Tatour: Israel can now strip away 48 Palestinians’ #citizenship

2022/07/27 Leave a comment

Of note, even if reference to broader “ethnic cleansing” is overstated:

Last week, in a precedential decision, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the state had the power to revoke the citizenship of a person convicted of offences that amounted to “breach of loyalty”, even if the person would become stateless as a result and in violation of international law.

The decision deliberated on the case of Alaa Zayoud, a Palestinian who holds Israeli citizenship. In October 2015, Zayoud rammed his car into a bus station and stabbed three Israelis. In 2017, a year after his conviction, the minister of interior notified Zayoud of his intent to revoke his citizenship, in accordance with the Citizenship Law.

The importance of this decision cannot be overstated. Its implications are grave and will be seen in the near and far future

The administrative court in Haifa approved the decision. Zayoud appealed and the case ended up in the Supreme Court.

In its decision, the Supreme Court determined that: “No constitutional defect in the arrangement that allows the revocation of the citizenship of a person who committed an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty in the State of Israel, such as: an act of terrorism; an act of treason or serious espionage; or the acquisition of citizenship or the right of permanent residency in a hostile state or in hostile territory.

“This is so, even if as a result of the revocation of his citizenship, the individual becomes stateless, provided that if the individual becomes stateless, the interior minister must grant him a status of permanent residence in Israel or another designated status.”

The importance of this decision cannot be overstated. Its implications are grave and will be seen in the near and far future. This decision has created a legal path for revoking the citizenship of the 48 Palestinians (also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel), a stepping-stone in Israel’s efforts to advance the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians.

‘Terrorist intent’

On a practical level, the court has cleared the way for what would become the routine denaturalisation of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, making them vulnerable to deportation, something Israel has long aspired to.

The decision to substitute citizenship with a so-called permanent residency status might enable individuals to continue to have access to some social services, but it strips them from the utmost protection that citizenship is designed to grant: the right to remain at home.

Israel knows that to make 48 Palestinians vulnerable to expulsion, it has first to revoke their citizenship. The court’s decision facilitates just that.

And it is Israel and its security services who define what constitutes a “breach of loyalty”, which according to the Citizenship Law creates the grounds for revoking citizenship. At the moment, Israel defines a “breach of loyalty” based on Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Law, which permits it to classify different offences as terrorist acts.

Israel routinely applies “terrorist intent” when it comes to Palestinians. For example, in the aftermath of May 2021’s Unity Intifada, Israel arrested thousands of Palestinians and filed indictments against hundreds of protesters, with 167 of them charged with terrorist offences, based on the Counter-Terrorism Law.

Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision, all of them face the threat of having their citizenship revoked. Palestinians know all too well what this could potentially mean: expulsion from their homeland.

The act of revoking citizenship would leave the affected Palestinians stateless. Israel already made all Palestinians stateless in 1948 with the nullification of Palestinian citizenship under the British Mandate. Many Palestinians remain stateless. The Palestinians who remained after the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948 received Israeli citizenship in the first two decades of the state.

Now Israel is threatening to make them stateless again.

Although this decision clearly violates international law, the court still determined that it was constitutional to denaturalise Palestinians, stating – falsely – that the condition of statelessness could be remedied through the extension of “permanent residence in Israel or another designated status”.

A secret plan

The experience of Jerusalemites teaches us that there is nothing permanent in “permanent residence” when it comes to Palestinians. Since 1967, Israel has regularly revoked the residence of Jerusalemites, effectively banning them permanently from their city and homes. So far, over 15,000 residencies have been revoked, as part of the ongoing effort to eliminate Palestinians from the city.

Israel has never made peace with the existence of its Palestinian citizens. It pursued plans for the mass expulsion of 48 Palestinians in its first decade. The Kafr Qasim massacre of October 1956, in which the army executed 51 Palestinians, was part of a larger secret plan, called Operation Hafarperet, to oust the Palestinian population from the Little Triangle.

In addition, in the early 1950s, Israel attempted to advance a plan for the expulsion of 10,000 Palestinians from seven villages in the Galilee, as well as other plans for the resettlement of Palestinians in Argentina and Brazil.

The quest to expel Palestinians persisted. It re-emerged in the Israeli public and political landscape during the 1980s with the rise of Meir Kahane, an American-born ultra-Orthodox nationalist rabbi, and his fascist party, Kach. Kach advocatedthe denaturalisation of Palestinian citizens and their transfer, as well as the expulsion of Palestinians in the occupied 1967 territories.

Proposed plans to reduce the number of Palestinian citizens are now an integral part of the Israeli mainstream political discourse

Since the 2000s, there have been significant efforts to make the citizenship of Palestinians more easily revocable. Proposed plans to reduce the number of Palestinian citizens are now an integral part of the Israeli mainstream political discourse and are supported by most of the Israeli public.

We have seen calls to demand that 48 Palestinians sign an oath of allegiance to the Israeli state as a Jewish state; the adoption of the Nation-State of the Jewish Peoplein 2018; and the advancement of what is known as the “population exchange” plan– the planned transfer of Little Triangle villages and their estimated 300,000 residents to the Palestinian state against the will of the Palestinians in these areas.

Instrument of sumud

In an alarming development, in recent years Israel has been revoking the citizenship of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev in an apparent test case for a wider project of denaturalisation of Palestinian citizens. In 2010, the Ministry of Interior began a review of the citizenship status of the Bedouin.

Its report concluded that thousands of Bedouin had been erroneously registered as citizens. Subsequently, Israel denaturalised hundreds of Bedouin in the Negev, rendering them stateless.

It is no coincidence that Israel began with the Bedouin – the most vulnerable and marginalised population among 48 Palestinians.

It is no secret that Israel wants to see all Palestinians, including 48 Palestinians, vanish. Even though the latter were granted Israeli citizenship, Israel sees 48 Palestinians as guests whose presence is not only undesirable, but always conditional.

Israel sees in their citizenship a gesture, not a right – and gestures can always be undone – as articulated by Israel’s former transport minister, Bezalel Smotrich: “We are the landlords of this land. This land has belonged to the Jewish people for thousands of years. God did promise us all of the Land of Israel, a promise he kept. We’ve just been the most hospitable people in the world since the days of Abraham and so you’re still here. At least for now.”

We need to see it for what it is: Israel is working step by step to create legal paths for making denaturalisation, and thus the expulsion, of 48 Palestinians possible. For 48ers, Israeli citizenship has been an instrument of sumud or steadfast perseverance.

It guarantees – for the most part – their continued presence in their homeland. For 48 Palestinians, citizenship means survival.

Source: Israel can now strip away 48 Palestinians’ citizenship

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Identity politics, Israel style: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Good post on Ottomans and Zionists:

If there was a silver lining to the deal brokered by Prime Minister Netanyahu between Bayit Yehudi and Otzma Yehudit to run as a joint electoral list and the immediate furor that ensued, it is that it focused a spotlight on the most abhorrent prejudice and racism that is exhibited toward Israel’s Arab citizens. What made Meir Kahane, his Kach party, and his Kahanist followers so repugnant and led to Israel outlawing Kach was its advocacy for discrimination and glorification of violence toward Israeli Arabs. Kahane’s heirs in Otzma have continued in his footsteps, calling Arabs a fifth column with whom there can be no coexistence, proclaiming that less than one percent of Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state, advocating that Arabs who “speak out” against Jews be executed, working to prohibit Arabs from public life, and attempting to criminalize relationships between Jews and Arabs. It is evident – or should be – to anyone with an ounce of moral fiber that this type of incitement should not be welcome anywhere in Israeli society. But the new focus on Otzma has a downside in that it threatens to obscure a much bigger problem, which is the routine delegitimization of Israeli Arabs that takes place as a matter of course.

The most familiar example of this constant message that shunts one fifth of Israeli citizens into a rhetorical leper colony is Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 election day warning that Arabs were being bused to the polls in droves. The clear implication was twofold; first, that there was something untoward or dangerous about Arabs having a say in the composition of Israel’s next government, and second, that true Israeli patriots should come vote in order to counter Arab influence. It not only portrayed actual full citizens of Israel as being ominous but did it on the basis of their ethnicity alone. After all, Netanyahu did not say that his political opponents were going to the polls in droves, nor did he call out any individual parties. His message was straightforward: Arabs are voting, and no good result can possibly come out of that because they are Arabs.

In the current campaign, this same message is alive and well. But it is not just Netanyahu who is utilizing it. Across the political spectrum, there is a rush to assure Jewish Israeli voters that nobody is looking to form a government that includes Arabs; not Likud under Netanyahu, and not Kachol Lavan under Benny Gantz. Netanyahu, naturally, has made this pledge a centerpiece of his campaign. In the Likud party campaign kickoff on Monday, Netanyahu repeatedly trotted out the catchphrase “Tibi or Bibi,” referring to Ta’al chief Ahmad Tibi, who has been an MK for two decades. Netanyahu argued that the only way for Gantz to form a coalition is by including Arab parties, making the choice for voters one between Bibi – the current prime minister running for reelection – or Tibi – who is not running for prime minister and is not even the top person on the Hadash-Ta’al list but is Israel’s most recognizable Arab politician. It’s an effective rhyming catchphrase, and despite the fact that its logic is absurd, it works precisely because it plays on this notion that Arab parties, which overwhelmingly garner Israeli Arabs’ votes, are inherently non-kosher.

There are now two Arab party lists with very different politics, and the one that includes Tibi is the one that is more moderate, endorses a two-state solution (inherently accepting Israel’s legitimacy), and is a willing participant in Israeli institutions. But in singling out Tibi rather than the actual Arab extremists in the Balad party – whose representatives have called for Israel’s dissolution, have supplied intelligence to Hizballah, and have been convicted for smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists – Netanyahu is purposely casting a wider circle of aspersions on Israeli Arabs as a group.

Sadly, Netanyahu is not alone, though he stands out in his bluntness and willingness to embrace the most extreme position. Gantz on Monday ruled out forming any coalition with Tibi as well, and lumped him in with Kahane, which is an unfair comparison by any measure. Unlike Netanyahu, Gantz and Yair Lapid have not explicitly ruled out using Arab parties to form a blocking coalition, as Yitzhak Rabin did, and it is to their credit – factoring in the soft bigotry of low expectations – that they have not definitively closed that door. But they are also obviously trying to walk a tightrope in their avoidance of directness on a host of issues so as not to be cast as leftists, and making any overtures that legitimize Arab participation in Israeli political life is a quick route to the dreaded leftwing moniker.

Politicians have not come up with this strategy out of nowhere. It is an unfortunate reality that Jewish Israeli society prioritizes the Jewish aspect over the Israeli aspect in this regard, and politicians understandably believe that their voters will respond to using Arabs as an electoral foil. It is certainly the case that there are Arab parties, such as Balad, that are anti-Zionist in a genocidal way, and there have been Arab MKs who are not only anti-Zionist but have actively committed treason against their country. Much as Kahane violated Israel’s Basic Law on racist incitement and was banned from serving in the Knesset and his party outlawed, I have no problem with that standard being used on Balad – which yesterday was banned from running by Israel’s Central Elections Committee – or on MKs like Hanin Zuabi (who is not running for the next Knesset but has been the subject of disqualification petitions in the past). But portraying Israeli Arab participation in governing Israel as something that shocks the conscience in its extremity should itself shock the conscience in its extremity. That it does not is a poor statement about Israel’s commitment to its Arab citizens, who should not be delegitimized as a category of people.

One of the most familiar pro-Israel talking points is that Israel is the country in the Middle East where it is best to be an Arab, since they are full citizens who not only vote but serve in the Knesset and on Israel’s High Court. There is a popular formulation of this idea that the strength of Israel’s democracy can be demonstrated by an Arab justice (Salim Joubran) sending a Jewish president of Israel (Moshe Katsav) to prison. But it is hollowly cynical to use Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life to tout Israel’s greatness, and in the next instance portray Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life as something that must be negated and combated. The entire spectacle of using Israeli Arabs as props, raising them up for geopolitical benefit and keeping them low for domestic political benefit, is ugly and should stop. The best thing that Israel’s current election campaign could accomplish would be to demonstrate that this tactic does not work.

Source: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

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