Fortress Israel
An excerpt from Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
In the dead of night on 24 January 2006, an elite unit of Israel’s border police seized the Israeli Palestinian village of Jaljulya. The troops burst into houses, dragging out thirty-six women and eventually deporting eight of them. The eight women were ordered to go back to their old homes in the West Bank. Some of them had been married for years to Palestinian men from Jaljulya, some were pregnant, many had children. They were abruptly cut off from their husbands and children. One Palestinian member of the Knesset protested, but the action was backed by the government, the courts and the media: the soldiers were demonstrating to the Israeli public that when the presence of the Palestinian minority population threatens to change from a ‘demographic problem’ to a ‘demographic danger’, the Jewish state will act swiftly and without mercy.
The police raid on Jaljulya was entirely ‘legal’: on 31 July 2003, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from obtaining citizenship, permanent residency or even temporary residency when they marry Israeli citizens. In Hebrew ‘Palestinians’ always means Palestinians living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and in the diaspora, so as to distinguish them from ‘Israeli Arabs’, as though they are not all part of the same Palestinian nation. The initiator of the legislation was a liberal Zionist, Avraham Poraz,
of the centrist party Shinui, who described the bill as a ‘defence measure’. Only twenty-five of the 120 members of the Knesset opposed it and Poraz at the time explained that those ‘Palestinians’ already married ‘to Israeli citizens’ and with families ‘will have to go back to the West Bank’, regardless of how long they had been living in Israel.
The Arab members of the Knesset were among a group of Israelis who appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court against this latest racist law. When the Supreme Court turned the appeal down, their energy petered out. The Supreme Court ruling made clear how irrelevant they were in the eyes of both Israel’s parliamentary and judicial systems. It also revealed once again how it prefers to uphold Zionism rather than justice. Israelis enjoy telling Palestinians they should be happy they live in ‘the only democracy’ in the region where they have the right to vote, but no one is under any illusion that voting comes with any actual political power or influence.
**The above story is also told in the following article: “Ingathering: Ilan Pappe on the Israeli election and the ‘demographic problem’”. London Review of Books, 20 April 2006.
