Ha'aretz,
Wednesday, December 8, 1999
Ethnic discrimination against Palestinians must end
By Amira Hass
About a month and a half ago, B'tselem organized a
tour for foreign diplomats of the settlement of
Ma'aleh Adumim and the Palestinian villages on top
of which this community was built and is being
expanded. The diplomats were brought to the site
of a Palestinian home that the Israeli Civil
Administration (CA) had demolished and viewed the
shantytown neighborhood of the Jahalin tribe,
which was evacuated by the CA from land they had
occupied for years and on which a very
impressive-looking Jewish neighborhood has now
been built.The diplomats traveled along the broad
avenues, surrounded by lush vegetation, of Ma'aleh
Adumim, which is a well-planned community, and
then they were taken to Abu-Dis and Azariyeh,
where they had to navigate their way among a
disarray of concrete houses and through crowded
alleyways and where they took note of the poorly
paved roads.
First-hand observation informed these diplomats -
far more than any statistics can - of the
existence of a tremendous gap between the limited
development that Israel allows the Palestinians to
carry out and the accelerated pace of modern
development that is permitted only to Jews - and
on the very land that Israel captured in June
1967.
One of the diplomats defined the situation in one
word: a "disgrace." A second diplomat said that
his descriptions reach the highest echelons of his
foreign ministry and are included in official
reports. However, he notes, by then, the language
has been softened and the reality depicted is
painted in vague terms.
A new report by Amnesty International, which
appears today, does not leave much room for
equivocal impressions, although it is written in a
pragmatic, succinct manner. The report, entitled
"Israel and the Occupied Territories: The
demolition and dispossession of Palestinian
homes," emphasizes that the demolition of
Palestinian homes goes with a the confiscation of
Palestinian land throughout most of the West Bank,
amounting to a policy of colonization.
Ever since 1995, Amnesty has been protesting the
demolition of homes all over the world - actions
taken simply because of the inhabitants' political
belief or identity, including ethnic identity, in
such countries as Burma, Turkey, the former
Yugoslavia, and in the territories occupied by
Israel. According to the present report, Israel's
policy of development in the territories it
captured in 1967 can be boiled down to ethnic
discrimination. Nothing new, of course, yet this
international human rights organization expresses
shock over this fact. Moreover, the authors of
this report are not overly impressed by the
promise of a change in the mentality underlying
the Israeli occupation, a promise that many
Western governments believed would emerge from the
Oslo agreements.
Since 1987, Israeli authorities have demolished at
least 2,650 Palestinian homes in the West Bank
(including East Jerusalem). As a result, 16,700
Palestinians, including 7,300 children, have
become homeless. The report points out that the
annual number of demolitions has not diminished
since the declaration of principles made in 1993
and in fact has even somewhat increased to 226,
despite the fact that Israel now has jurisdiction
over only one-eighth of the population that was
under its civilian control in the past. According
to the report, Israel has manipulated, and
continues to manipulate, existing procedures, laws
and comprehensive construction plans in order to
carry out its policy of discrimination.
Ancient Mandatory comprehensive construction plans
have been used as a pretext for preventing the
erection of structures in Palestinian agricultural
zones. Military orders have been issued to enable
extensive construction for Jews only. An Ottoman
law from 1855 has been distorted in order to
permit the confiscation of uncultivated land: The
original law spoke of the transfer of land to
other inhabitants of the same village so that they
could cultivate it, yet Israel has automatically
taken hold of these lands for itself, that is, for
its Jewish inhabitants.
According to Amnesty International, the Oslo
accords have created an "archipelago" of 227
islands (cities and villages) under civilian
Palestinian control (areas A and B), within a sea
of Israeli control (area C, which includes more
than 70 percent of the West Bank). In this
archipelago, there are 190 "islands" measuring
less than two square kilometers and they comprise,
more or less, the built-up area of each village.
Only 40,000 Palestinians live within area C;
however, all Palestinians live within six or less
kilometers of it. One of the lawyers quoted in the
report states that, since Oslo, all of the 200
applications for building permits submitted to the
CA have been rejected. During that same period,
Amnesty learned, 79 building permits were issued
for area C. In Amnesty's eyes, this policy is
tantamount to paralyzing any possibility of
legally authorized expansion. Even if we forget
for a moment that area C is an integral part of
every Palestinian community on the West Bank, the
natural increase alone of the population in area C
would necessitate the granting of 1,200 - not 79 -
building permits during that four-year period.
There is no connection, the report indicates,
between planning considerations and the demolition
of homes. On the West Bank and in East Jerusalem,
building permits for Palestinians entail
bureaucratic mazes that are - deliberately -
impossible. In Jerusalem, the Israeli authorities'
goal, "since then has been to transform the ethnic
character of the annexed area from Arab to
Jewish."
Thus, in East Jerusalem - whose annexation by
Israel, the report stresses, is not recognized by
the international community, the "boundary of the
annexed lands (like that of Area C) was drawn to
include land rather than people."
Amnesty International recommends that Israel
repeal the demolition orders that it has issued
and not yet executed and that it end its
discriminatory policy in the West Bank, including
East Jerusalem. However, in order to change this
policy, the government and citizens of Israel must
conclude that ethnic discrimination is essentially
immoral
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