More on Permits, Recognition and Other Forms of Discrimination

Friday began with a tour of Lyd led by Tamer, one of the members of DAM, one of the Palestinian rap groups I discussed earlier. Lyd was another old Palestinian village in which the Israelis killed 100 people in the village’s mosque and then proceeded to close the mosque and kept it closed until approximately 10 years ago. At that time, it was reopened, but as a flea market.

To understand the atrocity of these events, I would invite you to substitute the word “synagogue” for the word “mosque” and substitute “Germans” for “Israelis.” So, the story would go “the Germans massacred 100 Jews in their own synagogue. Subsequently, and on the blood of those 100 Jews, the Germans opened a flea market.” Now before you get upset that I am analogizing the Israelis to the Nazis, please, breath and read on.

After a boycott led by the Palestinian Muslims [note the nonviolent action once again], the Israelis relented and reopened the mosque for religious purposes.

Other residents of the pre-1948 village of Lyd were part of the forced marches of evacuation. I have to warn you, members of our group repeated brought up the similarity between the Native American “experience” in North America and the Palestinians in Palestine.

Next, Tamer discussed the settlements. The settlements, Israel’s way of ensuring that a two-state solution cannot happen unless you consider spotted enclaves of Palestinian land interrupted by Jewish settlements a state, are a topic all on their own. These are government and army supported houses that typically take the nicest land, the water, are government-subsidized, receive all the services denied to many Palestinian villages (especially those that are “unrecognized,” a near-psychotic concept we will cover below) whose residents regularly attack the Palestinian whose land they confiscated. For a few testimonials, see Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC) website at www.wclac.org/english/reports/un.pdf. These are scary people.

In Lyd, Tamer pointed out the brand new housing that constituted the settlement. He told us that if you look at a map of Lyd, it shows blanks where the Arab neighborhoods are, no street signs. The Jewish neighborhoods (not just the settlements) have, as I said, full services like electricity, for example, as well as gardens, parking and colors. Sometimes, when a Palestinian seeks to buy a house in the Jewish neighborhood, the Israelis stage a protest. The Arab neighborhood may go without water and electricity for days at a time and there is no trash collection. And typically, when the population of a village reaches 5-6000, the government is required to build a police station. So the Israelis did – by closing the library and using its facility.

Tamer then asked us to get out of the bus and drew a map in the dirt of the Arab neighborhood, to which all the Palestinians are confined. So how it works is that the Arab neighborhood is surrounded on one side by the infamous wall, on another side by a highway, on a third side by the neighborhood reserved for the Russian immigrants and on the fourth side by the high speed train tracks. How do the residents get in, you might ask? They must cross the high-speed train tracks. That is the sole entrance to the neighborhood to which the Palestinians are confined. 250 trains go by these tracks every day. Yes, many have died crossing the train tracks. And it is literally within feet of the neighborhood.

In contrast, the nearby Moshav, which is no where near the train tracks, complained about the noise of the train. They wanted the government to build a wall to muffle the sound. The Palestinians took them to court and won. But close to where the Moshav wanted the wall is a large house in which an entire extended family lives. The Israelis told the Palestinian community, lets make a deal. If you (a) don’t object to our building the acoustic wall, and (b) pay the fine for this family building this huge house without a permit, we won’t demolish the house. The community got together, raised the money, paid the fine and the “acoustic wall,” as it is known, was built. I will just let that story stand on its own.

Speaking of permits, or lack thereof, Tamer informed us that the Jewish population applies for and receives building, modification and repair permits. The Arab neighborhood, however, is not even on the map and is unrecognized by the Israeli government. Thus, THERE IS NO MUNICIPAL OFFICE TO WHICH THE PALESTINIAN POPULATION CAN APPLY FOR A PERMIT. Sigh. So, of course, as we discussed before, families grow, houses need modification and repair and so the Palestinians take care of their homes without permits. The Israeli government reaction? Issuing demolition orders. Most Palestinian homes in Lyd have standing demolition orders. Following a demolition, the Israeli government places giant boulders around the property border, preventing rebuilding.

Now, Tamer pointed out that it costs the Israeli government 500,000 shekels to demolish each house. To date, about 70 Palestinians homes in Lyd have been demolished. The cost of building a municipal office to house a building authority? 500,000 shekels. You do the math. Those of us listening and seeing were pretty convinced that the issue is not money but the Judaization of Lyd at the expense of those who were there way before the Jewish population, a repeat of 1948’s ethnic cleansing and a story we heard over and over again. Oh, by the way, Tamer organized a news conference of sorts, inviting 20-30 Israeli top stars to draw attention to the demolition process (note again, the utter commitment to nonviolent action). About a week before the tour, the police came and planted trees in the now empty land where a house was demolished.

Incidentally, Lyd is where many educated Palestinian are coming to settle: doctors, attorneys, etc. They refuse to leave because they believe the Israeli government’s goal is to get Palestinians out and confiscate even more land. Thus, this population refuses to cave and can afford to spend time beyond survival into activism and change.

And just to put icing on this cupcake, Tamer told us about the concept of “frozen land,” an Israeli term that identifies land on which no one is allowed to build until the government “unfreezes” it, i.e. until the government issues a permit. But one very wealthy Jewish “philanthropist” financed the building of a nice Russian, Jewish neighborhood on what was identified as frozen land. After ten years, the Israeli government, instead of knocking on doors and fining residents, instead of demolishing homes, issued a permit. Again, your honor, I rest my case. Lets move on, as we did, to Beersheba. Faisal Sawalha, of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages, was kind enough to guide us on our tour. We were also kindly welcomed (and fed – we are always fed here!) by one of the Bedouin villages, who, along with Faisal, gave us the following information.

So Beersheba is approximately 100 years old and is a refreshing change in that while it is by far mostly Jewish, with 200,000 Jews and 5-6000 Arabs, Arabs and Jews live together and Arab children go to Jewish schools. But we will not get away that easily.

Before 1948, the Arab population lived in the old city. In1948, the Israeli government displaced them (soon, I will challenge you to get used to the term “ethnic cleansing”). Some fled to Gaza, some to the West Bank, some to Jordan and some to what are called “unrecognized villages.” I advise you to take a deep breath before we continue because this concept is just . . . unimaginable, creepy, outrageous but most of all, indicative of the continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.

Here is how it works. An unrecognized village is not placed on a map of Israel (remember, here we are inside the state of Israel, not in the Occupied Territories anymore). Some of these villages are ancestral land on which the people have lived forever. But some of these are places to which the government displaced the population in 1948. The government uses the villages’ unrecognized status as an excuse to withhold services, so these people have no electricity, no water, no kindergarten, no secondary schools, and no municipality at which to obtain permits, meaning that the population is always under the threat of demolition. (The nearby Jewish kibbutz, of course, has running water and even a cemetery.)

Now, just in case you missed it, note that some of these unrecognized villages are places to which the Israelis forced the Palestinians to in 1948. So, imagine this: you are forced to leave your ancestral land, the government displaces you onto another piece of land, and then labels you unrecognized and leaves you to survive without water and electricity. Oh, and by the way, there were electrical wires running all along the homes and schools of the unrecognized villages. Such an easy solution right in front of the government’s eyes. Does it not make you ponder on the reason for the treatment of the unrecognized villages? I will help you out.

These unrecognized villages are largely Bedouin. The Israelis cry that the Bedouins are taking over the land – they are invaders, and they are building homes without permits!!! There is so much wrong with that statement, I hardly know where to begin. First, the Bedouins lived on this land eons before the Israelis arrived, thus the question becomes “who is the invader;” but second, well we have discussed the permit issue. The Bedouin population in this area of Israel is 90,000 people. As Faisal suggested, perhaps if 90,000 people are without running water and live on this land, the problem is with the law and not the people? I don’t know – is that too radical a concept?

So in 1997, after years of demolitions and unrecognized status (have you gotten your arms around that one yet because I cannot), the community leaders gathered together to resolve via nonviolent actions. They formed the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages, a/k/a RCUV. The RCUV pointed out to the Israeli government that under Israeli law, every 500 people forms a village. We have 45 villages of more than 500 each. Accordingly (under any logic I have ever heard), the Israeli government must recognize us and provide us services and treat us as the citizens that we are supposed to be. (As Faisal jokingly said, “I am an Israeli when I pay taxes, a Palestinian at a checkpoint.” I am constantly amazed at the Palestinians’ abilities to make such jokes. As for me, I spend half the time outraged and the other half in tears – in between enjoying the Palestinians’ inevitable hospitality.) The RCUV also did the government a favor and formulated its own development plans for the region. They hired a team of attorneys (that always means trouble) that take demolition cases to the Israeli High Court (the equivalent of the United States Supreme Court). They also try to empower the people to take action via, you guessed it by now, I hope, demonstrations. They also try to keep the media apprised. (Although I am sure you have not read about this in any US paper.) Incidentally, the RCUV brought a case to the High Court regarding the electrical wires that could easily be connected to the unrecognized villages homes and schools (what would be our reaction if our children were sitting in schools without electricity?). The High Court ruled in favor of the Bedouins. So the government bought generators.

Has the RCUV been successful? Well, to date, approximately 18 villages have been recognized. But the hook (there just always seems to be a hook) is that the Israeli government will only service part of each village, insisting that the Palestinians move to the other part. The Palestinians answer: a resounding “no.” Is there no end to this? Not yet.

Here’s the next hook (I have lost count of how many we have heard – and the trip is only half complete). During the Ottoman and Mandate (British) rule of Palestine, the Bedouins’ land was recognized as Bedouin land. The Bedouins are a traditional, but not nomadic, people. So there was no deed recorded in a municipal office. When the Israelis confiscated the land, they claimed this part of Palestine based on a concept of if you have no documents proving it, you do not own the land. (Compare and contrast: remember AM, the man on whose land we stood the other day, surrounded by JNF trees? His village had documentation of 480 people’s land ownership. It did them no good at all because the High Court recently ruled that the land as it stood today was too picturesque to return to the Palestinians.)

So back to the Bedouins. Here’s yet another hook or injustice or outrage, use your imagination to name this one. Notwithstanding the unrecognized status, notwithstanding the claim that because the Bedouins had no documentation proving ownership of the land, the Israeli government, to this day, makes it clear to the Bedouins that if they want to sell the land, the government will be happy to buy it.

Furthermore, the Israeli government established a commission last year to look at the Bedouin issue. They agreed that Bedouins were, in fact, not invaders. Before you get too excited, they also recommended that no villages receive recognition unless (are you sitting down?) the villages are consistent with the plans of the Israeli government. By the way, you may have heard about the Israeli government’s Negev Development Plan, which left the issue of the Bedouins to the National Security Council. The head of that council wrote that unrecognized Bedouin villages are an obstruction to the government’s plan and should be resolved like the government resolved the settlements of Gaza. (Remember? The ones that showed the IDF removing the Orthodox settlers from their beloved land?) The one difference, he said, was that the Gaza settlements were legal.

Oh and the Israeli government plans also include a request from the Israeli government that, in order to expand a nearby prison, they have expressed their desire for more Bedouin land. The land the government is requesting? It is the land to which the Bedouins were expelled in 1948 from their ancestral lands, to which they are not allowed to return (by this same Israeli government). Oh, and to be clear, these are Israeli citizens we are talking about here, citizens who pay taxes to this same government. I am exasperated and cannot help but agree with the Palestinians’ conclusion: the Israelis simply want the land, and will do anything to get it – period, end of story.