Israel's Gaza Bantustan

Israel controls the Palestinian population registry and all important cards required to enter Gaza and the West Bank.

Last Modified: 05 Jan 2013 

The system of ID cards is used as a weapon to further cement the fragmentation of the Palestinian population as it confines the Palestinians to their geographic Israeli-controlled Bantustans [EPA]

Israel's one state reality greeted us at the gates of the Gaza-Rafah crossing when we were asked by the Egyptian officer to present our Haweyah (Palestinian IDs) in order to be allowed through. It is not like we weren't expecting this request, we knew that it would come down to this even though our Australian passports clearly showed Gaza as our place of birth we were still not considered Palestinian nationals in our own home city. Rather, we were treated like foreigners who needed an almost impossible amount of bureaucratic red tape designed to discourage the likes of us of ever thinking of visiting loved ones back home.  Allow me to explain: Since Israel's establishment it has used the system of ID cards to differentiate between its Jewish and non-Jewish residents and citizens, a distinction needed in order to apply its apartheid discriminatory policies of separate and unequal treatment. When Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, its Interior Ministry began to also issue ID cards to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. By 1982, Israel passed the Identity Card Carrying and Displaying Act requiring all residents of Israel both inside its 1948 borders and inside the green line in the Occupied Territories, who are over 16 years of age, to carry at all times these ID cards and to present them upon request to the authorities.  Israeli citizens' ID cards come in blue plastic casing with the Israeli Coat of Arms on the outer cover. Palestinians prior to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority had orange casings in the West Bank and red casings in the Gaza Strip both with the IDF insignia embossed on the outer cover highlighting Israel's military control. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who were forbidden entry into Israel's 1948 borders had green casings.  Follow the latest developments in the ongoing conflict  After the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority and as part of the creation of the illusion of progress, the Palestinian National Authority was handed some limited inconsequential powers. These included issuing Palestinian residents with ID cards. A pointless exercise given that the power to issue these cards hinged on Israel's approval, which was selectively given. Not only that, Israel continues to this day to control the Palestinian population registry and to assign the actual ID numbers provided for the Palestinian ID cards; the all-important cards required to enter Gaza and the West Bank. Much has been written about how the system of ID cards is used as a weapon to further cement the fragmentation of the Palestinian population as it confines the Palestinians to their geographic Israeli-controlled Bantustans, forbidding Palestinians with Gaza IDs entry into the West Bank and Jerusalem and vice versa. But perhaps the worst and most insidious effect this system has is in the way it is designed to control and monitor the movement of all Palestinians and to curb the Palestinian population by denying their diaspora the right to come home even if for a short visit. As we stood at the Rafah crossing, we were confronted with this reality. The Egyptian officer insisted that only Palestinians with the Israeli-controlled Palestinian ID cards are allowed to use this crossing. These orders are a result of an unforgivable move, one of many, that were made by the Palestinian National Authority when in 2005, Palestinian negotiators led by Mohammed Dahlan (a Fatah leader with strong links to Israel and the US) signed an agreement with Israel on movement and access from and to Gaza. One of the conditions they agreed to was restricting the use of the Rafah crossing to Palestinian ID card holders. It is hard to fathom why the Palestinian Authority would have agreed to such an inhumane condition which in reality means that Gazan residents would be cut off from loved ones in exile. After seven hours of waiting at the Rafah border and after exhausting every connection, every phone number, every thread of hope and every possibility, we managed to make it through. Once inside Gaza, it became abundantly clear that despite Hamas' visible presence inside the city and the endless waves of green flags, we had arrived into an Israeli controlled Bantustan. The currency used here is the new Israeli Shekel, the IDs all the residents carry are issued by the Israeli interior ministry, all births go through the Israeli national registry, the essential products are all Israeli in this captive market. As I type this to the sound of the Israeli F16 hovering in the sky above, and as I look at the sea patrolled by Israeli cruisers, I am convinced that I am now inside Israel's one state reality in a Bantustan they call Gaza. Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian writer and Policy Adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network.   Follow her on Twitter: @gazaheart The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

en http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/20131372925495458.html

Gaza to Galilee: The colonial context

Ben White is a freelance journalist, writer and activist, specialising in Palestine/Israel. Cambridge University.
Framing events in Gaza in the colonial context is vital for understanding the nature of the violence, argues author.

Many of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are a few miles away from the land of their ethnically cleansed former villages, across the border fence in southern Israel [AFP] While it is common knowledge that a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, it is less well understood where they came from. The shocking reality is that many of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are a few miles away from the land of their ethnically cleansed former villages, across the border fence in southern Israel. Like so much else with Palestine, you can't understand Gaza if you don't understand the Nakba.  To give a few examples. In 1948, most of the Palestinians of al-Majdal had fled in fear by the time the Israeli army took the town. In November of that year, around 500 were expelled to Gaza. But during 1949, a good number of Palestinians managed to return. Those remaining Palestinians were "concentrated and sealed off with barbed wire and IDF guards in a small, built-up area commonly known as the 'ghetto'".  The ethnic cleansing of al-Majdal was completed between June and October 1950. And if you haven't heard of al-Majdal before, I'm sure you know the Israeli port city built in its place: Ashkelon.  Or take the village of Najd, whose inhabitants cultivated citrus, bananas, cereals and orchards. They were expelled by Israeli forces in May 1948 and you can find Palestinians from Najd in Jabaliya refugee camp. The Israeli city of Sderot was founded on its land.  An AFP article from 2008 illustrates the links between 1948 and 2012, and how the Nakba never finished:  When Israeli soldiers razed his village of Najd during the Jewish state's independence war, Yussef Abu al-Jidyan fled to a Gaza refugee camp where he has now lived for 60 years. But he has never lost hope of returning. Since 1948, he has lost his home three times in Israeli military operations. The latest was in March when the Israeli army came with bulldozers and levelled houses in Jabaliya refugee camp in the besieged Gaza Strip.  One final example: the village of Simsim. Ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, most of its population also lives in Jabaliya camp, just nine miles away. A kibbutz now holds village land, with ruins located in a "nature preserve". Israeli organisation Zochrot published a booklet on the village, in which the author writes:  "The Qassam rockets fired from Gaza by the Palestinians reach the villages and lands from which they were expelled in 1948. The Qassams are fired at the roots. The roots of the conflict."  These roots are not limited to the area around Gaza - they also go to the Galilee where Jewish development town Upper Nazareth sits overlooking the famous Palestinian city.  Follow the latest developments in the ongoing conflict  During the recent attack on Gaza, Upper Nazareth's mayor wroteto the Interior Minister to declare the city of Nazareth to be "hostile" to the state, adding:  "If it was in my hands, I would evacuate from this city its residents the haters of Israel whose rightful place is in Gaza and not here."  The mayor has form; in 2010 he commented:  "Just as Ben-Gurion and Peres said in the 1950s that the Galilee must be Jewish, we say the same about Nazareth Illit: It must retain its Jewish character."  The back story of Upper Nazareth is instructive about the colonial present of the Middle East's "only democracy", a town created in the 1950s on land expropriated for the "public interest":  In 1953, a government official acknowledged that "making Nazareth a partially Jewish city" would be "a colonising act with difficulties", but its importance was also clear. The director of the IDF Planning Department said that the role of Upper Nazareth would be to "emphasise and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole", while according to the Northern Military Governor, the final aim of the settlement was to "swallow up" the Arab city through "growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group".  Israel's then-Prime Minister Ben-Gurion wrote in 1957 that Upper Nazareth "must be a Jewish town that will assert a Jewish presence in the area". Today, while Upper Nazareth's 50,000 inhabitants occupy 42,000 dunams (4,200 hectares), down the hill in Nazareth, 70,000 Palestinians are forced into just 14,000 dunams (1,400 hectares): four times as crowded.  This is just one example from a regime of systematic discrimination that has developed and been maintained by Israeli leaders from Ben-Gurion to the likes of Deputy FM Danny Ayalon, who recently declared that "settling the land is highly important" and means "creating a Jewish hold in [the Negev and Galilee]".  Framing events in Gaza in the colonial context is vital for understanding the nature of the violence, as well as the separation and sealing off of the territory, a microcosm of fragmented Palestine. The colonial paradigm brings the focus back to the Nakba, to the foundational act of ethnic cleansing and ongoing policies of exclusion. It is a reminder that the answers for Gaza are the same as those for Jerusalem, the southern Hebron Hills and the Galilee: decolonisation, implementation of the Palestinian people's rights - and international sanction of Israel until such a goal is realised.  Ben White is a freelance journalist, writer and activist, specialising in Palestine/Israel. He is a graduate of Cambridge University. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121216124912496638.html