The Galilee First!
By Sam Bahour
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| Attorney Sabri Jiryis (L) and Sam Bahour standing on the rooftop of the 105 year old Saint Elias Church in the Palestinian village of Fassouta which is located in the western Galilee. The South Lebanon skyline is in the background. |
The horrendous reality of the Palestinian communities inside
Israel—in places like Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, Yaffa, and the Negev—is not about
being regulated to sit in the back of the bus; they could only wish for such
blatant racism. Here, the racism is multilayered, ideological, well-camouflaged,
state-sponsored, and non-stop. Anyone who thinks that resolving the Israeli
military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would bring peace to the
region would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one
that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind: completing the campaign
of ethnically cleansing Palestinians that started with the creation of the
State of Israel.
Last week, on a beautiful fall day, I sat in a friend’s living
room in a village at the northern tip of Israel,
adjacent to the Lebanese border, in the part of Israel
called the Galilee. This is where the Palestinian
citizens of Israel
are concentrated. Five generations of Palestinians were sitting in the room. As
expected in Palestinian society, within no time, politics was the focus of the
discussion. But this political discussion had a different twist from what most of
those following this conflict are accustomed. The issues had to do with the
Palestinian citizens of Israel
and how the Israeli government systematically and structurally discriminates
against them.
Bilateral negotiations between the Palestinians and
Israelis, better known as the infamous Oslo Peace Process, began with a slogan
(and accompanying actions on the ground) of Gaza
and Jericho First. The idea was that the Palestinian Authority, which the Oslo
Accords created, would start by being set up in the Gaza Strip and in the West
Bank city of Jericho, a
sort of pilot phase before subsequently deploying to all of the Palestinian areas
defined in the Accords. The standing joke at the time was that what Israel,
the military occupying power, really meant was Gaza
and Jericho Only!
With 20 years of a never-ending “peace process,” Israeli misdirection
diverted the world’s attention, including the Palestinian leadership’s, away
from the discriminatory workings within Israel
itself. As the parties quibbled over who violated the Oslo Agreement first and
most, Israel
never stopped strangling the Palestinian towns and villages inside it. More
recently, even some of the mainstream, international research outfits, such as
International Crisis Group (ICG), were forced to take note. Their March 2012 report
titled, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated:
“World attention remains fixed
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but a distinct, albeit related, conflict
smoulders within Israel
itself. It might be no less perilous. Jewish-Arab domestic relations have
deteriorated steadily for a decade. More and more, the Jewish majority views
the Palestinian minority as subversive, disloyal and – due to its birth rates –
a demographic threat. Palestinian citizens are politically marginalised,
economically underprivileged, ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality
and ever more willing to confront the status quo.”
That’s researcher-talk for “A slow and calculated campaign
of displacing an entire population in broad daylight—world, take note.”
As one travels northward in Israel,
a stark reality cannot be ignored. Israel
is empty. Most of the lands which comprise the State of Israel, as it is recognized
worldwide, are empty of any population. The sad irony is that less than one
hour’s drive north of where we were sitting, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees, who, since 1948, have been prohibited by Israel from
returning to their homes, dwell in squalid refugee camps, waiting for
international law and UN resolutions calling for their return home to be
respected. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher with the Palestine
Land Society, and a refugee himself, has extensively documented this phenomenon
of empty lands in Israel,
lands that Palestinian refugees call home. The undeniable fact is that allowing
Palestinian refugees to return home would disrupt very little on the ground in Israel.
It would, however, threaten the very basis of its existence as an exclusively
Jewish state and create a demographic majority of Palestinians—a normal expectation,
given that they were the majority in 1948 prior to being expelled.
Another startling realization, when traveling around the
Palestinian farming villages in the Galilee, is that the hilltops are dotted
with gated, Jewish Israeli communities and Israeli government-declared nature
reserves, all creating a physical barrier to the natural growth of the
indigenous Palestinian communities. Added to these physical obstructions to
Palestinian development, Israeli law provides for another platform, a legal
one, whereby hundreds of Israeli communities can keep out Palestinians on
cultural grounds. Coming from the occupied territory of the West
Bank, these physical obstacles and legal tools looked to me much
like the illegal, Jewish-only settlements that surround every Palestinian city.
The physical location of both types of these residential colonies is not
random, but rather a sharp demographic weapon to interrupt and stunt the growth
of the Palestinian communities.
While hearing the tribulations of Palestinian communities in
Israel, I was
reminded of another jarring fact: Israel
detains and arrests Palestinians for their thoughts. One of the persons I was
with, a 64-year-old man, was released a few years back after spending two years
without charges in an Israeli prison. On my way home, I stopped in Haifa and,
while speaking to a new business acquaintance there, he reminded me of another
case: Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel and the director
of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, who, like so many
others, is imprisoned in Israeli jails after an unfair trial aimed at striking
fear into an entire minority community in Israel. Also, just as in the areas
under military occupation, Israel
tends an army of collaborators within the Palestinian communities to do their
bidding for them.
I wanted to engage more, but had to head back home to the West
Bank.
Now that I’m a Palestinian ID holder, which means I have West
Bank residency status issued by the Israeli occupation authorities,
I can’t be in Israel
as a tourist. My U.S.
citizenship—my only one—is useless now that I am classified as a West Bank
Palestinian in the Israeli government’s eyes. Israel
is the only place on earth where I can’t be an American! Thus, my Israeli
military-issued permit, which allows me to enter Israel,
restricts my movement so that I have to be back by 10 in the evening to what I
call my cage, also known as the metropolitan area of Ramallah.
What is now clear to me, and wasn’t when I first arrived
here shortly after Oslo, is that
the system of command and control, which oppresses over four million
Palestinians under military occupation, is strikingly similar to the system
which controls over one million Muslim and Christian Palestinians inside Israel.
The Israeli
goal is to erase Palestinian collective memory, limit Palestinian education, squeeze
Palestinian living space, and strangle any serious notion of Palestinian
economic enterprise. But Palestinians are not going anywhere. This was confirmed
when I asked a law student from this Galilaean village where he plans to be in
five years. Without hesitation, he said, “Here, in my village, and not for the
next five years, but for the next 10 and 20 and 100 years.”
After hours of deep discussion in that quiet Palestinian
village, tucked away in the velvet-like green hills of the Galilee,
a Palestinian researcher, who was quiet for most of the time, spoke in a calm, definitive
voice. He said that everything we were discussing, in terms of how much harm Israel
is doing to Palestinians living in Israel
and under military occupation, is true, but in the village, the numbers speak
volumes. Over the past 64 years, since Israel’s
creation, and despite all of its attempts to force the Palestinians off the land,
the population has increased as per official Israeli statistics. As long as the Palestinians exist on this
land, he asserted, their rights are bound to be realized.
All the way home, I could not get out of my mind a new
political slogan that would reveal the extent of the Palestinian tragedy, The
Galilee First. Instead of managing the conflict as if the only contentious
issue is about those of us living under Israeli military occupation, the
international community, and Palestinian leadership as well, should call for
the world to witness the reality of Palestinians inside Israel.
If Israel is
bent on discriminating against one fifth of its own citizens, what should we
expect of it in the occupied territories, areas that are not internationally recognized
as Israel?
Indeed, the next time I’m asked what I think the solution to this conflict is,
my answer will be ready: Let’s start with full equal rights for Palestinians
inside Israel.
In other words, The Galilee First if Israel
is serious about peace and truly desires historic reconciliation with the Palestinians.
- Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business
development consultant from Youngstown, Ohio, living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the
West Bank. He frequently provides independent commentary on Palestine and serves as a policy advisor of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He is
co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and blogs at www.ePalestine.ps. @SamBahour
