Deporting Hamas Members of Parliament: The Sinister Meaning Olmert's "Hitkansut"

After all, Olmert could hardly campaign convincingly for a West Bank disengagement when it was clear Jewish settlers and soldiers would continue occupying a significant proportion of Palestinian land at the withdrawal's end. So convergence is usefully, and misleadingly, supplanting disengagement.

Many critics of Israel assume convergence is simply jargon disguising the government's intention illegally to annex swaths of West Bank territory. The grand land theft will be sold to the world as a painful withdrawal of Jewish settlers, even if the great majority (probably 80 per cent) are left in place and only the most remote settlements are dismantled.

But events this week suggest that the principle of hitkansut will have a far wider application than just to the West Bank settlement blocs, with results even more sinister than many had anticipated. Olmert's consolidation, it is becoming clear, will embrace Palestinians too.

The shape of things to come was hinted at this week in the wake of Monday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv by the small militant group Islamic Jihad. Rather than approving the usual indiscriminate military strikes against Palestinian population centres that characterised the Sharon era, Olmert pursued a low-key, but no less disturbing, response.

He revoked the rights of three Hamas MPs and a Palestinian cabinet minister, Mahmoud Abu Tir, to reside in Jerusalem. The intention is to deport them to the West Bank, behind the separation wall Israel is hastily completing, where they will lose all the rights they currently enjoy to live and work inside Jerusalem and Israel.

Apparently Israel is considering extending this punishment to other members of Hamas in Jerusalem and possibly anyone working for the Palestinian Authority.

Once upon a time, back in the 1970s and 1980s, Israel would regularly dump hundreds of Palestinian political activists at a time across the border in Lebanon. Now the border will be, more conveniently, much closer to hand: just a stone's throw from the centre of Jerusalem.

What are the grounds for the deportations? The official reason is the failure of Hamas to denounce the suicide bombing. Olmert told an emergency meeting of the cabinet: "Any member of a government involved in terrorism should not be granted any immunity in the form of his Israeli residency identification."

Let's ignore Olmert's gratuitous extension of the meaning of the word "terrorism", and concentrate instead on the extent of his chutzpah. Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war of 1967 and later annexed the Palestinian half of the city and its inhabitants to Israel in violation of international law.

Now Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem and a man well-versed in underhand manoeuvres in the holy city, is expelling Palestinians from East Jerusalem on the grounds that he doesn't like their politics.

Foreign minister Tzipi Livni observed that Israel had the right to revoke the residency of whomever it deemed disloyal to Israel. In other words, Olmert and his cronies are behaving as though Palestinian residency in Jerusalem is a right conferred by Israel ­ as though Palestinians are immigrants rather than the city's indigenous inhabitants living under an illegal and increasingly vicious occupation.

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