Apartheid targets Palestinian home-owners inside Israel

A recent protest meeting held at the home of Ali and Terese Zbeidat. Their house has been ruled illegal and threatened with demolition, despite being built on the family's land and approved by their local municipality, Sakhnin. (Jonathan Cook)
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You won't hear about the story of my Palestinian friend Ali Zbeidat and the threatened demolition of his "illegal" home, either from the hundreds of international correspondents in Jerusalem or from the Hebrew media - not even from those remarkable Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, two lone beacons inside Israel in the campaign for justice for the Palestinians.

None of them will tell you about the story of Ali's family and the imminent physical and financial ruin of their lives by Israel, even though Ali's plight is far from unique. There are tens of thousands of other Palestinians in the same desperate situation as Ali, living in homes Israel defines as illegal.

The problem for Ali is not just that he is Palestinian; if he were, you might learn of his story. Ali's problem is that he is also a citizen of Israel. He belongs to a minority of one million Palestinians who fell under Israeli sovereignty during the 1948 war that founded a Jewish state on what was once the Palestinian homeland.

Another three and a half million Palestinians live close by, also under Israeli rule, in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. When their homes are destroyed by the Israeli army, their story catches the attention of international and Israeli correspondents. It is an interesting question why the media relate to the destruction by the Jewish state of one group of Palestinians' homes and not to the other.

In terms of their identities, these two Palestinian populations are separated merely in a technical sense: the Palestinians of the area where Ali lives, the Galilee, were defeated in a war in 1948, whereas the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza were defeated in a war two decades later, in 1967. Both groups belong to the Palestinian people and are ruled over by a country which defines itself as a state of the Jews.

But from the point of view of the media and the international community there is a big difference between the two populations. A big legal difference. The Galilee and its Palestinian inhabitants were incorporated into Israel after 1948 with the agreement of the major world powers, whereas Gaza and the West Bank and their Palestinian inhabitants were occupied, in violation of international law.

Unlike the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, Ali and the million or so other Palestinian citizens of Israel enjoy legal rights in a state hailed around the world as a democracy. Ali has an Israeli ID, an Israeli passport, and a vote in Knesset elections. His Palestinian brethren enjoy none of these rights.

The reason, therefore, why Ali's story is not deemed worthy of coverage is because he is an Israeli citizen enjoying the protection of Israeli law. Unlike the occupied Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, he has the right to make his case against the demolition order before a judge. The army cannot wreck his home at its own discretion, as it does in the West Bank and Gaza. Only the police, directed by the courts, can destroy Ali's house. In other words, Ali has to break Israeli laws before his home can be demolished.


Squaring the circle

There is one problem with this argument. It makes a very large assumption, though one it is impossible to question anywhere in the mainstream media. It is the assumption that Israel is exactly as it describes itself: a state that is both Jewish and democratic at the same time; that the Jewish content of the state's self-definition has no bearing on the democratic part of its definition; and that Ali, despite being Palestinian, can expect the same treatment as a Jew under Israeli law.

It might seem patently impossible for a state to be both Jewish and democratic. It appears as illogical as calling a state "white and democratic", or "Catholic and democratic". But that is not the view of the international community and its media. Israel, they believe, has squared the circle.

So what is the evidence that a geometric miracle has taken place in Israel? What is the evidence, for example, in Ali's case?

Ali lives in the town of Sakhnin in the central Galilee, home to about 25,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the late 1990s he decided to build a single-storey home inside the municipal boundaries of Sakhnin on land that has belonged to his family for generations. No one disputes that. He is surrounded on three sides by other legal buildings belonging to Palestinian families, and his own municipality approves of his decision to build there. Nonetheless, his home has been ruled illegal by the state and in a succession of rulings by the courts. In two months he, his Dutch wife Terese and their two teenage daughters Dina and Awda may be homeless.

The Galilee has vast tracts of undeveloped land on which to build. In fact, there has been a glut of communities springing up all over the Galilee since the early 1960s. But they have all been communities for Jews, who have been brought to the north of the country over the past several decades in what Israel calls the "Judaisation of the Galilee": that is, the attempt by sheer force of numbers to ensure Jewish control over a traditional Palestinian area.

Ali had no choice but to build where he did. His family does not own land anywhere else. And most of the territory inside the country is not available to him. Israel has nationalised some 93 per cent of the country's lands, by appropriating land without compensation from the four million Palestinian refugees who live in exile and by confiscating the lands of the one million Palestinians who live as citizens. This 93 per cent of Israel is out of bounds to Palestinians like Ali.

Read More (with more pictures)
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3674.shtml