The "Jewish Character" Syndrome
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From Refugees To Citizens At Home
Palestine Land Society
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Considering the European Jews' history of oppression, Jewish fear of gentiles is understandable. But when this fear is forged into active policy, it is dangerous and bloody, as the case has been in Palestine. The expulsion of the Palestinians and expropriation of their property, as a precondition for establishing the state of Israel, was a result of this paranoia. That was Ben-Gurion's doctrine, now fully documented by historians. This doctrine is still being followed. It calls for committing an actual murder for fear that the victim, if he lived, might harm the murderer.
The claim that the "Jewish character" of Israel would be threatened is commonly recited to justify the denial of the fundamental right of Palestinians to their land and property. But what is the meaning of "Jewish character"? Does it mean legal character, demographic, social or religious?
If it entails policies that deny the return of refugees and allow unlimited numbers of Jewish immigrants in their place, these policies are best described by the noted jurists Thomas and Sally Mallison, who pointed out that "the term, 'the Jewish character', is really a euphemism for the Zionist discriminatory statutes of the State of Israel which violate the human rights provisions of the Partition Resolution..... The United Nations is under no more of a legal obligation to maintain Zionism in Israel than it is to maintain apartheid in the Republic of South Africa." The US State Department rejected any special meaning for the Jewish citizens of Israel by stating that it "does not recognize the legal-political relationship based on the religious identification of American citizens.... Accordingly it should be clear that the Department of State does not regard the 'Jewish people' concept as a concept of international law."
This is not an isolated view. In 1998 the UN Treaty-based Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights said that Israel's "excessive emphasis upon the State as a 'Jewish State' encourages discrimination and accords a second-class status to its non-Jewish citizens.... The Committee notes with grave concern that the Status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries including the Jewish National Fund to control most of the land in Israel, since these institutions are chartered to benefit Jews exclusively.... The Committee takes the view that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination because these agencies by definition would deny the use of these properties by non-Jews." Israel cannot maintain this position for long. The moral and legal weight of human rights will catch up with it one day. How can this concept of "Jewish character" be an acceptable basis for peaceful relations?
Some Israelis understand the "Jewish character" as a society in which Jews are a numerical majority. But in what territory? In the whole of British Mandatory Palestine? Today, 47 percent of the population of Palestine are (non-Jewish) Arabs and 53 percent Jews. In fact, the percentage would be reversed if we take account of the fact that 62 percent of the Russian immigrants are not really Jews.
Let us examine this matter further. Israel's Master Plan for the year 2020 made a detailed study of population increase in Israel with various scenarios for Jewish immigration. The standard case gives a population of 8,100,000, of which 5,832,000 are Jews and 2,268 (40% of Jews) are Palestinians, in the years 2020. In the same year, Palestinian refugees will increase to 11 million.
The Jews in the world are about 13 million and decreasing at a rate of -0.50% due to mixed marriages and conversion or abandonment of religion. That is because 98% of Jews live in affluent societies and have no need for protectionist measures leading to isolation. Israel plans to have 52% of the world Jewry, or more, in Israel by the year 2020.
Sharon's aggressive plans call for removing the remainder of Russian, all South American and South African Jews from their countries to Israel. Jews in Europe and USA have no interest to immigrate save for the zealots who now build settlements and terrorize the West Bank.
Taking the most and least optimistic forecasts of Jewish immigration (1,700,000 and 800,000 respectively), it becomes apparent that there is an upper limit for immigration which may be reached before 2020 (Fig. 13). Showing the Palestinian increase in Israel on the same curve, it is clear that they will overtake the Jews in or around the year 2070 with or without immigration. That is assuming that no other factor comes into play before then. By 2070, the total number of refugees will be equal to the size of Egypt today at 61 million.
The fallacy of Israeli arguments, aiming to maintain Jewish majority, is abundantly clear. They aim to attain an impossible goal: that Jews will remain a majority at all times in all territories held by Israel. This is impossible. Either the time within which this majority can be maintained shrinks or the territory in which this can be maintained shrinks. A better solution for Jews, indeed for all people, is to live with the people of the land, not instead of them.
All these examples indicate that the notion of the numerical superiority of Jews is a cruel time game in which the refugees rot in their camps until the Israelis realize, or admit, that this contention is a horrible hoax, intended to keep the conquered land empty until its owners give up or are gotten rid of by a "final solution" of the Palestinian problem.
The most incredible notion is the claim that the "Jewish character" means a socially homogeneous society in which Jews speak one language, dress and behave similarly, and uphold the same values, such that the presence of one national group as the Palestinians will 'pollute' this uniformity. It is hard to imagine that very many Israelis really believe this. There are no dominant common features between the Russians and Moroccans, the Mizrahi and Ashkenazi or the Haredim and the secular. There are thirty-two official spoken languages in Israel and about two dozen political groups with an equivalent number of newspapers for a Jewish population a little larger than Los Angeles. The problem of their fractured society is a serious one, and it is already causing internal conflict in Israel, now tenuously held together by the drummed-up Arab danger. Considerable research has already been devoted to this question. The return of Palestinians to their ancestral homes would not substantially exacerbate these problems. Already, the Palestinian citizens of Israel (Fig 9) are 11 percent of the population in group A, 21 percent in group B and 70 percent in group C.
If the "Jewish character" refers to religious practice, this has rarely been a problem in the Arab and Islamic world. Numerous historians have demonstrated that the treatment of Jewish minorities by Islamic and Arab societies has been far better than that by Christian societies.
There is no ethical or legal justification for the maintenance of a "Jewish character" that denies human rights or violates international law. The real reason for Israel's racist practices is to maintain its hold on Palestinian land and keep it as a reserve for future Jewish immigration. On March 1, 2001, the Israeli media reported that Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon told the Jewish Agency that his plan is to bring 1 million immigrants from Russia, Mexico and Ethiopia, and that Israel must bring all of the world's Jews to Israel by 2020.
Ethnic Cleansing Plan
Getting rid of the native inhabitants of Palestine has long been one of the tenets of Zionism. It was clearly spelled out by Yosef Weitz, the head of the Transfer Committee and the chief of land-confiscation operations. As early as 1940, he proposed an ethnic cleansing plan: "The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left."
Plan Dalet was designed to "occupy...expel" the Palestinian people. It was David Ben-Gurion's doctrine that the destruction of the Palestinian people and their cultural and physical landscape was the precondition for creating the state of Israel on its ruins. The systematic elimination of the Palestinians in 1948 took the following forms:
Military Plans for Jewish Settlement
As early as January 1948, four months before the official war began, the Zionists prepared plans for the settlement of 1.5 million new immigrants over and above the existing 600,000 Jews, two-thirds of whom were themselves recent immigrants under the British Mandate. During the Jewish military operations that followed the UN partition resolution of November 1947 and before the end of the British Mandate, more than half of the Palestinian refugees were expelled. The settlement agencies headed by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) directed the military attacks to acquire coveted land, such as the villages of Indur, Qumiya, Ma'lul, Mujaidil and Buteimat in Galilee, which were destroyed primarily to grab their land.
Physical Elimination of the Refugees
Almost every one of the thirty-odd Zionist/Israeli military operations was accompanied by a massacre of civilians. There were at least thirty-five reported massacres, half of which took place before any Arab regular soldier set foot in Palestine. The most notorious of these massacres is Deir Yassin, the largest is Dawayma, and the latest disclosed by an Israeli researcher, Teddy Katz, but known to Palestinians all along, is Tantoura.
Shooting of civilians was not restricted to wartime. After the fighting ceased, some of the refugees tried to return home to rescue civilians left behind, to retrieve some belongings or to attend to crops or cattle. These returnees were shot on the spot as "infiltrators." The UN truce observers reported hundreds of such cases.
Plunder and Destruction of Property
Plunder took place in the immediate aftermath of military assaults, especially in cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, and Jerusalem. The looters included nearby kibbutzniks, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) brigade commanders and the high-ranking political figures of the ruling Mapai (Labor) party. There followed a massive campaign of destruction, which lasted over fifteen years and in which 53 percent of the 418 villages surveyed were totally destroyed and 44.5 percent partially destroyed. The clear aim of this destruction was to prevent the return of the refugees.
Political Action
Soon after the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948 and following the protest of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who witnessed, by June 1948, the expulsion of about 500,000 refugees, the Provisional Government of Israel stated that it could not allow any refugees to return before a peace treaty was signed, on the pretext that these refugees would be a "security threat." Even after the fighting stopped, Israel refused to re-admit the refugees, and it maintains this position in the international arena to this day. It does so even though Israel's admission to the UN in May 1949 was unique in that it is the only UN member whose admittance is "conditional" upon the return of refugees (Resolution 194) and withdrawal to the lines of the partition plan (Resolution 181).
Creation of a Fictitious Legal Web to Mask Illegal Confiscation
Before, during and after the 1948 war, Israel/Zionists resorted to many pseudo-legal devices to organize and justify the confiscation of 18,700 square kilometres (92 percent of Israel) of Palestinian land, in addition to the property found in 530 depopulated towns and villages. The property was held by the Custodian of the Absentee (i.e., refugee) Property and transferred later to the Development Authority. All such land, as well as JNF holdings, is now administered by the Israel Land Administration (ILA). According to Israel, the "Absentee" is a Palestinian refugee not allowed by Israel to return. The term also applies to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are not "Absent," hence dubbed "Present Absentees"; much of their land has also been confiscated.
Importing of Jewish Immigrants to Fill the Depopulated Villages
Immediately upon the invasion of Palestinian villages, Israel activated its program of sending Mossad agents to transport Jews in Arab countries to Israel. The immigrants were persuaded by a mixture of rosy promises, incentives, and, for the reluctant ones, various acts of coercion, including throwing grenades at their houses. About 700,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in the period 1949-52. Many of them were unhappy about the discriminatory treatment they received at the hands of the ruling Ashkenazi. Their resentment is still strong today.
All these actions were designed to prevent the return of refugees to their homes. While Israel was successful in preventing their return, the refugees remained adamant in their intention to return. They could often see their old homes across the barbed wire of the armistice line; indeed, most refugees still reside within a two-hour bus ride of their homes. After their expulsion during al Nakba of 1948, the problem for Israel thus became how to get rid of the refugees themselves, wherever they may be in exile.
The Right of Return is Legal
First, the Right of Return is perfectly legal in accordance with international law. The well-known UN Resolution 194 has been affirmed by the international community 135 times in the period 1948-2000. There is nothing like it in UN history. This universal consensus elevates this resolution from a "recommendation" to an expression of the determined will of the international community. International law also prohibits mass denationalization of a people if the territory in which they live undergoes a change of sovereignty. Thus the refugees are entitled to return to the homes they lost and to a restoration of their nationality as well. The Right of Return is supported by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many regional conventions based on human rights law. It is also derived from the sanctity of private ownership, which is not diminished by change of sovereignty, occupation or passage of time.
Second, the Right of Return is sacred to all Palestinians. It has remained their fundamental objective since 1948. Their determination on the return issue has endured despite warfare, suffering, and enormous social and political hardships. In this, the refugee from Iqrit, who is an Israeli citizen, the refugee from Lydda, who is a Jordanian citizen, the refugee from Haifa, who is stateless in Syria or Lebanon, and the refugee from Jaffa, who is a US citizen, have the same determination.
Third, there is no acceptable reason why they should not return. The Israelis oppose return on the grounds that it will pollute the "Jewish character" of Israel and cause outward emigration of Jews. They say it is impossible because the refugees' villages have been destroyed and property boundaries lost. A senior Israeli intelligence General still perpetuates this claim when he says, "while the principle of 'return to their original homes' was fitting and possible in 1948, it has not been a realistic option for years. Implementing it today would mean dismantling and destroying the new infrastructure built in the last 50 years". None of these claims stand serious scrutiny. They are meant to perpetuate the act of ethnic cleansing. They try to derive some comfort from the dubious assumption that, while planning a crime is illegal and reprehensible, carrying it out efficiently is acceptable.
ORIGINAL
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