When I checked with Halper’s colleague, Meir Margalit, I learned that in 2006, Israel destroyed 823 houses of Palestinian Israelis and that the figure was 759 for last year.
While a large number were scrappy shelters erected by bedouin in “unrecognised” communities in the Negev, Israel demolished hundreds of houses elsewhere as well. Furthermore, Israel’s motivation is the same as in the West Bank: it seeks to dispossess Palestinian citizens of the state in order to force them to emigrate so that Israel will be an exclusively Jewish state, an objective unattainable as long as 1.3 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel and 2.5 million Palestinians remain steadfast in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Israel is in the process of annexing.
Palestinians in Gaza are in a different category, because Israel has “withdrawn” from the strip. From the 1880s, the Zionists realised that they had to overcome the “demographic threat” to the Jewish state enterprise posed by the native Palestinian population. Today, the Palestinian physical presence is the major obstacle to the Zionist/Israeli “Jewish state” project and the major challenge to the very legitimacy of Israel. This is why Israel always demands recognition of its “right to exist” and why it is now insisting that Palestinians recognise it as a “Jewish state”.
The greatest Zionist/Israeli fear is that Palestinians will drop their demand for a “two-state solution” and call for the creation of a secular, democratic state where, in a matter of years, Palestinians would become the majority.
One of the most dramatic Israeli military operations during the Nakbeh was the ethnic cleansing of 60,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle, which took place in mid-July 1948, two months after the proclamation of the Israeli state. Since these Palestinians had withstood Israeli attacks for many months, a frustrated David Ben Gurion ordered his commanders to undertake the clearing of the towns. Lydda was bombarded and men massacred in the mosque. In Ramle, which had reached an agreement with the Jewish military to allow the population to stay, men were rounded up and taken away, and women, children and the elderly were driven out by force.
Battered and terrorised Palestinians were compelled to walk to the lines of the Arab Legion, 15 miles away. En route, they were stripped of their valuables by Israeli soldiers. Many of the refugees died of heat, exhaustion and thirst. In spite of the cleansing campaign, several hundred remained and stayed on, in spite of the flood of Jewish refugees who were settled in Palestinian houses and given Palestinian land.
Buthayna Dibit, a Czech-trained Palestinian-Israeli architect who is the project manager for the New Israel Fund-Shatil Mixed Cities Project, is a native of Ramle. She said before the Nakbeh, Ramle had 20,000 inhabitants, all Palestinian, Lydda 40,000, Jaffa 120,000 and Acre 15,000. After Israel’s cleansing, there remained 1,000 in Ramle, 600-700 in Lydda, 31,500 in Jaffa and 1,500 in Acre, all urban folk. But, the international community has always focused on rural Palestinian refugees, not those from the urban areas.
Israel proceeded to seize 44,000 buildings in Ramle, Lydda and Jaffa. Half were confiscated and given to Jewish Israelis, half were demolished, including a large number of historic buildings. In Lydda only 5 per cent of the old city remains, in Ramle 10 per cent and in Jaffa 3,250 buildings have been demolished.
“They are systematically destroying houses to deny Palestinians their rights and to carry out the Judaisation of these cities by erasing their Arab character. This is a cultural Nakbeh. The story has not yet ended because Israel is following a [two-pronged] policy of neglecting and destroying [Palestinian] Arab communities. They issue hundreds of eviction and demolition orders. Seventy per cent of Palestinians are living in an illegal situation although they are citizens of the state. This means Palestinians have an illegal existence. There are 500 demolition and evacuation orders in Ramle [alone].”
“After 1948, 70 per cent of Palestinians left in Ramle had bedouin roots.”
The urban inhabitants of the city were confined to the old city in what the Israelis called the “ghetto”, bedouins in their own smaller ghetto. Jewish Israelis were settled in the newer areas.
“There were no mixed neighbourhoods.”
Jewish Israelis sent to Ramle “were poor, living on the periphery, like the Palestinians, and were also neglected. Drugs, hunger and crime became major problems”.
Jewish residents demanded that Israel build walls between the two communities on the premise that “if I don’t see my neighbour, he does not exist”.
“Some of the walls were also used for landgrab [following the West Bank model]. Although both Arabs and Jews here live on the margins, the Jews can go away if they have money. We have fewer options. We are demanding a Palestinian third option [the other two being to endure in silence or to leave]. We want to live as Arabs.”
“Our culture must be respected and we must be able to mix normally [with Israeli Jews]. They build cultural centres for new immigrants, but not for us. We need centres where Jews and Arabs can mix.... Today we face two problems. We must end the situation of the occupation, which we share with residents of Gaza and the West Bank. Once the occupation ends, we can start to discuss our civil rights.... We must secure our civil rights and recognition as citizens by Israel. We have citizenship but we are treated as enemies of the state and in the Arab world we are treated as collaborators. We live a segregated existence, there is no coexistence...”
As we strolled around Ramle’s old town, Buthayna showed me wide sandy spaces cleared of buildings, slum flats erected for Palestinians where Jewish Israelis have also settled, the dome of the Ottoman bath which belonged to the family of Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad), her family home, “Dibit”, on a plaque on the door. Today Ramle’s population is 20 per cent Palestinian Arab, 14 per cent Muslim, six per cent Christian, the rest is Jewish.
“Our city is a unique place. It is the only city [in Palestine] founded as an Arab Muslim city in 716 by Suleiman bin Abdel Malek. The character of the place dates from this time.”
We walked down alleyways and through arches very much like the Old City of Jerusalem. Most buildings are built of stone. While there has been some effort to preserve them, the Israelis have constructed two hideous wedding halls amongst the traditional buildings. Buthayna paused by a squat, ancient minaret near the large Franciscan church.
“Napoleon came to Ramle and he slept in a house near here. But when he was awakened by the call to prayer early in the morning, he had the muezzin shot.”
* Published in the JORDAN TIMES on May 15, 2008. Michael Jansen is a freelance journalist and author of the book The Battle for Beirut: Why Israel Invaded Lebanon. |
