Al-Jazeerah History
Archives
Mission & Name
Conflict Terminology
Editorials
Gaza Holocaust
Gulf War
Isdood
Islam
News
News Photos
Opinion
Editorials
US Foreign Policy (Dr. El-Najjar's Articles)
www.aljazeerah.info
|
|
Israeli Forces Test Ethnic Cleansing Scenario
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Redress, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, October 17, 2010
Secret Drill Simulates Riots by Arab citizens
Israel has secretly staged a training exercise to test its ability to
quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the
Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Arab
citizens, the Israeli media has reported.
The drill was intended to
evaluate the readiness of the civil defence units, police, army and prison
service to contain large-scale riots by Israel's Arab minority in response
to such a deal.
The transfer scenario echoes a proposal by
Avigdor
Lieberman, Israel's far-right foreign minister, for what he has termed
a "population exchange". “A few years ago, only the extreme right-wing
parties talked about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see that even
the security forces are preparing concrete plans for carrying out such a
scenario.” Dov Chenin, Israeli MP Lieberman proposes land swaps that
would force many of Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens into a future
Palestinian state in return for annexation to Israel of most of the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank. The scheme has been widely criticized as a
violation of international law. He outlined his proposal to the United
Nations General Assembly last month. Although Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's
prime minister, said he was not consulted about the speech, he did not
admonish Lieberman. The training exercise has fuelled fears among
Israel's Arab minority that the government might be hoping to pressure
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to agree to
land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored peace negotiations,
which have stalled.
Dov Chenin, a member of the Israeli parliament
representing the joint Jewish-Arab Communist Party, on 12 October called
for more details of the exercise from the government during a speech in
the chamber, although officials offered no immediate response.
Chenin said the drill was a sign Israel was heading in an “extremely
dangerous direction”. “A few years ago, only the extreme
right-wing parties talked about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see
that even the security forces are preparing concrete plans for carrying
out such a scenario.” Netanyahu demanded this week that the
Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state before further progress
was possible – a move seen by the Arab minority as a threat to its status
inside Israel. A US State Department spokesman referred to recognition as
“a core demand” and said it had Washington’s support. “Netanyahu is
letting us know that we are not part of his vision of Israel's future as a
Jewish state and that, if we try to resist his plans, our protests will be
greeted with violent repression.” Haneen Zoubi, Israeli Arab MP
Haneen Zoubi, an Arab member of parliament, said the exercise was designed
to send “very clear messages” to the Arab minority and Abbas’s
negotiators. “Netanyahu is letting us know that we are not part of
his vision of Israel's future as a Jewish state and that, if we try to
resist his plans, our protests will be greeted with violent repression,”
she said. “He also wants the Palestinian negotiators to understand
his minimum requirements for an agreement. He is not interested in justice
for the Palestinians or in creating a viable state.” Details of
the five-day drill were reported last weekend on the Voice of Israel radio
station by Carmela Menashe, one of Israel’s most respected military
correspondents. The exercise envisioned extensive disturbances by
Israel’s Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, as security forces
prepared to enforce border changes that would forcibly relocate many to a
new Palestinian state, according to her report. In the operation,
code-named Warp and Weft, the security services established a large
detention centre in the Galilee region between Nazareth and Tiberias to
cope with an “unprecedented” number of arrests of Arab citizens.
The drill anticipated a rapid takeover of the West Bank by Hamas following
the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. In the
exercise, the security forces had to handle the firing of hundreds of
rockets into Israel, terrorist attacks, prison riots and breakouts.
As Chenin raised his concerns, Lieberman opened a new front in his attacks
on Israel’s Arab citizens, following his repeated statements questioning
their loyalty to the state. While hosting the Finnish foreign minister on
12 October, he accused groups of Arab citizens of plotting to secede from
the state under orders from the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
“The Palestinians will try, through various groups among Israeli
Arabs, to overturn the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and will
work to create different autonomous areas within the state,” he said.
Aluf Benn, a senior columnist for the Ha’aretz newspaper, wrote on 13
October that Netanyahu was “hiding behind” Lieberman and that the prime
minister was the “true instigator” of the wave of anti-Arab policies and
laws the government was promoting. The impression was being created
that “an issue which is completely illegitimate – the forced revocation of
the citizenship of some of the country’s Arab citizens – is perceived by
the government as a reasonable and even likely possibility”.
Association for Civil Rights in Israel On 10 October the cabinet
approved a bill that would demand a loyalty oath from non-Jews seeking
citizenship. In the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab MP,
accused Netanyahu of being behind “a gradual ethnic-cleansing scheme –
removing as many Arabs as possible while creating a Jewish, homogenous
Israel”. Opinion polls among Israel’s Arab minority have
repeatedly shown strong opposition to any plan to revoke their citizenship
or force them into a Palestinian state.
The
Association for Civil Rights in
Israel, the country’s largest human-rights group, wrote to Netanyahu
this week calling the media reports “alarming” and demanding assurances
that there were no plans for “population transfer”. It added that
the impression was being created that “an issue which is completely
illegitimate – the forced revocation of the citizenship of some of the
country’s Arab citizens – is perceived by the government as a reasonable
and even likely possibility”. Some observers have speculated that
the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who is a member of
Lieberman’s Yisraeli Beiteinu Party, may have been the driving force
behind the exercise. However, Chenin said such an extensive drill
involving so many different branches of the security forces could not have
been carried out without the involvement of other government ministers,
including Ehud Barak, the defence minister. Barak, leader of the
Labour party, has presented himself in Washington as a moderating
influence on Israel’s right-wing government. A version of this article
originally appeared in The National,
published in Abu Dhabi. The version here is published by permission of
Jonathan Cook.
|
|
|