The Corner Report

There simply can be no genuine peace with justice where there is no will for it.

By John Chuckman

I don't know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.

It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.

As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.

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He did it with seven words. “Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution.”

By Alan Hart

He was speaking at the White House the day before the start of the new round of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, after he had met with them and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. (In my last post I anticipated Obama saying at the point of his complete surrender that “America can’t want peace more than the parties.” He also said that – ahead of schedule!)

Today there is a growing number of seriously well informed people of all faiths and none (including me) who believe there will only be peace if it is imposed.

Among those who have dared to say so in public is one of the most eminent Jewish gentlemen of our time, Henry Siegman. A former national director of the American Jewish Congress, he is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, which was part of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 until 2006 when it was established as an independent policy institute. He is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. During his more than 30 years of involvement in the Middle East peace process, he has published extensively on the subject and has been consulted by governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations involved in the peace process. In a comment piece for the Financial Times on 23 February 2010, (quoted in Conflict Without End? the Epilogue to Volume 3 of the American edition of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews), he wrote this:

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Can the resistance exploit the fake talks, re-position itself and finally “come good”?

By Stuart Littlewood

Hamas “vows to step up attacks on Israel”, say reports in the western media.

Reading further, we learn that this escalation is either “a natural response to the crimes of the occupation” or a spiteful reaction to being left out of the talks.

Either way, Hamas surely knows better than to let such crude impressions be formed.

This is their golden opportunity. The eyes and ears of the world are focused on the Israel problem, and will re-focus every two weeks.

Instead of hurling threats of more violence, which only serve to reinforce opinion that Hamas is a terrorist organization, the words and deeds of the resistance movement should be carefully chosen to harmonise with the West’s values and beliefs.

This is Hamas’s chance to ‘educate’ the rest of the world as to the truth about the evil that stalks the Holy Land. It is perhaps a final window of opportunity to define the massive, decades-old injustice accurately.

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By Ghada Karmi

With the odds stacked so strongly in Israel’s favour, Palestinians rightly view the US talks with dread

What an irony that the Palestinians’ arch-enemy, Israel, should also be their saviour. There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks due to start on September 2 in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the needs of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades, if not for ever. Fortunately this will not happen as long as Israel’s obduracy can be relied on to save the Palestinians from such an outcome.

Time and again, when Israel was thrown a lifeline by Arab neighbours that could have ensured its legitimacy and security, its folly and greed lost it those opportunities. But, since they came at great cost to Palestinian rights, Israel’s obduracy had the perverse effect of safeguarding those rights. All peace proposals after 1967 were based on maintaining Israel as a regional power and forcing the Palestinians to settle for less than they were entitled to. They were repeatedly offered paltry settlements that legitimised Israel’s hold on most of their land and undermined their right of return. Had Israel agreed, the Palestinian cause would have been lost long ago.

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Half the Negev's Bedouin population live in unrecognised communities.

By Jonathan Cook - Hura, the Negev

Nuri al Uqbi's small cinderblock home in a ramshackle neighbourhood of Hura, a Bedouin town in Israel’s Negev desert, hardly looks like the epicentre of a legal struggle that some observers say threatens Israel's Jewish character.

Inside, the 68-year-old Bedouin activist has stacks of bulging folders of tattered and browning documents, many older than the state of Israel itself, that he hopes will overturn decades of harsh government policy towards the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin.

For the past few months, Mr al Uqbi has been in court pursuing a case that has pitted his own expert witnesses against those of the state.

Mr al Uqbi claims the right to return to a patch of 82 hectares in the Negev, close to the regional capital, Beersheva, that he says has belonged to his family for generations. But as both the government and the judge in the case, Sarah Dovrat, seem to appreciate, much more is at stake.

Should Mr al Uqbi win his case, tens of thousands of Bedouin, who long ago had their properties confiscated, could be entitled to repossess their agricultural lands or seek enormous sums in compensation.

Theoretically, it might also open the door to claims by millions of Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East.

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Gazan supporters of Hamas rally to mark Al Quds day and to condemn new Palestinian-Israeli talks launched in Washington. Leaders at the Al Quds day rallies told supporters in Gaza that negotiations with Israel were 'pointless' [AFP]

Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters have rallied in the Gaza Strip to mark Al Quds day and to condemn the direct talks launched in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Friday's rally comes a day after armed groups said that they had joined forces to step up attacks against Israel, possibly including suicide bombings.

Al Quds day is an annual event on the last Friday of Ramadan, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people and opposing Zionism.

"The negotiations that the Palestinian people have tried for over two decades are pointless negotiations, the Palestinian people never gained anything from them except the loss of their cause and their rights," Ismail Rudwan, a Hamas official, told a large cheering crowd.

"Therefore, we consider that participating in these negotiations is a crime and treason."

Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, held talks sponsored by the US administration in Washington on Thursday.

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The message of the bulldozers is clear..

By Jeff Halper

The day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla "to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin's] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site." For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s "Independence Park" was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for.....a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center's Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack "is a cemetery.")

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Evidence of ethnic cleansing kept under lock and key.

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.

That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.

The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.

The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents “are not fit for public viewing” and raise doubts about Israel’s “adherence to international law”, while the government warns that greater transparency will “damage foreign relations”.

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Hamas must re-invent itself as a matter of urgency.

When Palestinians elected Hamas, sore losers Fatah set out to cause maximum trouble. The relentless pressures of occupation and bribery succeed in causing internal divisions and self-destruction. When an attempted coup was beaten off there were claims that Hamas "seized control" when it simply acted to enforce its legitimate authority.

By Stuart Littlewood – London

In the five years since I became interested in the conflict in Palestine, only two things of positive note have happened in the Occupied Territories.

The Palestinians held full and fair elections in 2006 to establish themselves as a democracy… and much good it did them.

And in Gaza these amazing people have resolutely survived a vicious land and sea blockade imposed by Israel and aided and abetted by the western powers as soon as those elections put Hamas into government. They have resisted almost daily air strikes and armed intrusions for four years and courageously withstood the cowardly Israeli blitzkrieg of 20 months ago.

And during all that time they have endured unending barbarity and betrayal, which would have brought a lesser nation to its knees. They have come through.

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Rocket attacks were a pretext for well-planned naked aggression.

By Stephen Lendman

Despite a credible start, the fix is in. Expect justice again to be denied. After the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead), the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) appointed Justice Richard Goldstone to lead an independent four-person fact-finding Commission to investigate human rights and humanitarian law violations committed on both sides, Israel doing everything possible to obstruct him in vain.

The Commission conducted 188 interviews, got over 300 reports, submissions and other documents, comprising more than 10,000 pages, 30 videos, and 1,200 photographs, much of it gathered first-hand. Secondary sources added corroboration, in total providing clear evidence of Israel crimes.

On September 15, 2009, the Commission concluded that:

"There is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity."

"While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self-defense, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole."

Rocket attacks were a pretext for well-planned naked aggression. The Commission's findings were conclusively damning despite Israeli war criminals not punished, justice still denied but not forever.

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From Mazin:

On the first Friday of Ramadan, thousands of Palestinians tried to reach the Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem for prayers in Al-Aqsa mosque. But only some men above 50 and some women above 45 year old were allowed to enter through the checkpoints in the apartheid wall. Some of those left behind participated in demonstrations.

Al-Walaja demonstration was particularly inspiring and faced the might of the apartheid system. The Apartheid wall here is being built to surround Al-Walaja on all sides. We marched from the mosque towards the village entrance and along the main road; here the wall facing Al-Walaja village is ugly concrete and the side of it facing the illegal colony of Har Gilo is decorated with Jerusalem stone.

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Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman has little interest in a peaceful settlement.

By George S. Hishmeh – Washington, D.C.

Oftentimes, Israelis and their supporters bury their heads in the sand, ignoring all that goes around them. Take the case, for one example, of a university professor who joyously lauded in a commentary in a leading American newspaper, The New York Times (which in turn was remiss in not checking) an "opinion poll" that claimed that 71 percent of Arab respondents have "no interest" in the Palestinian-Israeli "peace process." Probably sharing his enthusiasm, the paper headlined the column, "The Palestinians, Alone."

It turned out that the shady poll that was cited by Efraim Karsh, who teaches at King's College, London and is author of "Palestine Betrayed," was nothing more than a tally of readers responding to another reader's query on the website of an Arabic television network. Moreover, one would have thought that Karsh should have known better. His puerile analysis failed to differentiate between Arab views of the "peace process" a lackluster issue and their genuine concern toward the Palestinians, whose homeland was mostly usurped by Israel 63 years ago, while the remaining segment the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is still under Israeli control since 1967. His punch line was that the Palestinians should abandon their dependency on the Arab world. "The sooner the Palestinians recognize their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace...."

But Karsh would have done better had he digested what two prominent American Jewish leaders, Jeremy Benami and Debra Lee, wrote recently: "Decades of telling and retelling a comfortable narrative in which Israel is always extending its hand in peace, only to have it rejected by the Palestinians, understandably makes it hard to accept when the facts show otherwise." They underlined that "facts don't support the charge that the present Palestinian leadership is not a partner for peace."

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By Dr. Alan Sabrosky - Intifada Palestine

As the US edges toward an unprovoked and utterly needless war with Iran, some remarks by an eminent and experienced observer of that part of the world caught my attention. First, he noted that “Israel and the US realize that the next war will burn much of the Middle East and may well spell the end of Israel.”

Now, Israel certainly believes that about the Middle East, and in fact hopes it happens, because that just makes its position stronger. But neither Israel nor the US — at least at a governmental level — accept the second part of the proposition, just the opposite, that in fact it will be the saving of Israel — because (as I’ve noted elsewhere) if the regional chaos is great enough, Israel will take the opportunity to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians (and probably Israeli Arabs as well) from “Greater Israel” by shoving them over its borders, into Jordan and the Sinai (and some into the Lebanon as well). That will leave it intact and Jewish, its neighbors overwhelmed by a few million destitute Palestinians — a 2nd and even worse Nakba — and everyone else in ruins or teetering on the edge. Netanyahu, Barak, Lieberman and their merry thugs won’t shed a tear or lose a second’s sleep over any of it, much less over the many Americans who will die in yet another of America’s Jewish Wars.

Second, he remarked that “Every week Israel becomes weaker vis a vis the “resistance axis” and at what point does Israel decide to bring down the house and start again if it can survive with enough military power (backed by the US) to remake the region.”

But I simply don’t see Israel getting weaker, just more beleaguered, which is not the same thing. We need to keep in mind that Israel defines its usable power (and therefore its security) not only in terms of what it has, but also what it can command from its “most favored goyim” in the US — and that, now, is virtually everything. We know about Israel’s control of the Congress and the media, and I think people on our side generally understand about their control of political appointments that absolutely keep opponents of Israel out of office – the Chas Freeman incident ought to have been telling. The American public, unfortunately, is almost absolutely clueless about the whole enterprise, thanks to the prevailing dominant theme they get from the President, national politicians, the press and mostly the Protestant pulpit.

Yet it goes beyond that.

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"The Obama administration, colluding with Israel, is backing the gradual naturalization of the Palestinians wherever they are or can be embedded. In this context, and according to the information acquired by the Kuwait Daily, Al-Anbaa, 'the State Department has formed a team of Arabs and Europeans, in order to pressure the Gulf States into financing a fund to support any country that will accept and nationalize Palestinians.' ”

By Franklin Lamb

SHATILA PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP, BEIRUT -- For months as Lebanon’s historic debate over basic civil rights for Palestinian refugees has unfolded, the Obama administration has watched idly along the sidelines. As hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees cough and slow-bake while inhaling rancid camp air in Lebanon’s sweltering breezeless heat, the White House has now sent Lebanon’s Parliament a message.

The United States will not support meaningful civil, social or economic rights for the World’s largest and oldest refugee population and it wants them naturalized anywhere except anyplace in Palestine.

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Palestine is back at the heart of the antiwar movement.

By Andrew Pollack – New York

The United National Antiwar Conference, attended by 850 people from July 23 to 25, 2010 in Albany, New York, marked a sea change in the attitude of the antiwar movement toward Palestine. For the first time a broadly representative, democratic national conference of peace activists adopted the demand "End All US Aid to Israel." UNAC also endorsed the global BDS movement, committed itself to joining Palestine solidarity efforts around future flotillas, emergency responses to Zionist attacks, etc., and expressed its opposition to the US's many-faceted complicity in Zionism's various crimes. All of these positions were adopted in near-unanimous votes and in the face of attempts by a handful of delegates to water down or obstruct them.

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Israel's foreign minister is advocating international monitoring of the Gaza Strip [GALLO/GETTY]

This proposal not only limits the vision of Palestinian statehood, but is also designed to break the will of the Palestinian people - reducing them to a population consumed by the immediate needs of living at the expense of their freedoms and aspirations.

By Lamis Andoni

While most Israeli leaders are resistant to fully lifting the blockade of Gaza, Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing foreign minister, is advocating that Israel abandon the Strip to international monitoring and economic rehabilitation.

The proposal, recently leaked to the Israeli press, does not amount to freeing Gaza but rather to placing it under European sea and land inspections and a reconstruction plan.

If implemented, it will permanently sever the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, transforming the Strip into an internationally supervised ghetto - with the dual purpose of ensuring Israeli security and reigning in the Palestinian population.

The isolation of Gaza would further undermine the vision of a contiguous Palestinian state or any form of equitable coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. It would also divide those families with members in the West Bank, creating a permanent schism in Palestinian society and deepening the sense of fragmentation.

Hamas would effectively be ruling a development project with no meaningful ties to the rest of the Palestinian people.

Lieberman's plan would effectively turn the Strip into a European protectorate [AFP]

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Israeli troops clash with Palestinians protesting against last year's Gaza offensive

By Abbas Momani

The death of five Israeli servicemen in a helicopter crash in Romania this week raised scarcely a headline.

There was a Nato-Israeli exercise in progress. Well, that's OK then. Now imagine the death of five Hamas fighters in a helicopter crash in Romania this week. We'd still be investigating this extraordinary phenomenon. Now mark you, I'm not comparing Israel and Hamas. Israel is the country that justifiably slaughtered more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza 19 months ago – more than 300 of them children – while the vicious, blood-sucking and terrorist Hamas killed 13 Israelis (three of them soldiers who actually shot each other by mistake).

But there is one parallel. Judge Richard Goldstone, the eminent Jewish South African judge, decided in his 575-page UN inquiry into the Gaza bloodbath that both sides had committed war crimes – he was, of course, quite rightly called "evil" by all kinds of justifiably outraged supporters of Israel in the US, his excellent report rejected by seven EU governments – and so a question presents itself. What is Nato doing when it plays war games with an army accused of war crimes?

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Inter-Palestinian reconciliation might be possible were it not for the meddling of foreign powers, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Unlike what drivers are used to on Saturdays and Tuesdays, traffic these days is flowing smoothly on Salaheddin Street (the location of a used car market) south of Al-Zaitoun district in southern Gaza City. In the past, used cars on sale on these two days blocked this busy street that connects the northern part of the Gaza Strip with the south. Today, only a handful of cars are being traded since most people can no longer afford to buy used cars at extravagant prices as a result of the siege, especially after Israel announced that it would lift the blockade.

Despite the decision by Israel, bickering between the governments in Ramallah and Gaza has prevented the entry of cars to the market. Ramallah insists that cars can only be allowed in through cooperation between the Ministry of Transportation in Ramallah and car dealers in the Gaza Strip, without any interference by the government of Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza. In response, the government in Gaza stated that it is not interested in taxes, but it cannot be taken out of the equation. It suggested that a joint committee of both governments be formed to coordinate the passage of cars.

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Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva, released from police custody hours after being arrested for encouraging the killing of non-Jews.
July 27, 2010

Chaim Levinson Police released the head rabbi of a prominent yeshiva yesterday hours after arresting him for encouraging to kill non-Jews.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva and author of “The King’s Torah,” was arrested early yesterday morning at his home in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. His book describes how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law )

Detectives first carried out a search at the yeshiva, where they confiscated 30 copies of the book. The investigation and arrest were carried out on the orders of Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan.

The preface of the book, which was published in November, states that it is forbidden to kill non-Jews – but the book then apparently describes the context in which it is permitted to do so.

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Netanyahu calls Bedouin citizens of Israel “real threat” – and next, an entire village in the Negev is demolished

Early this morning (July 27) police raided the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib in the Negev, destroyed all 40 of its houses, and evicted more than 300 residents. The residents, mostly children, were left homeless. The unprecedented raid began at about 4:30 in the morning, residents were surprised to wake up surrounded by a huge force of 1,500 police with guns, stun grenades, helmets and shields, including hundreds of Special Riot Police (Yasam) as well as mounted police, helicopters and bulldozers.

At the residents’ call, dozens of left-wing activists and volunteers arrived from all over the country, helping them to offer non-violent resistance. Several residents were bruised and beaten by police, though not needing medical attention. One woman demonstrator was detained by the police. The police removed the residents’ property into prepared containers, and bulldozers demolished the residential buildings and sheepfolds and destroyed the residents’ fruit orchards and olive tree groves.

The villagers, mostly children and old people, were left stunned near the destroyed village, shelterless and waterless under the blazing sun.

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Domestic pressure is one reason behind the US-Israeli rapprochement but so is a failure of policy, writes Graham Usher in New York

After a cool year United States-Israeli relations are again warming. Since their "kiss-and-make-up" meeting in Washington on 6 July, Barack Obama has made no call on Binyamin Netanyahu to extend Israel's so-called settlement freeze in the West Bank beyond its expiry in September. Instead, the US president has squeezed the Palestinians to move from indirect "proximity" talks with the Americans to direct negotiations with Israel.

So far to no avail. On 17 July Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said there would be little point in talks unless Israel accepted the 1967 armistice lines as the "basis" of the borders of a future Palestinian state with "international" -- rather than Israeli -- troops to police them. Netanyahu has rejected both conditions. So, currently, has Obama.

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Two new political initiatives emerge from the Israeli right: both aim to destroy the Palestinian cause and prospects of a Palestinian state, writes Saleh Al-Naami

"You will hit several birds with one stone," asserted Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Relations and Security Committee, when discussing the plan by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to detach Israel from the Gaza Strip. Despite political sparring and disparity between Hanegbi, who is a member of the opposition Kadima Party, and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Lieberman, the advantages of the foreign minister's plan were convincing to his opponent.

According to the proposal, which was formulated at the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Political Research Council, Israel must completely separate from Gaza, both economically and politically. This separation must be recognised internationally, and according to Yediot Aharonot newspaper the scheme includes the following:

- Economic separation embodied in the construction of a power station, desalination plant and a sewage treatment facility through international funds, in order for Israel to stop providing Gaza with energy.

- Israeli seaports should stop receiving all ships heading to Gaza. Security checks of these ships should take place in the Cypriot port of Limassol under EU supervision.

- Sending European forces to the border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, as well as the crossing between Gaza and Israel.

- International recognition -- including of the UN -- that the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip has ended.

- Israel would undertake diplomatic efforts to convince the US administration and other countries to adopt this plan and transform it into a working plan.

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The proposed amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel law would further institutionalise the dispossession of the Palestinians [GETTY]

By Lamis Andoni

The debate in Israel over whether to force all prospective Israeli citizens to declare loyalty to "a Jewish and democratic state" is reflective of the Israeli right's efforts to further institutionalise the dispossession of Palestinians.

It is ironic that the proposed loyalty oath should include the term democracy as, if introduced, the law itself would be a blatant exercise in state coercion.

As Adalah, a legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, puts it, the proposed amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law "requires all non-Jews to identify with Zionism and imposes a political ideology and loyalty to the principles or Judaism and Zionism".

Targeting intermarriage

In practice, the amendment - which would require all Jews and non-Jews applying for citizenship to endorse the ideology of the state - is mainly aimed at Palestinians married to Israeli Arabs.

Israeli-Arabs constitute 20 per cent of the Israeli population. The majority are Muslim but there is also a strong Christian contingent. The purpose of the law is not to impose Judaism but the Jewishness of the state - which in practical terms excludes Arabs and legitimises their expulsion.

Other elements of the law, which was originally passed as a temporary emergency measure in 2003 but has been repeatedly extended by the Knesset since, mean that many Palestinians married to Israelis actually live in Israel illegally.

Such marriages are largely between Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel, so the law effectively discourages marriages between Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and those living inside Israel.

Israel's Palestinian minority today are those who stayed in their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948 and their descendents. But when Israel occupied the remaining territories of historic Palestine in the 1967 war, the dispersed Palestinians were able to reconnect and intermarriages ensued.

However, the law bars Palestinians married to Israelis from joining their families inside Israel until the interior ministry has granted them permission to reside in the country. The law also denies residency rights to any foreign spouse or his children if he is married to other women in addition to his Israeli wife. And it requires that Palestinians seeking Israeli citizenship provide financial guarantees and proof that they have a home in Israel.

Israel has also made it difficult - and at times, impossible - for Arabs or any non-Israelis to reside with their Palestinian spouses in the West Bank in order to force the latter group to leave.

Sacred security cow

Advocates cite security concerns [GETTY]

Israeli advocates of the amendment cite security issues as a justification and argue that the oath would discourage Arab citizens of Israel from taking part in attacks or actions against Israel.

The explanatory notes accompanying the proposed restrictions state that their purpose is to make it harder for Palestinian terrorist groups to recruit Palestinians who have acquired Israeli citizenship to carry out attacks.

"An examination of the security reality since the outbreak of armed confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians revealed growing involvement by Palestinians who took advantage of their status in Israel, received on the basis of their family reunification process with Israelis, to become involved in terrorism and abet suicide bombing attacks," the notes said.

"The Israeli identity cards granted to [these] Palestinians provided them with freedom of movement between Israel and the [Palestinian] Authority and thus made them into the terrorist organisations' preferred population for carrying out hostile actions in general and inside Israel in particular."

The claim that there are Israeli-Arabs who have used their citizenship to engage in or facilitate attacks inside Israel may be true, but the solution is to be found in addressing the root cause of the conflict - the dispossession of the Palestinians - and not in institutionalising "ethnic cleansing".

Taking an oath will not prevent an alienated citizen - whether Jewish or not - from protesting against the government or even committing violent acts. But as so often with Israel's arbitrary laws and actions, the sacred cow of security concerns is being held aloft.

Another brick

All evictions of Palestinians - whether through the demolition of homes, deportations or the confiscation of lands - are committed under the guise of Israel's security needs. But their aim is, in fact, to maintain a Jewish majority and to reduce - and if this continues, potentially end - the presence of Palestinians in both Israel proper and the Occupied Territories.

If introduced, the loyalty oath would be not only a tool for the subversion of Palestinians, but also a vehicle for the continued eviction of Palestinians from their homeland.

Editors of the Israeli daily Haaretz, who urged the government not to pass the amendment to the law, have unequivocally rejected the security rationale. "The wording of the initiative perpetuates the lie that these measures are required by security considerations, when in truth they are clearly driven by demographic concerns," said an editorialpublished prior the decision's ratification.

In Israel proper, the government has systematically employed discrimination and the confiscation of land to strangle major Arab cities, encircling them with Jewish settlements so as to prevent them from expanding outwards as any city might as a result of natural growth.

There has always been talk, mainly but not exclusively among right-wing Israeli politicians, of the need to 'transfer' - a euphemism for expel - the country's Arab minority to the West Bank or even to Arab countries.

This talk was renewed when the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party secured third place in the country's 2009 election and joined a coalition government led by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister.

Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beiteinu's leader, himself a Russian immigrant, started to aggressively advocate 'transferring' the country's Arab minority so as to maintain a Jewish majority and the Jewishness of the state.

Yisrael Beiteinu has been the driving force behind the demand that non-Jews declare loyalty to a Jewish state and the proposed amendment to the citizenship law is a watered down version of an earlier Yisrael Beiteinu initiative to expel Arabs who do not do so.

If approved, the amendment will be another brick in the apartheid system that Israel has built. But the main problem in Israel is not apartheid but the systemic colonisation and dispossession of Arabs. And for Israel, apartheid is a tool - not an aim in itself - to complete the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

Lamis Andoni is an analyst and commentator on Middle Eastern and Palestinian affairs.

Al Jazeera

Decision not to cooperate with the UN committee has not been announced officially, but is expected to be made this week.

Haaretz

Aharon Leshno Yaar, Israel's UN envoy in Geneva, delivers a statement on the Gaza flotilla raid, June 1, 2010
Photo by: AP

Israel does not intend to cooperate with the United Nations Human Rights Council's investigation into Israel's interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla at the end of May. The raid resulted in nine deaths.

According to a senior Israeli official, the sense at the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office is that cooperating with the investigative committee would only confer legitimacy upon the UNHRC, which has consistently acted against Israel.