Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

“Jeremiah Haber,” Two More (Palestinians) for the Road – The Ethnic Cleansing Continues, The Magnes Zionist,June 27, 2008

If I were a Palestinian, and spend some time out of the country, then I could lose my residency rights in Palestine. If I were a Palestinian who lived all my life in Jerusalem, and then married a Palestinian from the US, who lost his residency privileges in his native Palestine, then ipso facto I would lose mine – even if I spent most my time in the land where my family has lived for generation. Just marrying a Palestinian living in the US would jeopardize my status in my native land.

That is what is known as “ethnic cleansing lite”. The Zionists have always done their best to rid Israel of Palestinians – not so much through murder, rape, or torture, which would be ethnic cleansing of the sort we expect in Rwanda or Bosnia, as through more banal methods, such as telling a Palestinian who has been living in the West Bank with his family for fifteen years, and who during that time has had to renew his tourist visa every 3 or 6 months, that he will not be able to renew it again. Oh, and about that “tourist” visa; you see, that’s the best a Palestinian can do in the Palestinian territories, which are controlled by Israel.

Some part of me wants this policy to be part of a master Israeli plan in which Palestinian Americans, and upper middle-class Palestinian professionals are driven from the territories in order that they become centers for poverty, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Such centers will ensure the requisite number of Jews being blown up in order to justify before the world Israel’s continuing existence as an ethnonationalist state that controls and settles the territories. I say that some part of me wants this policy to be part of such a plan, only because that would indicate some degree of intelligence on the part of those who framed such a policy.

But no, I really think that there is no master plan; it is simply bureaucratic evil, an expression of the need to humiliate Palestinians. Otherwise I cannot explain why Israel has gone to such lengths to stick to this policy, despite US “pressure” and despite its promises to work out “humanitarian” solutions.

The first letter is from Mona Nasir Tucktuck; the second from Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison, who happens to be the daughter of Hanan Ashrawi. For these two there are many, many more, of course.