Israeli ethnic cleansing surge: How many more Palestinian homes must be demolished before western governments act?

As Westerners busy themselves preparing for Christmas, Israel has accelerated its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and within its own (non-declared) borders. Those familiar with the conduct of successive Israeli governments, right-and left-wing, will not be surprised. They have a long-standing reputation for using international diversions to advance their drive for lebensraum – living space – in Palestine.

During the Christmas holidays two years ago, the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, launched a massive artillery and aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, followed by a full-scale invasion. This year, it appears that a pre-Christmas offensive has started with a spate of insidious home demolitions.

To-date, there has not been a word of condemnation from Brussels, New York or Washington; everyone is too busy, it seems, preparing for the supposed “season of peace and goodwill to men”. Censure of the Israeli acts may well have to wait until the cows come home (unless Israeli bombs get there first and kill them in the fields).

Meanwhile, Israel’s campaign is unfolding with such breath-taking speed that it is almost impossible to keep up. Today, 20 December, Israeli forces destroyed five shops in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. Further north, they ordered the residents of Khirbet Tana, a tiny Palestinian village to the east of Nablus, to evacuate their homes within 24 hours. Khirbet Tana is located just two kilometres from the illegal Israeli settlement of Mekhora, and this explains in part the ultimatum. The security and comfort of the illegal Jewish settlers must be guaranteed, by any means, regardless of international laws and conventions.

Threatening to demolish the homes of those impoverished villagers is bad enough, but threatening to confiscate their property, including their livestock, once the deadline has passed, is beyond contempt. Wasif Abu Sa’ud, a resident of Tana, said the army has threatened to confiscate their sheep and other animals if they miss the arbitrarily-imposed deadline; as if to rub salt into the wound, the owners will be forced to pay expenses incurred by the confiscation.

This torrent of bad news from Israel was not fabricated by a media-savvy Palestinian propaganda unit. A report issued yesterday by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs   Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) confirms that 47 homes were demolished in the occupied West Bank in the first two weeks of December 2010:

On the first of December, the Jerusalem Municipality destroyed buildings in the Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Issawiyah and Sheikh Jarrah.

On 14 December, the Municipality again carried out home demolitions in two locations of East Jerusalem. In Ras al Amoud (on the old Bethlehem road), they demolished a Palestinian house belonging to a family of seven people, including five children. Since 2007, the neighbourhood has been targeted, after the Mayor brazenly approved the construction of the Ma’ale Hazeitim settlement, built on Palestinian land.

In a second outrage, in Sur Baher, a neighbourhood in south-eastern Jerusalem and just north of the Har Homa settlement, the Municipality demolished a Palestinian house. It will be recalled that the Israeli government confiscated more than 2,000 dunums of Sur Baher lands to build the East Talpiot settlement in 1970 and nearly 900 dunums in 1997 for Har Homa settlement.

In Israel proper, the treatment of Palestinian citizens is equally horrific. In the city of Al-Lid, 50 children returned from school last week to find their mothers wailing amid the rubble of their homes. Even the palm trees in the yard were uprooted and flattened beside their shattered furniture.
These buildings were not destroyed by the bad weather sweeping the region at that time. The seven homes were demolished by contractors of the Israeli state acting under the order of its Supreme Court. Their guiding motive was the Judaization of Al-Lid, the same notorious call that is used in the Judaization of Jerusalem.

Some may argue that Israel is doing all of this to force a violent confrontation or reaction from the Palestinians so it can then “respond” in a ridiculously disproportionate manner, exact retribution and expel them, thus continuing the ethnic cleansing that the Zionists started in 1948 even before the state of Israel was invented. The fact is, though, that Israel doesn’t need such excuses for carrying out illegal acts; it faces no sanctions, no rebukes, nor censures. It is the “Democratic Jewish” state, and this alone qualifies it to treat international law with contempt and act with callous impunity.

Of course, if these crimes were to take place in any other part of the world, Europe included, they would be condemned as ethnic cleansing they constitute, and rightly so. They would be followed by punitive action, with or without the approval of the UN Security Council, to stop the perpetrators in their tracks. Those who pay lip-service to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people must now act and go beyond ineffectual statements of condemnation. No slickly-spoken words will bring shelter, comfort or warmth for the hundreds of children left homeless by Israel’s cruel and barbaric inhumanity.

If this ethnic cleansing is not enough to warn of worse to come, then the custodians of human rights and international law will have only themselves to blame for their inaction when that “worse” comes to pass. Warning signs of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans were writ large; the indications of genocide in Rwanda were even larger. Complacency combined with cowardice led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in those places. The situation in Palestine is even more obvious; there is not a politician in the West who is not aware of what is happening, despite the craven approach of many sections of the media in reporting the outrages. In a world when animals are not treated in this way, why do we allow Israel to treat Palestinians like this? Is their protection under human rights and humanitarian laws a mirage?

At the time of year when huge swathes of the world’s population remember the birth of Jesus in the little town of Bethlehem, let us remember that Palestinian Christians in that special place are suffering along with their Muslim neighbours. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Failure to act makes our governments complicit in that crime. Nobody can claim that we have not been warned.