Labs of Oppression, Part Three: Palestinians as an “obstacle”
In Part Three of the in-depth article from the Intercept on Israel’s decades-long campaign to rid the land of Palestinians, read about the current situation under Israel’s extremist government, and Israel’s ruthless efforts to evict Palestinian Bedouin inside Israel from their historic land and lifestyle. (Read Parts One and Two here and here; watch for Part Four.)
While apartheid policies encompass a range of institutionalized discrimination practices — from restrictions on residency for non-Jews to the recent introduction of legislation that would seek the death penalty for Palestinians only — the element of racial domination that is intrinsic to the concept is particularly evident in Israeli land policies.
“They want maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” said Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans opposed to the occupation. “They don’t want to annex tens of thousands of Palestinians because eventually they’ll have to give them citizenship.”
In many ways Masafer Yatta is a microcosm where the dynamics playing out across the entire West Bank are magnified by the designation of the firing zone. Daily harassment of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion, and settler violence have been growing steadily throughout the occupied territory for years. So has the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — which last year reached the highest toll since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
“Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School who has researched legal policies pertaining to land in Israel and the West Bank, noted that the Israeli state has perfected the use of the law as an instrument to control Palestinians, shrouding its actions in a façade of legitimacy. Dispossession is often disguised as a bureaucratic matter of enforcing the law, with Israeli officials declaring homes illegal and subjecting them to demotion orders, designating land as restricted, and issuing eviction orders. “There is definitely this culture of hyper legalization and performative law,” Eghbariah told me, pointing for instance to a legal distinction Israel draws between settlements and outposts — even as it mostly treats both equally, and even as both are illegal under international law. “The whole distinction between outposts and supposedly legal settlements is absurd. But it’s part of the legitimizing force of the law to try to use this façade of rule of
law, of supposedly a democratic state, that practices so-called measured violence, and that has checks and balances in place. The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”” See also See also She was walking toward her family’s land. A soldier broke her ankle.