Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The year 2014 marks the 66th commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba. The Nakba encapsulates events which have took place from 1947 to the early 1950s by which approximately 750,000 Palestinians have become refugees. At the beginning of the 20th century, most Palestinians lived inside the borders of Palestine, now divided into the state of Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territory (The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip). Five major periods or episodes of forcible displacement transformed Palestinians into the largest and longest-standing unresolved refugee case in the world today. By the end of 2013, an estimated 7.4 million (66 percent) of the global Palestinian population of 11.2 million are forcibly displaced persons , PNN Reported .
Israel’s overall regime aims to colonize the territory of Palestine (also known as ‘historic’ or ‘Mandate Palestine’). It is not limited to the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), but it is also targeting Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the “1949 Armistice Line”. Israel’s treatment of non-Jewish Palestinians throughout Israel and the oPt constitutes an overall discriminatory regime with the primary purpose of controlling the maximum amount of land with the minimum amount of indigenous Palestinians residing on it. The main components of this structure serve to violate Palestinian rights in areas such as nationality, citizenship, residency, and land ownership.
Israeli laws such as the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law and military orders 1649 and 1650 have prohibited Palestinians from legally returning to Israel or the oPt. This deliberate and planned forcible displacement amounts to a policy and practice of forced transfer of the Palestinian population, or ethnic cleansing. This process started prior to 1948, and is still ongoing today in all parts of Mandate Palestine. Forced population transfer is considered one of the gravest breaches of international law. According to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the former Commission on Human Rights:
The essence of population transfer remains a systematic coercive and deliberate […] movement of population into or out of an area […] with the effect or purpose of altering the demographic composition of a territory, particularly when that ideology or policy asserts the dominance of a certain group over another.
In order to achieve the forcible transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population beyond the boundaries of Mandate Palestine, many Israeli laws, policies and state practices, as well as specific actions of para-state and other private actors have been developed and applied. Nine major policies of forced population transfer are identifiable:
- Denial of residency
- Installment of a permit regime
- Land confiscation and denial of use
- Discriminatory zoning and planning
- Segregation
- Denial of natural resources and access to services
- Denial of refugee return
- Suppression of resistance
- Non-state actions (with the implicit consent of the Israeli state)
All these policies aim at forcibly displacing Palestinians by creating an overall untenable living situation which leaves no other choice for the inhabitants other than to leave their homes. The term forcible displacement:
... is not restricted to physical force, but may include threat of force or coercion, such as that caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power against such person or persons or another person, or by taking advantage of a coercive environment.
Silent Forcible Transfer
This transfer is carried out today by Israel in the form of the overall policy of 'silent' transfer, and not by the mass deportations witnessed in 1948 or 1967. This displacement is silent in the sense that Israel carries it out while trying to avoid international attention, displacing small numbers of people on a weekly basis. It is to be distinguished from the more overt transfer achieved under the veneer of warfare in 1948. For instance, over the years Israel imposed increasingly restrictive procedures for the registration of children of couples where one or both spouses are Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The legal framework governing child registration is Section 12 of the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Regulations, and lacks any real clarity on issues relating to Palestinians.
Israeli statistics on the processing of applications for child registration have been consistently scarce, vague and/or contradictory. This dearth of statistics is deliberate, designed to obscure the degree to which the impact of Israeli policy on family unification, consequently on child registration, has been disproportionate and irrelevant to the reasons Israel officially invokes to justify it. Nonetheless, to data of Physicians for Human Rights, there exist now some 10,000 children who are not registered with the Ministry of Interior.The psychological impact of this Israeli policy is vast.
Those individuals affected are deprived of one of the most fundamental tenets of human existence; that of an identity. Other than a birth certificate, they have no other form of identification and as a result are denied the ability to travel, to obtain high school diplomas (and by extension, higher education) or to access social benefits. Parents must therefore make the impossible decision between remaining as a family in Jerusalem and in doing so, subject their children to the hardships associated with having no identification, breaking up the family unit, or relocating as a family from East Jerusalem to another domicile. Review of the historical background and contemporary reality surrounding child registration paints a picture of ever-tightening restrictions on the ability of Palestinians to enjoy the most basic of human rights, that of a family life. Israel’s child registration policy can be seen as a blatant attempt to reduce the Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory in order to secure a Jewish demographic majority. As such, Israel is turning child registration into a tool for forced population transfer.
Israel’s continuous and calculated strangulation of the Palestinian people must be properly challenged by the international community, and this challenge must come from an assessment of Israeli actions and policy through the lens of international law. The facts on the ground demonstrate that such an assessment will reveal elements of an international crime against humanity and Israel's regime must be judged accordingly, with the state’s impunity for these crimes brought to an end. Yet, the silence - if not complicity - of powerful members of the international community in relation to these crimes continues. The resulting reality represents a worst case scenario: the intense and prolonged suffering of a colonized and occupied population, witnessed in conjunction with an emphatic politicisation and devaluing of international law.
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