Uprooted and expelled in the name of Jewish supremacy
Without an appreciation of this attitude toward the Palestinians as transient people, it would be absolutely impossible to understand the Zionist project. A combination of superiority of the most violent strain that sees them as human dust, game dice that can be moved from place to place according to the interests of the Zionist demographic engineering project, but also of a deep fear of the deep, deep-rooted connection of the Palestinians to the land
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
If there is a story that encapsulates the entire concept of Jewish supremacy in Israel, it is the story of the Umm Al Hiran. This morning the authorities demolished the mosque’s building there, thereby completing the obliteration of the Palestinian village.
This community was placed in its current location by the state itself, after taking over their lands in the area of Kibbutz Shoval. On some occasion, they even helped defend the border with Jordan. Now the state has decided that it wants to build a Jewish settlement, Khiran (there is something mean-spirited in the choice of such a similar name), and kick the Bedouins out of there. The Negev/Naqab is empty, but they insist on building a Jewish community on the ruins of this village. And the High Court gave the project its stamp of approval. Why? Because this is state land and the state is allowed to do whatever it wants with it.
The residents of Umm Al Hiran offered the state various proposals, such as allocating them a neighbourhood in the new community, or that they could build a new village nearby, but no, it was rejected. The state will not settle for anything less than obliteration.
It is interesting to look at the story of Umm Al Hiran also in the context of the Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Givat Amal. Two communities — Mizrahi Jewish and Palestinian Arab — that the state sees as transient people, whose rights to the place where the state itself has places them have never been regularised and formalised, who can be moved from place to place, in the name of Jewish supremacy or that of greed.
I am in the midst of reading A Man in My Image, the third part of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, translated by Yehouda Shenhav-Sharabani. This is how he describes the march of the deportees from Lyd [Lod/Lydda] in July ’48: “The July sun hit us mercilessly, and we walked down a rocky road. The soldiers blocked all the asphalt roads leading out of the city with stones and furniture which they removed from the houses. The thousands of children who wandered in the convoy from Al Lyd were reborn, but in shrouds […] they slept on the ground. It was hard and dry… Those who are thirsty cannot fall asleep. I was afraid of insects, wild animals and the Jews.”
Without an appreciation of this attitude toward the Palestinians as transient people, it would be absolutely impossible to understand the Zionist project. A combination of superiority of the most violent strain that sees them as human dust, game dice that can be moved from place to place according to the interests of the Zionist demographic engineering project, but also of a deep fear of the deep, deep-rooted connection of the Palestinians to the land. It’s some sort of psychotic delusion that if they are uprooted enough and get tossed from place to place on death marches that are happening now in Gaza, in mass ethnic expulsions that are happening in the West Bank, or in the endless obliteration of their communities and expulsion as is happening in Umm Al Hiran, they will eventually give up and leave. Decades of expulsion, carnage and destruction, and Zionism still refuses to understand.
