Arrest of
Palestinian leaders in Israel 'a dangerous development'
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
14 May 2010
The recent arrest of two respected public figures from Israel's
Palestinian Arab minority in nighttime raids on their homes by the Shin Bet
secret police -- brought to light this week when a gag order was partially
lifted -- has sent shock waves through the community.
The arrests are not the first of their kind. The Shin Bet has
been hounding and imprisoning politicians and intellectuals from the country's
Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, since the birth of the Jewish
state more than six decades ago. Currently, two MPs from Arab political parties,
as well as the leader of the popular Islamic Movement, are facing trials.
But the detention of Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said is seen
differently -- as the gathering storm clouds in a political climate already
fiercely hostile to its Palestinian citizens.
Mohammed Zeidan, the head of the Human Rights Association in
Nazareth, said: "We are used to our political leaders being persecuted but now
the Shin Bet is turning its sights on the leaders of Palestinian civil society
in Israel, and that's a dangerous development."
Makhoul and Said are not accused of the
usual public order offenses, nor have they simply violated chauvinistic
legislation that criminalizes Palestinian citizens' visits to neighboring Arab
states. Both are facing the much more serious charge of espionage, on behalf of
Lebanon's Hizballah.
Makhoul, who appears to be the chief object
of the Shin Bet's interest, is the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization
coordinating the activities of Palestinian human rights groups in Israel. More
specifically, he has become the leading voice inside Israel backing the growing
international campaign for boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel.
On Wednesday, the courts approved an extension of Makhoul's
remand. He was not allowed to be present and was denied the right to a lawyer
until at least next Monday, 12 days since his arrest. He is reportedly being
interrogated around the clock.
Said, an activist with the Tajamu political party and a scientist
who specializes in developing new medicines from Middle Eastern plants, has been
held by the Shin Bet since 24 April.
Amnesty International has threatened to declare Makhoul a
"prisoner of conscience," saying his arrest "smacks of pure harassment, designed
to hinder his human rights work."
Observers from the Palestinian minority too have ridiculed the
allegations, based on secret evidence, that the pair made "contact with a
foreign agent." They point out that under the draconian emergency regulations
being used in this case the Shin Bet needs only the flimsiest circumstantial
evidence to lay such a charge.
Zeidan called it an easy, "one size fits
all" security offense that was difficult to challenge but persuasive to the
Jewish majority. "You only need unwittingly to meet at a conference a relative
of a relative of someone in Hizballah and the Shin Bet thinks it has grounds to
arrest you."
The Palestinian minority is not alone in believing that Makhoul
and Said have not spied in the accepted sense of passing classified or sensitive
information to an enemy: Israel's military correspondents have been largely
dismissive of the espionage charges too. In the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos
Harel and Avi Issacharoff pointed out that neither Palestinian citizen is privy
to secrets that would interest Hizballah.
Instead, the correspondents hinted at other motives behind the
arrests. Any contacts between Israel's enemies such as Hizballah and Palestinian
rights activists in Israel are a threat, they surmise, because Palestinian
leaders in Israel might offer assistance in "coordinating political positions"
or initiate "protests and riots during sensitive periods." That radically
expands the traditional definition of "espionage."
The Shin Bet's pursuit of Makhoul and Said, in the view of
community leaders, needs to be understood in terms of a fixed assumption by the
Israeli establishment that the Arab minority poses a political threat to the
continued survival of a Jewish state.
The roots of this worldview can be traced back to the signing of
the Oslo accords. With the launch of a peace process with the Palestinians,
Israeli politicians began to reconsider the status of the large Palestinian
minority. Many believed that allowing a significant population of Palestinians
to remain inside Israel as citizens after the creation of a neighboring
Palestinian state might one day prove to be the country's Achilles' heel.
Might not the Palestinian minority provide the Palestinians in
the occupied territories with a "foot in the door" to try to win back the whole
of historic Palestine rather than settle for a mini-state in the West Bank and
Gaza?
Those fears escalated dramatically when Oslo turned sour and the
second Palestinian intifada erupted in 2000. Israel believed the Palestinians
had refused its "generous" offer at Camp David in the hope that they could use
the Palestinian minority as a "Trojan horse" to destroy the Jewish state
demographically from within.
Ehud Barak, the prime minister at the time,
called the Palestinian minority the "spear point" of what he believed was
Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat's attempt to dismantle
Israel as a Jewish state. He feared that a political reform program demanding a
"state of all its citizens," which had become a rallying cry for Palestinian
citizens, was really intended to bring the return of millions of Palestinian
refugees under cover of an equal rights struggle.
Israel responded by making contact all but impossible between
Palestinians in Israel and those in the occupied territories, including by
building a wall around the West Bank and legislating an effective ban on
marriages across the Green Line boundary between Israel and the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Shin Bet's chief target prior to
the latest arrests was Azmi Bishara, the architect of the "state of all its
citizens" campaign. In 2007 Bishara was accused of spying for Hizballah too, and
has been in exile ever since.
At that time, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, warned that
he regarded it as his job to "thwart" any activities, including political ones,
that threatened Israel's survival as a Jewish state.
According to Zeidan and other analysts, the Shin Bet's hand in
the latest arrests appears to be guided by a similar assessment that the
Palestinian minority is again posing an "existential threat" to Israel -- even
if for different reasons.
Makhoul is seen as at the figurehead of an
emerging movement inside Israel that, faced with the refusal of Israelis to
countenance political reforms to democratize the country, is devising new
political strategies.
He has not hidden the extensive contacts he has developed both
among western Palestinian solidarity activists and in the Arab world, urging the
need for a boycott of Israel. He was also at the forefront of the protests
inside Israel against its attack on Gaza last year. He was called in for
interrogation by the Shin Bet at the time.
"The occupation isn't news anymore," Zeidan said. "The big
threats facing Israel, in the Shin Bet's view, are its deteriorating image in
terms of human rights and the growing sense abroad that it is an apartheid
state.
"Palestinian civil society in Israel, more so even than our
political parties, is best placed to make the case on those issues to the
international community, to expose the racism and discrimination inherent in a
Jewish state. Ameer Makhoul's arrest should be understood in that light.
"The Shin Bet believes we have crossed a red line in our
international advocacy."
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
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