The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli
parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the land from which they had
been expelled as Israel was established.
The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law
was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the
new state's borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could
ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created
through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the
infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its
existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum
seekers.
As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has
criminalised these new refugees - in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or
economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for
three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who
offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.
Israel's intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees
behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.
To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous
detention camp, operated by Israel's prison service, to contain 10,000 of these
unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind
in the world - according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger
than the next largest, in the much more populous state of Texas.
Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its
moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish
people's own experiences of suffering and oppression.
But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators
who backed the law - like their predecessors in the 1950s - have drawn a very
different conclusion from history.
The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies
fortifying Israel's status as the world's first "bunker state"- and one designed
to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by
an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, who called Israel "a villa in the
jungle", relegating the country's neighbours to the status of wild animals.
Mr Barak and his successors have been
turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state
from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US
taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside
influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian
state, need ever be made with the "beasts" around them.
The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy
of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian
territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending
to annex - or, at least, not yet.
The northern border is already one of the most heavily
militarised in the world - as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost
last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed
the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along
the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.
The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently
being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last
year's Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of
Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it
is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence
systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named "Iron
Dome", as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception
systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range
missile attacks Israel's neighbours might launch.
But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is
apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the
very "animals" the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees,
but also 1.5 million "Israeli Arabs", descendants of the small number of
Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.
This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of
anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly
turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership's
new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel's Jewishness; its
obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.
In the face of the legislative assault, Israel's Supreme Court
has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding
a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians
with Israeli citizenship the right to live with a Palestinian spouse in Israel -
"ethnic cleansing" by other means, as a leading Israeli commentator noted.
Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of
unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from
them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews
out of its precious villa.
The bunker state is almost finished. The question is whether,
from the outset, that was the true goal of Israel's founders.
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