JERUSALEM // Tzipi Livni, the woman leading the ruling Kadima
party into Israel’s forthcoming elections, stoked anger in the region last week
when she warned that a peace deal would put the future of the country’s 1.2
million Palestinian citizens inside Israel in doubt.
Speaking to a group of Jewish schoolchildren in Tel Aviv, she
said: “When the Palestinian state is created, I will be able to go to
Palestinian citizens, who we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them – you are
residents with equal rights, but your national solution is in another place.”
Late last year, before becoming head of Kadima, Ms Livni made
similar, though less noticed, comments. She declared that a Palestinian state in
Gaza and parts of the West Bank would be the “answer” to Israel’s Palestinian
citizens, who constitute nearly a fifth of the country’s population.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of parliament, demanded that Ms Livni
explain her intention: “She must decide whether she means to leave a million
Arabs without political rights or a national identity, or whether she really
intends to transfer a million Arab citizens to the Palestinian state that will
be established.”
Swiftly on Mr Tibi’s heels, the Lebanese militia Hizbollah issued
a statement that Ms Livni was giving voice to a plan “essentially based on
expelling an entire population from its land”.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Mahmoud
Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, also criticised her remarks saying
they “show that Israel is not serious about a solution or the negotiations with
the Palestinians”.
Later questioned, Ms Livni reiterated that Palestinian citizens’
“national aspirations should be realised elsewhere” but added: “There is no
question of carrying out a transfer or forcing them to leave.”
The clarification was needed because Ms Livni’s comments are the
latest in a series of speeches and legislative manoeuvres suggesting that a
future government may revoke the citizenship of its Palestinian population.
There is particular concern among the country’s Palestinian
minority because opinions similar to Ms Livni’s have been voiced previously by
the leaders of the two main political parties challenging Kadima in the
elections.
Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud party, which
enjoys a lead in the polls, has referred in the past to the Palestinian minority
as “a demographic threat” because its birth rates are far higher than those of
the Jewish population.
He has urged the development of policies to “guarantee a Jewish
majority”, and has also lauded child allowance cuts he introduced as finance
minister on the grounds that they appeared to have a “positive effect” in
reducing the number of babies born to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Similarly, Ehud Barak, leader of the supposedly left-wing Labor
party and a former prime minister, told an interviewer in 2002 that it was “not
inconceivable” that Palestinian citizens would have their citizenship revoked.
He added: “I don’t recommend that government spokesmen speak of it.”
The political consensus on this issue should not be surprising.
The debate among the Jewish majority about where the country’s 1.2 million
Palestinian citizens belong has intensified since the launch of the Oslo process
in the early 1990s.
Israeli politicians believe that by conceding a Palestinian state
they are entitled to expect the entrenchment of the country’s Jewishness.
The most important annual security gathering, known as the
Herzliya conference, attended by the leaders of all the main parties, has been
considering ways to deal with the Palestinian minority since 2000.
The discussions there suggest Palestinian citizens are likely to
face an uncomfortable choice: either commit to loyalty tests and have their
citizenship effectively downgraded to the status of temporary resident or move
to the Palestinian state.
The far-right has been calling openly for expulsion for decades.
The increasingly popular Yisrael Beiteinu party, however, has also introduced
the idea of land swaps with the Palestinian Authority in which the borders would
be changed to incorporate the settlers inside Israel while the homes of large
numbers of Palestinian citizens would be relocated behind the separation wall.
In private, Israeli governments have been pondering how such a
plan might be implemented over the opposition of the international community and
in violation of international law. An area known as the Little Triangle, hugging
the north-west corner of the West Bank and densely populated with 250,000
Palestinian citizens, is the chief target of the scheme.
Mr Barak tentatively proposed such a plan at the Camp David
negotiations, overseen by Bill Clinton, the former US president, in 2000. The
media also revealed that Mr Barak’s successor, Ariel Sharon, discussed a similar
idea with the then-leader of the Labor party, Shimon Peres, in 2004.
Surveys show Palestinian citizens are deeply opposed to land
swaps. They fear the precedent may later justify physical expulsions, or
“transfer” as Israelis popularly call it, and that the relative privileges of
their second-class citizenship will be lost if they join other Palestinians in
the ghettoes being promoted as a Palestinian state in current peace
negotiations.
In the meantime, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has been
busy drafting measures to further erode the minority’s rights.
The most significant – a form of loyalty legislation – gives the
state sweeping and secretive powers to revoke the citizenship of anyone
committing a “breach of trust” with the state, including by living in many Arab
or Muslim states, as well as in Gaza.
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