Israeli Forces Open Fire on Arab Citizens of Israel Protesting Land Confiscations Inside Israeli Borders

by Maureen Meehan, December 1998
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

A powerful event took place in late September in Umm al-Fahm, a Palestinian town inside Israel’s borders, that has many here wondering if a sleeping giant is beginning to open its eyes. Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship are once again reminded that in a state defined as a Jewish State, their position as a national minority is that of second-class citizens, discriminated against and oppressed violently when the need arises.

Three days of violent clashes took place in Umm al-Fahm, north of Tel Aviv, when Israeli police and soldiers broke up a peaceful protest held in a tent near the town. The protest was in response to an Israeli decree to expropriate 10,000 acres of land belonging to the area’s residents and turn them into a shooting range for the Israeli army.

Palestinians who live in villages in this area, known as al-Roha, are all too aware that such confiscations for “military use” usually end up as new Jewish towns or settlements.

“These massive land confiscations not only prevent our overcrowded villages from naturally expanding, but they are part of a larger plan to keep us off the land so Israel can eventually settle it and break up any territorial integrity that exists either here or anywhere else where Palestinians live inside Israel,” said Tawfiq Jabareen, an attorney from Umm al-Fahm who is a member of the Popular Committee for the Defense of the Lands of al-Roha.

Jabareen, who studied law at American University and interned at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told the Washington Report that the Israeli government has long-term designs on this and other Arab-owned land in Israel. He referred to the Israeli 2020 Plan that foresees the building of some 300,000 homes for Jews by the year 2020.

“The first step is to confiscate our land using all manner of laws, decrees, and ordinances which are blatantly discriminatory and which basically make it impossible to keep our land or to get anything back that was taken when the state was formed,” he explained.

“The government tells us we can grow vertically rather than horizontally. In other words, Palestinian ghettos with skyscrapers and no land,” he said, using Umm al-Fahm as an example. “We’re bursting at the seams with 36,000 people and the government refuses to allow us to build on the surrounding land—our land, which is now subject to confiscation.”

Large sectors of land in the al-Roha area had already been expropriated in 1948 for use by the military. In fact, by the early 1950s the state became owner of 92 percent of all land in Israel, a figure that has increased to 95 percent to include subsequent confiscations. Expropriation of Palestinian-owned land is carried out with the help of over 30 laws. All confiscated land is subject to the Israeli Basic Land Laws that ensure no state lands can be transferred either by sale or any other means.

Legal struggles to regain land are doomed by the complicated system of state ownership and private land held by the Jewish National Fund and Development Agency, who together own one-third of the land in Israel. Both agencies have close links with the Israeli government. The JNF is essentially a cover for the government against accusations of discriminatory and racist land policies in that the institution was set up expressly to settle “persons of the Jewish religion, race or origin,” according to its constitution.

Despite the earlier confiscation of land in al-Roha, army trainers and Palestinian farmers in the area managed to keep out of each other’s way over the years as the latter tended their crops and grazed their sheep and cattle and the former conducted military exercises.

That status quo came to an end, however, when the Israeli government issued a decree in May stating that Palestinian landowners would no longer be permitted to set foot on the land. The infamous Green Patrol, a mobile unit that functions under the Ministry of Agriculture to “protect state lands,” was sent in.

After several incidents of armed intimidation and confiscation of livestock by the Green Patrol, people of Umm al-Fahm and other villages set up a tent on the land and remained there around the clock for three weeks in protest. Without warning on Sept. 27, hundreds of Israeli police and cavalry charged the tent, tore it down and three days of fierce confrontations began.

Hundreds of people were injured in clashes as Israeli soldiers and police attacked with live ammunition, rubber- and plastic-coated bullets, tear gas and baton charges. During the three days of fighting Israeli ambulances were prevented by police from entering the town to evacuate the seriously injured, who were treated at a small clinic in Umm al-Fahm. The teachers’ lounge in the local high school was turned into a first aid center, although shortly afterward the school was raided by soldiers, who fired at students in the school yard as well as in the halls and through the windows.

“The whole school was full of tear gas as we were treating the wounded,” said M. Mohamad, the school principal. “The soldiers shot wildly at kids in the school yard. It was frightening chaos.” Two teenage boys, shot at close range in the school yard with rubber-coated bullets, have permanently lost their eyesight.

Dr. Suleiman Igbaria, deputy mayor of Umm al-Fahm, who was beaten and arrested for two days during the disturbances, admitted he was shocked at the ferocity of the attack by the Israeli armed forces.

“We see such things in the West Bank and Gaza where there is still occupation but here we’re in a so-called democratic state,” Igbaria said. “If there was ever any question about our identity and whether we’ve been ‘integrated’—well, the answer is very clear. We are 100 percent Palestinian and Israel treats us as such... like second- or third-class citizens.”

Igbaria said the struggle for the land will continue, although a three-month moratorium was agreed upon by both sides with the idea of working out an agreement. Under the terms of the moratorium, landowners can tend to their trees or graze their sheep but only with prior permission from the authorities. For the time being, the Green Patrols have left the area, but are never far away.

GREEN PATROLS—“ENVIRONMENTAL” PARAMILITARY

Set up in 1976 under the Ministry of Agriculture, the Green Patrols are less concerned with conserving nature than with “intimidating and harassing Palestinian and Bedouin farmers accused of stealing ‘state land,’” explained attorney Tawfiq Jabareen.

The Green Patrol operates in coordination with the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency. According to a report in the independent Israeli magazine News From Within, a quarter of its budget comes from the ministry of security, followed by several other ministries and agencies including the JNF.

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, fostered the Green Patrols during his term as agriculture minister in the late 1970s when he pursued a policy of evicting Bedouin from the Negev desert and implemented the “not one inch of land to Arabs” approach.

The Green Patrols are most active, at the moment, in the Negev desert, where for the past 500 years the Bedouin were almost exclusive inhabitants. Uri Okbi, Bedouin rights leader, says the Green Patrol has herded and harassed the Bedouin tribes, demolished their homes, sprayed their crops with anti-foliant chemicals (a strange act for a nature reserve ranger), and killed and confiscated their animals. In August, a young man riding in the rear of a small van was shot and killed for wandering into an army shooting range. The ranger who shot the man spent two hours in custody and was later released.

“The Green Patrol’s job is to remove us from our land, kill our animals and ultimately our way of life,” said Okbi. “They’re in charge of ethnically cleansing the Negev of all Bedouin.”

Original article at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs