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Israel's Palestinian Minority has Good Reason to Fear Trump's Plan

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Jonathan Cook
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According to figures published by Peace Now this week, some 380,000 Palestinians 260,000 in the Triangle and a further 120,000 in East Jerusalem would be "swapped out" to a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, some 330,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would need to be "swapped in" that is, brought under Israeli rule as part of the annexations.

The overall gain would be official US recognition for the first time of territory housing 650,000 Jewish settlers as part of Israel.

"The demographic rationale behind this isn't being hidden," said Jabareen. "Israel loses lots of Palestinian citizens and gains lots of territory seized by Jewish settlers."

Citizenship and loyalty

Schemes to transfer the Triangle have been floating around on the right for nearly two decades. It first came to prominence when a formal plan was published by Avigdor Lieberman, a settler who has served as defence and foreign minister under Netanyahu.

He has been keen to tie citizenship rights to "loyalty" to Israel as a Jewish state. In previous election campaigns, he has run under the slogan: "No loyalty, no citizenship."

Transferring the Triangle has been seen by the right as a prelude to much wider revocations of citizenship for Palestinians, according to Jabareen.

In recent years more politicians on the right, including Netanyahu, have been explicit that Palestinian citizens are necessarily disloyal to a Jewish state because they hold on to their Palestinian identity.

'Sword over our heads'

Such imputations of disloyalty were a mainstay of Netanyahu's two election campaigns last year. He accused Israel's Palestinian voters of wanting "to annihilate us all women, children and men".

He also sent his Likud party's monitors into polling stations in Palestinian communities in Israel wearing body cameras, implying that Palestinian voters were defrauding the Jewish majority.

Jabareen noted: "In the parliament, members of the ruling coalition openly incite against us. Bezalel Smotrich [a settler leader, and currently the transport minister] says it proudly: 'Accept your inferior status, or you will go to jail or be expelled.' For them, the Triangle plan is a sword hanging over our heads."

Palestinian identity

The assumption of disloyalty is implied in the wording of the Trump plan, which states that residents of the Triangle's communities "largely self-identify as Palestinian".

In fact, noted Atamni, the situation is far more complex. Surveys suggest that there is a complicated interplay between the minority's Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and various religious identities.

"Yes, our national identity is Palestinian, but that doesn't detract in any way from the fact that our civil identity is Israeli," he said. "When we struggle in Israel it is for our civil rights, to end the discrimination we face from the state and receive equality as citizens."

Nonetheless, the transfer proposal contained in Trump's so-called "deal of the century" is in line with recent legislative moves by Israel that sanction the downgrading of the status of Palestinian citizens.

The most significant is the Nation-State Law, passed in 2018. It confers constitution-like status on Israel's Jewishness, revokes Arabic as an official language, and makes a top priority of Judaisation a policy of settling Jews into Palestinian areas inside Israel and the occupied territories.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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