Just solution in Mideast remains elusive

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Transcribed from the clipping

In January, the Israeli Knesset (congress) voted, in my opinion, to ethnically cleanse 40,000 Arab-Israeli citizens (Bedouins) living in unrecognized villages in the Negev, because Shimon Peres and others called for the Judaizing of this region which has been home to Beadoins for 1,000-plus years. How can such a policy be legal in a democracy?

Israeli citizens have few rights; however, Jewish nationals have rights others in democratic countries regard as basic human rights. In 1948, Israel created the first of its “absentee property laws,” which allowed it to seize land, property and bank accounts of Arabs absent for as little as one day (and they drove them off at gunpoint).

In 1965, the Israeli government passed the National Planning and Building Law. Arab-Israeli villages became unrecognized villages, which effectively made these communities illegal. Though the indigenous people of the region continued to live on their traditional lands, Israel rarely provided services and made it illegal for private agencies to do so.

As a consequence, residents in these villages were denied running water, electricity, sewage treatment facilities, schools and health centers. What is at the heart of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict is found in the basic laws of Israel. I believe they imprint within the hearts and minds of Israelis the DNA of racism.

If Israel were to establish a constitutional democracy where all are truly equal, a just solution would be found for its citizens as well as for Palestine, which has existed since the time of the Persian Empire in 500 BC.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, folio or printed date appears on this clipping — the trim begins at the headline of the letter. Nothing on it names the newspaper, so 2006-03-18 and pub “Telegram & Gazette” could not be checked.

The only internal time reference is “In January, the Israeli Knesset … voted”, which is consistent with a 2006 letter but fixes nothing.

Cite this clipping

"Just solution in Mideast remains elusive," Telegram & Gazette, 18 March 2006. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2006-030. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2006-030