March
30, 2024
Jared
Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his
presidency, sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at
Harvard University. During this discussion on Feb. 15, Kushner talked about
“Gaza’s waterfront property,” which, he said, could be “very valuable.”
“If
I was Israel,” he continued, “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev
[desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and
finishing the job would be the right move.”
Kushner’s
choice of the Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is interesting. Al-Naqab, located
in what is now southern Israel, has long been a place of tension and conflict.
In
September 2011, the Israeli government passed the Bill on the Arrangement of
Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, also known as the Prawer-Begin Plan, which
called for the eviction of 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their 35
“unrecognised” villages.
Kushner
is now advising Israel to illegally shift even more Palestinians to al-Naqab,
many of whom were originally pushed to Gaza from cities in parts of Palestine
that are now within Israel. As Kushner might know, both a population transfer
to al-Naqab and the seizure of Gaza are illegal according to Article 49 of the
1949 Geneva Conventions.
The
displacement that faced Palestinian Bedouins in 2011 and that faces
Palestinians in Gaza today is reflective of the plight that has been inflicted
upon Palestinians since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.
Every
year since 1976, Palestinians around the world have commemorated Land Day on
March 30, marking the killing of six Palestinians during a mass action to fight
an attempt by the Israeli state to eliminate Palestinians from the Galilee
region and carry out Yihud Ha-Galil (the Judaisation of the Galilee).
The
Israeli regime has tried to annex all of the Galilee and al-Naqab since 1948
but faced fierce resistance from Palestinians, including Palestinian Bedouins.
Israel’s violence has failed to intimidate and cleanse the region for the
establishment of Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema) from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has not been able to attain its aims. It
cannot eliminate either the Palestinians or the Bedouin. Its dream of a pure
Zionist state is futile.
On
9 December 1975, the Palestinian population of Nazareth elected Tawfiq Zayyad
of the Communist Party (Rakah) with 67 percent
of the vote. Zayyad (1929–1994), a well-regarded poet, was known as “The
Trustworthy One” (Abu el-Amin) for his ceaseless role in forging a united front
amongst Galilee Palestinians against the Israeli policy of forced evictions.
For
these activities, Zayyad was arrested on numerous occasions, but he never
wavered. Zayyad joined the Communist Party in 1948, became the head of the Arab
Workers’ Trade Union Congress of Nazareth in 1952, led the party in his
hometown of Nazareth, won a seat in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in 1973,
and then became the mayor of his city in 1976 as the candidate for the
Democratic Front for Peace and Equality.
His
victory, which surprised the Israeli establishment, was hailed by the
Palestinians of Galilee, who had been fighting against the attempts to steal
their land and homes since 1948.
In
1975, the Israeli authorities announced that they would expropriate 20,000
dunums (18 million square metres) of Arab land, mostly in central Galilee or
“Area 9,” which meant the extinction of the villages of Arraba, Deir Hanna, and
Sakhnin. These were not new plans.
Beginning
in 1956, Israel created cities to displace Arab villages around Nazareth such
as al-Bi’neh, Deir al-Asad, and Nahef: first, it created Natzeret Illit (known
as Nof Hagalil since 2019), and then, in 1964, it created Karmiel.
When
I visited Nazareth in 2014, I was taken for a walk around the city’s perimeter
to experience how the new Jewish-only settlements were designed to throttle the
old Palestinian city. Haneen Zoabi, then a member of the Palestinian party
Knesset for Balad, told me about how Nazareth, where she was born, has, like
the West Bank, been gradually squeezed by illegal settlements, the apartheid
wall, checkpoints and regular attacks by the Israeli military.
Before
the general strike could get going on 30 March 1976, the Israeli regime sent in
a full contingent of armed military and police to ruthlessly beat unarmed
Palestinians, injuring hundreds and killing six.
Tawfiq
Zayyad, who led the strike, wrote that it was “a turning point in the
struggle,” since it “caused an earthquake that shook the state from end to
end.” The Israeli regime planned to “teach the Arabs a lesson,” Zayyad wrote,
but that “caused a reaction far greater in its effect than the strike itself.
This was demonstrated at the funerals of the martyrs who fell in the strike,
which were attended by tens of thousands of people.”
That
day became Land Day, which is now part of the calendar of the struggle for
Palestinian national self-determination.
The
Israeli regime was undeterred by public outcry. On Sept. 7, 1976, the Hebrew
newspaper al-Hamishmar published a memorandum written by Yisrael Koenig, who
had administered the North District, including Nazareth.
Koenig’s
thoroughly racist memorandum called for Palestinian land to be annexed on
behalf of 58 new Jewish settlements and for Palestinians to be made to work
through the day so that they would have no time to think.
Israel’s
prime minister at that time, Yitzhak Rabin, did not repudiate the memorandum,
which also detailed plans for the Judaisation of the Galilee. The plans never
ceased.
In
2005, the Israeli government decided that the deputy prime minister would
administer the Galilee and al-Naqab. Shimon Peres, who held that post, said
then that
“[t]he development of the Naqab and
the Galilee is the most important Zionist project of the coming years.”
The
government set aside $450 million to transform these two regions into Jewish
majority areas and expel Palestinians, including the Palestinian Bedouin, from
them. That remains the plan.
Jared
Kushner’s statements are easy to dismiss as a fantasy since they contain a
measure of ridiculousness. However, to do so would be misguided: Kushner was
the architect of Trump’s Abraham Accords, which led to the normalisation of
Israeli relations with Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
He
also has a close relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
(who used to stay in Kushner’s childhood bedroom in Livingston, New Jersey).
Al-Naqab
is a hot desert, a place that remains sparsely populated even after the
expulsion of many of the Palestinian Bedouin. But Gaza has possibilities as a
seaside resort and as a base for Israel’s exploitation of natural gas reserves
in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
This
accounts for the sustained attention it has received within the Zionist agenda,
represented in Kushner’s blunt statement. But, if history is any judge, it is
unlikely that the Palestinians will move from Gaza to al-Naqab or even the
Sinai desert. They will fight. They will remain.
In
September 1965, after he returned to Palestine from Moscow, Tawfiq Zayyad wrote
the poem “Here We Will Remain.” It was published the next year in Haifa by
al-Ittihad Press alongside his classic “I Shake Your Hand,” which was put to
music by the Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam and memorised by Palestinian children
across the world (“my hand was bleeding, and yet I did not give up”).
The
events of 1976 strengthened Zayyad’s popularity in Nazareth, where he remained
the mayor till his death in 1994. Tragically, he was killed in a car crash as
he returned from the West Bank, where he had gone to welcome Yasser Arafat to
Palestine after the Oslo Accords.
Thinking
of Land Day, and thinking of Gaza, here is Comrade Zayyad’s “Here We Will
Remain”:
In
Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
We
shall remain,
Like
a wall upon your chest,
And
in your throat
Like
a shard of glass,
A
cactus thorn,
And
in your eyes
A
sandstorm.
We
shall remain,
A
wall upon your chest,
Clean
dishes in your restaurants,
Serve
drinks in your bars,
Sweep
the floors of your kitchens
To
snatch a bite for our children
From
your blue fangs.
Here
we shall remain,
Sing
our songs.
Take
to the angry streets,
Fill
prisons with dignity.
In
Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
We
shall remain,
Guard
the shade of the fig
And
olive trees,
Ferment
rebellion in our children
As
yeast in the dough.
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