12/04/13 – Nadia Ben-Youssef – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our guest on the show today is Nadia Ben-Yosef.
She's a human rights lawyer and international advocate working to promote the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Palestinians living under the occupation.
She is the international advocacy coordinator for Adala, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Nadia?
Thanks so much, Scott, for having me.
Doing well.
Very good to hear that.
And thank you very much for joining us.
So tell me, when is the brutal Bedouin occupation of Israel ever going to end there?
Oh my goodness.
I'm sorry.
I'm just playing.
Poor little Israel, besieged on all sides.
In this case, some Bedouin villagers.
What's a Bedouin?
Where are they living?
What's the prower plan here?
Okay, so the Bedouin community have been living in the Negev, or the Nakab in Arabic, which is in southern Israel, the Negev Desert.
About 60% of the land of Israel.
They've been living there since the 7th century.
And the Bedouin, Bedouin derives from the Arabic word, which is desert.
And so Bedouin means people who live in the desert.
So they're really history's first desert farmers.
So they're a rural community that, again, have been living in this area since the 7th century.
And since 1948, so since the establishment of the state of Israel, the Bedouin have been facing a policy from Israel of forced displacement.
And confiscation of their land, and forcibly concentrating them into smaller areas, and especially into urban settings.
So this, again, is a traditionally rural community.
Pastoral, so they're shepherds and farmers.
And the government policy of Israel since the establishment of the state since 1948 has been to confiscate their land and to displace this community into urban settings.
So the Prover Plan is really just the latest iteration of government policy towards the Bedouin.
And again, the Bedouin are citizens of Israel, which I think is a really important point to consider.
But since the 1952 Citizenship Law, the Bedouin have been citizens, full citizens of Israel.
And so the Prover Plan is a forcible displacement of really the most vulnerable community in Israel.
Well, and that is an extremely important point.
And we're not talking about occupied Palestinians in the West Bank, or the Gaza Strip, or in East Jerusalem here.
That these are citizens of Israel.
And it really brings up the question of the form of the Jim Crow laws.
It's actually not often discussed, of course.
But we hear from time to time that non-Jewish citizens of Israel are treated as second-class citizens.
Although usually it sounds like it's just sort of de facto.
That the law would say that you couldn't do this to a village full of Bedouins any more than you could do this to a village full of Jews in Israel.
But is that actually the case?
Is it legal that, oh, well, you know, if you go back to the 7th century, then you're an illegal immigrant here.
You gotta go, or what?
That's a great question, Scott, and I think you're hitting exactly the issue.
So the Prover Plan is being implemented by what's known as the Proverb-Begin Bill.
And this is what the community is really fighting against right now at the present moment.
And that your listeners should kind of be aware of is the Proverb-Begin Bill is exactly that.
It's the legitimization and the legalization of this policy of forced displacement.
And it joins a wave of discriminatory legislation that we've seen that directly targets Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Either explicitly by name, like the Proverb-Begin Bill, which applies only to Bedouin citizens of Israel.
Or implicitly.
So, yeah, I mean, what's amazing about this, and you're also bringing up the issues of displacement in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza as well.
And I think that's relevant.
I think thinking about this as an overall strategy of Israel to displace Palestinians wherever they are is really important.
But the Proverb-Begin Bill, yes, explicitly targets the rights of Bedouin citizens of Israel.
And in fact, suspends any constitutional protections that they may have.
So the right to property or the right to human dignity, according to Israel's basic laws.
Or human rights protections, of course.
The right to adequate housing.
And the right to self-discrimination.
The right to non-discrimination.
So it suspends those rights in favor of an administrative regime.
Which, again, is really interesting.
So it allows for a very speedy execution of the demolition and eviction orders that forcibly displaces community in a very short amount of time.
And now, how many people are we talking about again?
We're talking directly targeted by the Proverb-Begin Bill are the 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel that live in what are called unrecognized villages.
And these are 35 villages that either predate the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 or were created by military order in the 1950s.
And going back to your idea, is this legal?
In fact, according to Israeli—basically, the Israeli government has cloaked this with a very thin veneer of legality.
So, in fact, the displacements are quote-unquote legal in that after the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel confiscated Palestinian-owned land through various legal measures.
So you first had the Absentee Property Law in 1950.
And then in 1953, the Land Acquisition Law, which legalized the confiscation of the majority of Palestinian-owned land in Israel.
And overnight, the land of the Negev, where the Bedouin lived, became state land.
And the Bedouin, therefore, became trespassers on state land.
So their homes, their villages became illegal.
And so their buildings—illegal, they became trespassers in the eyes of the state.
So the demolition and displacement of their homes, according to Israel, is just an upholding of the law, which is ironic.
I mean, this is coming from a human rights lawyer who's looking at this and saying, okay, what are the protections if, in fact, the displacement and the violations of human rights of these people is considered legal, quote-unquote.
Yeah, it sounds like it's almost a miracle that they're still there in 2013.
Well, I think that's—yeah, you're absolutely right.
And there have been concerted efforts by Israel to displace this community forcibly or by— and this is what's happening in the unrecognized villages—the withholding of basic services.
So they deny—again, citizens of Israel, these Bedouin citizens of Israel are denied access to water, electricity, sewage, roads, schools, health clinics, in an effort to pressure the community to abandon their ancestral land and move into these government-planned townships, of which there are seven.
And I think that resonates really a lot with American audiences, the idea of taking a traditional indigenous rural community away from their ancestral land and forcing them to be urbanized with dramatic and really detrimental impact on the community.
Well, of course, as most recently highlighted by Nick Turse in his book Kill Anything That Moves, this was the policy in Vietnam.
That whole war was waged against not so much the North Vietnamese army as it was against the population of South Vietnam to round them up basically like communists, round them up and put them on giant collectively-owned properties where, of course, they all had nothing.
Yeah, I mean, this is—yeah, it's interesting.
It's interesting.
It's taking—although this is more—the indigenous community has a traditional land ownership scheme that's much more community-based than it is individual-based.
Right, which is still a lot different than being rounded up and put in a prison together and being told, this is your new collective property, you know?
Right, although, yeah.
Which sounds like this is a lot more like, you know, being put in a prison— sort of like the Ethiopian crisis of the 1980s.
That was all basically a government-manufactured crisis.
They took the last arable farmland away from the people farming it.
Right, it also reminds me—this is as an American born and raised in eastern Montana— really reminds me of the policy of forced displacement of the American Indian population in the United States.
And you're finding a lot of really interesting parallels with regard to President Andrew Jackson's support of the Indian Removal Act in the 1860s.
And you're seeing that same sort of discourse coming from Israel that this is a benefit to the community, that this is being done out of benevolent generosity from the state, trying to bring the Bedouin community into the 21st century.
So a lot of paternalistic and patronizing language is being used when the Bedouins are being really disenfranchised from determining their own future.
Right.
And, of course, all this in the context of, there was no Nakba.
This is a land without people for a people without land.
And, by the way, it continues to this day.
Right, I mean, that's kind of the—you're hearing from the Bedouin community and representatives who are calling the proper plan the second Nakba.
Though you've also heard a lot of academics and civil society who are talking, as you said, about an ongoing Nakba.
So a policy of forced displacement that began even before 1948 and is continuing today.
And now, it's something that occurs to me that, you know, public relations is such a big part of Israeli policy in the United States.
And, you know, they have their own special word for it, of course, Hasbara, and all of that.
And it reminds me of—when I read about this, it reminds me of— I'm trying to remember who did the interview.
This may have been from the Penn and Teller show on Showtime or something where they talked to Frank Luntz.
And one of his things—no, it was something else.
Anyway, it was one of his things.
It was advice to the pro-Israel lobby in America of how to spin Israeli policies, especially in the occupied territories and in East Jerusalem.
But it could apply here as well, where apparently it had been part of their campaign to tell the Americans that, hey, listen, these Palestinians are in violation of the zoning codes.
And so they're against the law.
And that's why we have to do this.
And Frank Luntz had tested that in front of his focus groups.
And Americans hate zoning laws.
And that made Americans turn against Israel more than anything else they'd ever heard.
What do you mean you're zoning these people out of their houses?
And so he said, oh, no, don't ever say zoning again.
That's the wrong word to use.
But it just goes to show the reality of the situation here where if the American people ever had the truth spoken to them, frankly, about the occupation and about ethnic cleansing situations like what's happening in the Negev Desert right now to these Bedouins, the support would end.
That's why it's all a bunch of spin at best and blatant dishonesty at worst.
Yeah, I think this is why your show and others like it are very important, the idea that no one...
We should do our best to inform the American public.
And I think you're right to have a lot of optimism with regard to if the American public knew what was happening.
And especially with the blatant discrimination that's happening, I think they would be very troubled.
And I think there just needs to be, as you said, a more honest conversation about what's happening in Israel both to, again, citizens of Israel as well as what's happening, of course, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
And, you know, honestly, and for the audience, I'm probably repeating myself, though it's been less than a while anyway, I'm basically kind of pleading guilty myself.
And at the same time, I'm accusing my fellow Americans of knowing nothing about this.
I'm referring back to a younger me who defaulted to things like, well, you know, they're all fighting over God gave us this land and God gave that this land and whatever and so you can never solve that kind of problem and so I don't really need to know that much more about it.
And the point being, I didn't even understand that there was a permanent occupation.
It wasn't just...
And never mind, of course, the second-class citizenship of the Arab Israelis but the Israeli citizens, but the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I just didn't know anything about it.
I guess the territory next door and these terrorists just keep attacking Israel.
And it's not that I had really strong feelings about it either way.
Again, I was pretty dismissive of the whole thing that nobody's right.
They're all claiming magical property rights going back thousands of years.
How could any rational beings ever solve that?
But it turns out that just TV was lying to me by omission in such an important way that I actually did not understand that there was an occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And I think that when I...
And I'm talking about 14 or 15-year-old me or maybe a little older than that but I think that basically is the point of view of most Americans.
That they don't even understand what the occupation is to know that, hey, that isn't right.
Absolutely.
I think that's exactly it.
And in fact, when I...thinking about the occupation, thinking about the situation in Israel and the OPP, felt, as you said, very grazed that this seemed like an intractable conflict, quote-unquote, what's happening here and who's going to be able to solve it.
And I think studying it, even just a bit, the situation becomes much more black and white.
Which is really interesting because it does seem like something impossible to understand and yet it becomes very clear one, the asymmetry of power that exists and where the responsibility lies and who the duty-bearer is and just as it is for citizens of Israel as those living under occupation, Israel, the government of Israel is the duty-bearer that needs to protect the rights of Palestinians.
Yeah, I mean, you'd think people would get hip to the idea of a talk about well, there maybe one day will be a Palestinian state.
Well, that kind of implies that there isn't one now.
They do not have independence.
They're occupied by a foreign power now longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe.
You're right.
It's a prolonged occupation.
Exactly.
And by the way, well, are the peace talks even going at all anymore?
I guess the negotiators all quit except Abbas.
Is he even still talking in Netanyahu at this point or what's going on with that?
Anything?
To be honest, I'm not deeply following the negotiations and I think that might be the case for many people that many are very disillusioned by the quote-unquote process and what the process has indeed meant for the last 20 years starting from the Oslo Accords.
The idea of negotiations is met with a lot of skepticism because, in fact, the issue is that the underlying root cause of the problem, both the prover plan the prolonged occupation is not really being addressed and needs to be addressed in order for kind of the daily emergencies to stop and then also for a just a just solution.
Well, and I guess the process really, even Chomsky has pointed out numerous times that this whole thing is just about establishing facts on the ground meaning more settlements, more settlements more settlements, a bigger and bigger security zone in Area C and whatever until there's just no use in even talking about a Palestinian state anymore that the whole West Bank at that point would just be outright annexed at some point would be outright annexed they would go from de facto to de jure with just a stroke of a pen rather than any further change of facts, right?
They'll just put off calling it that until the very last day, but then at that point if they outright annex the West Bank then they can no longer be Jewish and Democratic because right now it's what, an 80-20 split in favor of Jews in the electorate inside Israel, but it would be much closer to 50-50 anyway if they just outright annex the West Bank, right?
Right, I mean I think this gets also to the main issue about how demography demographics plays a role in democracy and whether it should the idea that a democracy can only be sustained so long as a demography is sustained is incredibly problematic and really undermines the principles of democracy generally to view the Palestinian community inside Israel as a demographic threat to the democracy of the state or the perceived democracy of the state goes to show how fragile that idea is and this tension between a Jewish and Democratic state really needs to be addressed in both scenarios the idea of second class citizenship would be entrenched if that indeed was the case the human rights community really challenges this definition of the state which Israel is putting forward more and more intensely, in fact it has a basic law, so this is again a law of higher status, Israel doesn't have a constitution, but if it did these basic laws would take place and a basic law is being proposed by the coalition government, I mean, and this is the governing power now in Israel that says if there is a contradiction between the Jewish nature of the state and the Democratic nature of the state, the Jewish values and the Jewish nature would take precedence which I think is pretty extraordinary so it's, and there have been polls inside Israel, Jewish adults being asked, would you rather live in a Jewish state or in a Democratic state and the overwhelming 67% said a Jewish state and so we're really challenging and the proverb plan challenges that, it says if this wasn't equal in Democratic states, the Bedouin community would have equal agency to their Jewish neighbors equal rights and there would be no such thing as a law that suspends their constitutional protection, so you have a case now in the Negev with the Proverb Begin Bill that says if you had a Jewish trespasser and a Bedouin trespasser in the Negev so everyone's wrong the Jewish trespasser would have access to the courts, would be able to defend themselves, would have all of their constitutional protections and constitutional rights intact, whereas the Bedouin citizen of Israel had those rights suspended, cannot go to court cannot defend himself and if they do not comply with demolition orders, could face up to two years in prison and they need to move to an urban town, whereas their Jewish neighbors have a choice to live in, you know, Kibbutzim or Moshevim or even single family farms so the discrimination is inherent and entrenched and made legitimate by this new by the Proverb Begin Bill that's being passed now in the Knesset That's amazing, it sounds almost like Dred Scott or something that, well uh geez, if he's got these rights and that implies those rights too and we can't have that Right, because equality is a threat to the system and I think that needs to be made very clear in the United States and we need to wrestle with that as of course a major supporter of the state of Israel so what does that mean?
What does it mean that equality is a threat to the state and why aren't we demanding that both of the United States and of the larger international community that says the only thing that should be privileged in a democratic state is equality we need to privilege equality, we cannot privilege ethnicity or religion as Israel is trying to do Well now so you did say their passing they've passed stage one of this and they're still working on the second part which is the second and final part, right?
Exactly, so in June of this year it passed its first reading, which is the initial vote and then in the coming weeks we'll see both the second and third reading happening on the same day so this would be the second reading basically the final passage of third is the technicality that confirms the law And then so what are the odds going into this thing?
Is there much pressure against it at all?
Well from the community itself, yes tremendous pressure, and I think it's one of the most exciting things that's happened in the region in a long time last Saturday was the third what's called the Day of Rage this is a coordinated protest all over all over the region inside Israel and also in the occupied Palestinian territory, you had coordinated protests by Palestinian youth on both sides of the Green Line that were calling for an end of the proverb plan this is truly amazing because you're having Palestinian youth who are not directly affected by the proverb plan seeing that it's relevant to their own lives, that the confiscation, and again it would be the largest confiscation of Palestinian-owned land since the 1950s, matters to them, it matters to all of them, so you're seeing unprecedented coordination across the Green Line Palestinian youth saying this is about us, this is about Nakba, and we challenge it on the basis of our human rights and on the basis of equality, and I think the government is very concerned about this development but it's really exciting, and as to whether or not the proverb plan will pass, I mean this is a priority of the coalition government so informing the coalition this spring, the government agrees to kind of its outline for what it hopes to accomplish in its government and the proverb plan was one of these top five priorities, so it has the broad support of the coalition again the community is the community is entirely against it, the government will say this is a very small but loud minority and that's not true it's the Bedouin community as a whole is rejecting this plan and asking the government to instead adopt an alternative plan which was an initiative of the community and civil society that called for the recognition of the 35 unrecognized villages on the basis of equality and now so what about the Jewish left and the I don't know, are there any parties of any significance to the left of labor or is labor any good on this or is there any kind of outcry from within Jewish Israel about this so you're seeing a bit more again with the international with international scrutiny there have been some which is pretty extraordinary, the European Parliament last summer called for a withdrawal of the plan that was going to be my next question was is the EU at least good on this?yeah and the UN, the European Parliament called for withdrawal of the plan the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination called the plan discriminatory and asked for withdrawal, it's been raised at every international forum that Israel has been a part of in the last few years and so the international community is watching the US obviously hasn't spoken out against the Pover plan and doing so would be would be a tremendous achievement and would probably have the most impact if possible that would be something that we should all strive for to get the American decision makers to speak out against this plan on behalf of the Palestinian Bedouin community but the first vote was actually fairly close 40, it passed 43 of 40 but part of the opposition to the plan comes from the far right that called the plan too generous to the Bedouin community and so that's also playing an impact that the right is opposing the plan because they don't want the they believe that again the Pover plan is too generous well let's hope we can count on their malevolent intentions to scourge this thing yeah no it's really something else it's almost, it just seems so out of step with everything else on earth right now at least what's considered acceptable on earth right now in any other place not that there's not horrible sin going on all the time but it just sounds like a throwback to the first half of the 20th century or something it's a great point the issue too is the idea of legality that there are horrific violations of human rights happening around the world but there's not a government that's saying yes but this is legal or yes this is within our right to do this they frankly don't really care about rights or about legality what you're seeing in Israel is this again the veneer of legality that they say yes we're doing it yes we're displacing this community and yes it's legal yes it's within our rights to violate or to even suspend their human rights or their constitutional rights and of course maybe America can't even do anything about it at this point remember Biden's walking off the plane and they're announcing new settlements just to scotch his visit which was to tell them to do a settlement freeze to try to work on this thing they don't care not about America or any of the rest of the UN or anything else it's going to have to be internal opinion inside Israel and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that make the difference I don't know about that ultimately yes at some point in history there will have to be an internal change but I don't if we wait for that we'll never see the end I think I'm for America threatening at least to withhold every bit of aid and support and everything until they get their act together there needs to be external pressure absolutely I think the only time that we've seen discriminatory laws get off the table is when there has been public condemnation from the international community and I think there needs to be much more of that that the world needs to remain vigilant and also recognize its responsibility within it I think you're right to say I mean we have an unprecedented responsibility in this area as Americans because of the amount of investment that we're placing in this government absolutely alright thank you so much for your time on the show today Nadia appreciate it is Nadia Ben Yosef and she is from Adala the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel and she's got a blog here at the Huffington Post the latest one is put a stop to the displacement of Bedouin communities in Israel very important work please go check it out we'll be right back Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson the war state the Cold War origins of the military industrial complex and the power elite in the book Swanson explains what the revolution was the rise of empire and the permanent military economy and all from a free market libertarian perspective Jacob Hornberger founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation says the book is absolutely awesome and Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read the poll numbers state that people agree on one thing it's that America is on the wrong track in the war state Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society empire the permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road the war state could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers first get the facts get the war state by Michael Swanson available at your local bookseller and at amazon.com or just click on the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
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And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants Seeing a pattern here?
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