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Judaization

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Summary

The policy, named in The Question of Palestine, of converting Arab land and areas into Jewish ones — Judaizing territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it — pursued in Arab-majority parts of Israel such as the Galilee and Nazareth.

Details

  • Said: the effectiveness of the arguments converting Arab land into Jewish land lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.120 / printed p.99).

  • In those parts of Israel that still retain an Arab majority, an anachronistic but effective and detailed policy of “Judaization” goes on apace: as Ruppin and Weizmann foresaw a Tel Aviv to outstrip Arab Jaffa, the Israeli government creates a new Jewish Nazareth to outstrip the old Arab town (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.124 / printed p.103).

  • Upper Nazareth, created as a counterweight to Arab Nazareth, constitutes, in Yoseph Elgazi’s description quoted by Said, a cornerstone of the “Judaization of the Galilee” policy, built on thousands of acres expropriated from Arab settlements (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.124-125 / printed p.103-104).

  • The Koenig Report proposes, in the same frame, expanding and deepening Jewish settlement in areas where the contiguity of the Arab population is prominent (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.129 / printed p.108).

  • Pappe gives the Galilee sequence for the term as the sources use it: direct expulsions in the 1940s, military occupation in the 1960s, massive confiscation of land in the 1970s, and a huge official Judaization settlement effort in the 1980s — yet, he writes, half the Galilee’s population is Palestinian, so the ‘demographic balance’ prevents many Israeli Jews from thinking of the region as their ‘own’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.219).

  • In 1976, Pappe reports, Israel Koenig, the highest official in the Ministry of Interior, called the Palestinians in the Galilee a ‘cancer in the state’s body’, and Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan openly spoke of them as ‘cockroaches’, in the context of the ongoing battle against the ‘Arabisation’ of the Galilee (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.221).

  • Manna dates the Galilee drive’s start to 1956: the government began implementing a policy of Judaizing the Galilee by establishing the city of Upper Nazareth, confiscating what was left of Arab lands in order to sever the geographic connections among Arab villages by planting Jewish settlements between them, and decreed 200,000 dunums of Arab lands between al-Shaghur and al-Battuf a closed area as the first step toward expropriating the land to build Karmiel (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.294).

  • The construction for Jews only on confiscated Arab lands led many to compare Israel with South Africa; al-Ittihad wrote of Upper Nazareth: “Nazareth will not become South Africa.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.284).

  • Makdisi’s Jerusalem account: after 1967 the municipal boundaries were drawn, in former deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti’s words, to incorporate “a maximum of vacant space with a minimum of Arabs” — land from twenty-eight Palestinian villages taken into the city while their people were left outside it (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.109-110).

  • John Dugard, quoted by Makdisi, calls the revocation of Jerusalem residency part of “de-Palestinization” and says: “The Judaization of Jerusalem is a cynical exercise in social engineering” (PDF p.148-149). The means listed include revoking residency under the “Center of life” regulation, denying family unification, refusing to register births, and confiscating land for settlements (PDF p.149).

  • A box, “Segregation by the Numbers”, gives for Israel as a whole: 48 percent of Palestinians in poverty against 15 percent of Jews; 4 of 429 priority-development localities Palestinian; state funding per capita at a ratio of 159:100 (PDF p.150-151).

  • Makdisi part 3 gives the Jerusalem planning mechanism in the planners’ own words: the demographic question as “A cornerstone in the planning of Jerusalem” (Israel Kimchi, 1977); obstacles placed in the way of the Arab sector to preserve the ratio of 72 percent Jews to 28 percent non-Jews (Amir Cheshin); the 1978 Master Plan and Teddy Kollek: “it is necessary to make life difficult for the Arabs, not to allow them to build” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.152).

  • The mechanism’s outcomes as Makdisi gives them: five waves of expropriation taking about a third of the annexed area; Palestinians, a third of the city’s population, with access to less than 10 percent of its land; no comprehensive plan for the Palestinian areas thirty years after the 1974 promise; 100,000 sponsored housing units for Jewish settlers against 500 for Palestinians since 1967; and a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem announced in July 1993 (PDF p.154-155, p.162).

The Question of Palestine, Koenig Report, Israel Koenig, Jewish National Fund, Nakba and Survival, Nazareth Elit, Karmiel, Teddy Kollek

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