Stop the Wall live blog – Resisting Ethnic Cleansing

Israel’s settler colonial project in Palestine is premised on the necessity to ethnically cleanse the land from its Indigenous population. Hence, the Nakba in 1948 started Israel’s ongoing, planned, and systematic policy of ethnic cleansing.

Now that Israel through its genocide in occupied and besieged Gaza wants to leave Palestinians only two choices – expulsion or death – Israel intensifies its ethnic cleansing also in the occupied West Bank.

This live blog keeps you up to date on Israel’s daily efforts to expel the Palestinian people from the West Bank and our daily struggle to resist on our land.

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Learn more about Israel’s ethnic cleansing

The timeline of Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

September 25 – Settler militias from the settlement of Tapuach set fire to agricultural land near the homes in the Palestinian village of Yasuf. Yasuf is located east of the city of Salfit, within the line of the settlement corridor that is to cut off the northern West Bank from the center.

Watch here

September 24 – Stop the Wall releases a full report of Israeli attacks during August in Masafer Yatta,

Read here

Links

The Right to Exist

The Right to Exist Campaign is our response to Israel’s relentless attempts to obliterate Palestinian presence as a people, a culture, and a lifestyle.

Quick facts about the Palestinian refugees and their right of return

The UN and the Palestinian Right of Return:

“The exercise of the individual right of the Palestinian to return to his homeland was a conditio sine qua non for the exercise by this people of its rights to self-determination, national independence, and sovereignty.”

Learn more about Palestinian refugees and the UN Refugees Works Agency (UNRWA)

Israel’s ethnic cleansing

Israel’s very foundation is built on the mass expulsion of over half of the Palestinian people and the destruction of over 500 Palestinian cities, villages and communities during 1948/9. The mass expulsion of Bedouin communities continued until the early 1950s. And this Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe) continues until today.

The mass expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians (about ⅔ of all Palestinians living on the 78% of Palestine on which Israel was established in 1948) was a deliberate and systematic act of ethnic cleansing. Today, there are an estimated 9.17 million displaced Palestinians worldwide (as of 2021). They include approximately 8.36 million refugees and 812,000 internally displaced persons.

Settler colonialism is by definition a long term project of conquest of territory that substitutes the Indigenous population with a settler population. For this effort to be enduring over time, it is fundamental for the colonizer to eliminate the Indigenous population or at least their resistance – or, as Israeli politicians and ideologues repeat, to destroy their hope to achieve justice. The ongoing effort to expel Palestinians in order to settle a Jewish population in their place is a core pillar of Israel’s policy, justified or even mandated by Zionism, the European settler colonial ideology on which Israel has been founded.

The imposition of a regime of apartheid serves as a temporary attempt to create a sustainable colonial regime as long as the physical expulsion or genocidal elimination is impossible. It eliminates the Indigenous people from certain spaces, excludes them from the field of (full) citizens and justifies continued repression of any claims and struggle of the oppressed.

Israel currently perpetrates all three strategies of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing concurrently.

Ethnic cleansing in the West Bank today

Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank are attacked by Israeli military and settler militias, non recognized, deprived of access to vital infrastructure and demolished.

1967-1993

The strategic focus of Israel’s ethnic cleansing have been focused since the beginning of the occupation in 1967 on strategic areas, especially the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem and surroundings. This is evident from the maps for annexation produced by Israel, including the Allon Plan (1967), the Sharon Plan (1977), and the Drobles Plan (1978).

1993-2002

After the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, the areas Israel aims to annex and ethnically cleanse have become designated as Area ‘C’, constituting 61% of the West Bank.

2002 -2020

With the construction of Israel’s apartheid Wall, the colonial regime defined its focus of displacement, putting all those communities outside the Wall in the frontlines of its onslaught of displacement.

2020 – 2023

In 2020, Israel presented its map of ethnic cleansing as part of Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century”. It implies the de jure annexation of 33% of the West Bank. Over 75 Palestinian villages, Bedouin and semi-Bedouin communities are to be ethnically cleansed, with a total population of 118000.

2023 – today

Since the start of Israel’s genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza (the overwhelming majority of them refugees), Israel has escalated its ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank in many ways. Demolitions of homes, water well and other vital infrastructure as well as progroms and physical aggressions against communities and their lands by settler militias and the military have increased, the isolation and fragmentation of communities have intensified. 17 communities have been forced to leave their homes in less than a year.

In addition, Israel is systematically targeting the Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank with raids and destruction. They are the living testimony of the ongoing Nakba and a daily reminder to Israel’s regime that Palestinians will continue to exist, to resist and to claim their inalienable right of return.

July 19 2024 – International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion

In its Advisory Opinion on the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, the International Court of Justice confirmed that:

“the large-scale confiscation of land and the deprivation of access to natural resources divest the local population of their basic means of subsistence, thus inducing their departure. Furthermore, a series of measures taken by Israeli military forces has exacerbated the pressure on the Palestinian population to leave parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory against their will.

“The Court recalls that, under the first paragraph of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive”.

“In this regard, the Court considers that transfer may be “forcible” — and thus prohibited under the first paragraph of Article 49 — not only when it is achieved through the use of physical force, but also when the people concerned have no choice but to leave.

“Further, the Court notes that, to be permissible, evacuations are conceived as a temporary measure, to be reversed as soon as the imperative military reasons subside. By contrast, evacuations of a permanent or indefinite character breach the prohibition of forcible transfer. “The Court considers that Israel’s policies and practices, including its forcible evictions, extensive house demolitions and restrictions on residence and movement, often leave little choice to members of the Palestinian population living in Area C but to leave their area of residence. The nature of Israel’s acts, including the fact that Israel frequently confiscates land following the demolition of Palestinian property for reallocation to Israeli settlements, indicates that its measures are not temporary in character and therefore cannot be considered as permissible evacuations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In the Court’s view, Israel’s policies and practices are contrary to the prohibition of forcible transfer of the protected population under the first paragraph of Article 49, of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

“Israel is also under an obligation to provide full reparation for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts to all natural or legal persons concerned. Reparation includes restitution, compensation and/or satisfaction.

“Restitution includes Israel’s obligation to return the land and other immovable property, as well as all assets seized from any natural or legal person since its occupation started in 1967, and all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions, including archives and documents. It also requires the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements and the dismantling of the parts of the wall constructed by Israel that are situated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as allowing all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their original place of residence.”