From the Blog

How Slow Ethnic Cleansing Works

Fifteen-year-old Luai from Silwan, an East Jerusalem neighborhood, walked to the Al Mascobiyya Interrogation Centre after his mother told him that the Israeli police had come to their house looking for him. Luai reported arriving at the interrogation centre at around 1 PM and waiting for his mother to arrive. “I had barely waited two minutes when I saw an interrogator named ‘Shadi,’ recalls Luai. “I know him because he interrogated me several times in the past. Once he spotted me, he rushed towards me with another man in civilian clothes…and dragged me to another building across the street.” “‘What’s going on?’ I asked, but they didn’t respond. I was scared and didn’t know where they were taking me.”

Loai reports being taken to another building and placed inside a large room. “Shadi forced me to kneel down and face the wall with hands behind the back of my head. ‘Don’t say a single word or I’ll beat the hell out of you,’ he said to me.” Luai reports being kept in this position for about three hours whilst Shadi and the other man remained in the room smoking and talking to each other. “Whenever I moved my head, they would slap me on the neck,” recalls Luai. About three hours later, the two men started to interrogate Luai, and accused him of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. The only evidence the interrogators referred to was that of ‘our informers in the neighborhoods.’ Luai denied the accusations against him. “I wasn’t scared,” says Luai, “as I have got used to this, as this is the fifth time they have arrested me.”

Contrary to Israeli law, Luai was interrogated in the absence of a family member, and at the conclusion of the interrogation, was made to place his fingerprints on a blank piece of paper. Luai was then handcuffed and taken to a cell where he was detained with five other detainees, including adults and children. The following day, Luai was taken to court but says he did not understand what the judge was saying as he was speaking in Hebrew.

Following his court appearance, Luai was taken back to Al Mascobiyya for a second night, before being released on 14 January 2011, on NIS 500 (US $140) bail and a bond of 3,000 NIS ( US $840). Luai was also given a five-day home detention order. “My father has decided to leave Silwan,” Luai says, “and take us to Anata refugee camp because he’s tired of soldiers and settlers harassing us. Settlers who live in our neighborhood keep insulting us and soldiers arrest us whenever something happens. My brother, Feras, was released yesterday and is now under home arrest for six months, and my father is summoned from time to time. Our house is also under threat of demolition.”  “Therefore, my father had decided to leave Silwan and spare us the suffering. That means we’re going to start a new life in Anata and go to new schools. We will leave our relatives and friends behind because my father doesn’t want us to get arrested and beaten by soldiers.” This report was written and compiled from testimony given by the boy named Luai to an organization called “Defense of Children International—Palestine Section,” received on 12 February 2011. (The same organization reports 13 similar narratives from East Jerusalem.) What is so striking about this is that it isn’t any kind of horror story, but feels utterly normal—this is simply life for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. One is impressed by the sense of being completely helpless from aggression by the oppressor in the eyes of one’s own children. For that reason Luai’s father would rather take his family to a refugee camp rather than live in his own home in East Jerusalem. This tragic process is what can only be called slow ethnic cleansing. At present much of it is being focused on the neighborhood of East Jerusalem, because the Israelis wish to push the Palestinians into small, miserable ghettoes so Israeli Jews can take their houses. 

Why is this important? Because it violates international law, the International Declaration of Human Rights, and the most elementary concepts of human decency—and because the moral degradation of this systemic evil corrupts us all. The West does not want to know or care what happens to these people— it is tempted to listen only to the voice of empire, the impact of superior military power, the wealth and the weapons of the Israeli state and its powerful proxies. Most of all, however, slow ethnic cleansing is dangerous because any state that will use these despicable methods will almost surely be tempted someday to use a much more comprehensive form of ethnic cleansing. What happens to peoples’ hearts and souls when the political class and the military establishment of a country find out they can do anything with impunity, no matter how brutal, and get away with it? What do the tragedies of the 20th century teach us about that? It teaches us that moral collapse doesn’t happen all at once, but step by step. Today’s slow ethnic cleansing, unless it is democratically and effectively challenged, is very likely to be tomorrow’s genocide