the editor of the english language quarterly magazine of the big deal resource center for palestinian residency and refugee rights in bethlehem palestine alternative focus sat down with has him in his office in the west bank explained the history of the israeli palestinian conflict there's only one law in the jewish law books that says that expressly discriminates between jewish and non jewish which is the one hundred fifty law of return so anyone who is jewish can come to or come back to the land of israel and become a full citizen the way that discrimination works in israel is usually laws work in combination or in reference to another law where for example you need to be someone who would qualify for the law of return in order to get certain privileges so it doesn't say you need to be jewish but in the end eric he says that or the state will sort of devolve part of its sovereignty to an organization or institution that does discriminate but it's not in the law books so for example responsibility over most of the land in the part of palestine that was taken in one thousand forty eight or israel  directly or indirectly under the control of the jewish national fund sixteen percent of the land is directly under the control of the jewish national fund that most of the rest about seventy eight percent is under the control of something called the israeli lands administration which  the jewish national fund appoints around half of its board members so this is the in direct part of that ninety three percent approximately of the land of israel which is under the sort of  jewish national fund besides and again in the tank in its own constitution the jewish national fund purpose is exclusively jewish settlement jewish colonization now in these cities and it is one of the big ironies of the many of the thousands of ironies in this land jewish immigrants coming to these cities saw a neighborhood which was fenced off people needed military permission to come in and out and only had one word for it which is ghetto and so if you go to there these neighborhoods are still referred to as the ghetto even by the palestinian residents many of whom still believe until today that the word ghetto is the hebrew word for palestinian neighborhood so this specifically the case and that i'm so between forty eight and sixty sixty the israeli government confiscated thousands of homes are acres of of what remained in palestinian  hands and the way that this would work is for example laws would work in combination like so there's about twenty two laws military laws these are the kind of the equivalent of our constitution for palestinian citizens of israel during this period so one law would enable the military to come into an area and declare it a closed military area which means no palestinians can be here and so the palestinians would be kicked out another law would say that if the land is left cult uncultivated for three years it becomes property of the state so you'd be kicked out of your land because it's been transformed into a military area three years later you'd be someone to a court or you'd receive a piece of paper that says your lands been confiscated or is now property of the state because it's been uncultivated for over three years and if you go to challenge it and say well you're military is the one that kicked me out the response will be well you can take that up with the military we're just applying the law here so this is how these thousands of acres were taken from palestinians during this period understand i mean a lot of people talk about the situation in palestine as being very complicated and complex and hard to understand in my view it isn't that hard hard to understand  complexity if you want to look at the details of israeli laws and how this works and how laws work in combination with one another but overall if you want to understand what's happening here it can be summarized in one line the main purpose of the zionist movement was and continues to be maximum land under exclusive jewish control minimum palestinians on that land if you understand this you understand what happened in one nine hundred forty eight you understand the purpose of the military regime between forty eight and sixty six you understand what happened in the sixty seven war and since in the west bank and gaza and continues to happen every day today i'm going to talk a little bit about the negative just because it's you know some people have called some analysts at the cause of the forgotten half of palestine and in many ways he's right because people generally don't know what's happening in the south of palestine or and they give as it's known in hebrew is the south of palestine it's largely a desert area and the palestinians who inhabit are what anthropologists call bedwyn and they themselves call themselves and it's a nomadic or semi nomadic lifestyle where people travel often within a certain area but a large area  and life depends on pasture sort of raising sheep and goats as well as agriculture when there's enough water or there's good rainfall and in some cases trade sort of being the merchants between one  hundred forty eight about ten thousand on the remained the rest were forced to leave and when i say forced to leave just because some people also say that well people left of their own volition or that in times of war people leave the fact of the matter is that even if they weren't forced to leave at gunpoint which many people were but many people just left like i said news of massacres or because there was a war happening  establishment was ensured that anybody who did leave didn't wasn't able to come back and they were called infiltrators anyone who tried to come back and the orders of border patrols were to arrest or shoot on sight anyone who was trying to come back and many people died ekta the because they were shot at as infiltrators and some people did manage to come back and also i should note that all of the land of the refugees and the displaced people was confiscated by the state of israel  which passed a law called the absentee property law in one hundred fifty and all of this land which is over eighty percent of what israel considers its own state land now and jewish national fund controlled land is absentee  property for those people who are internally displaced the palestinians whose villages or towns were destroyed but they managed to stay within the state and they're citizens of the state their property is absent is absentee property it's been taken by the state  but since they're not really absentees they're still there israeli law has essentially created a new a new status their present absentees sort of apparently a contradiction but they're present physically in the state but the absentees as far as their property is concerned now in the case of the negative or the nightclub the vast majority or all bedouin palestinians who remained were concentrated in the area around beersheba which was called the area of the fence even though most of it didn't have a physical fence surrounding it you needed military permission to be able to leave this area or to enter it and in one thousand nine hundred sixty five what israel did was it passed a law called the planning law which essentially outlines its big massive law maybe one of the largest laws in the world which sensualists all of the towns villages cities of the israeli state  and it doesn't list many of the palestinian villages forty six villages in the club are not listed and in the galilee also several villages are not listed these become known as the unrecognized villages and these unrecognised villages because they're not recognize they don't appear on any state map but they also receive no municipal services so no electricity no water no roads no sewage no waste collection largely no schools  and any other essential services that you can think of also because they're not recognised as resident villages places where people live those the houses that they live in are subject to demolition and so those houses have been there's been an ongoing process since sixty five until today of destroying those houses and the fact that people don't know about it is why it's the forgotten half of palestine essentially in the late sixty's what israel decided to do and this was because these bedouin palestinians still create were a form of like continuity between palestinians in gaza and in the west bank was to further remove them from these american it switches and the plan was to create or to recognise some of the villages and force everyone into them they're actually called concentration towns so these concentration towns are seven village towns they became towns that were recognised and became concentration towns and israeli policy since then has been trying to cram palestinians from the unrecognized villages into the concentration towns which are the poorest towns by far the poorest towns in israel  policies i mean many of these policies hit at the economic life of bedouin palestinians which involves laws that severely restrict their ability to raise their their flocks their goats party i mean there's a law specifically dealing with the black goat which is and black goats like camels are kind of an indigenous species to the desert but this law says that they're a hazard to the environment and  black goats being a hazard to the environment any black any stray black goat becomes property of the state and the state can kill it can do whatever pleases with it in the late seventy's ariel sharon who was specifically interested in the case of palestinian b pet projects of ariel sharon and the late seventies he becomes the minister of agriculture and forms a military unit that answers to the ministry of agriculture it's called there were called green patrols and these green patrols would drive around and disperse and so then it was a race between the shepherd and the green patrol as to who could go and collect the goats faster in some case they would just shoot the go and actually during the next and until today the process of essentially killing the goats themselves and the sheep and all the other and the camels and everything else that are raised by bedouin palestinians has been a mainstay of the ongoing displacement force displacement of bedouin palestinians whether through actually using poison for example between two thousand and two and two thousand and four that the military would fly planes that would spray round up herbicide poisonous herbicide definitely poisonous to animals and humans and on the package i think it says you cannot aerially sprayed this because it's too dangerous they would spray from the air and many people got very very sick some people died there was high rates of miscarriages but also many goats died thousands of goats that also restricting access to water and to pastures especially on drought years is one way that the israeli government has effectively also killed off many of these flocks to the choppers so it's a very it's very much ongoing case of a living case of the ongoing neck but of course everywhere in palestine you see the ongoing that but so until today palestinian citizens of israel in the cities of the lid that definitely in jerusalem are facing a nick and accelerated program of today's nation an homes specifically to destroy the home for i mean and all of these cases in the cities it's called development the jewish development or zionist development and development essentially me is it's gentrification the idea is to tear down these houses and build expensive condominiums and shopping malls most often for jewish people living abroad to come here for the summer for the winter as they see fit so it's this dual process of gentrification and today's ation so some people are going to make a lot of money selling these condos and the zionist ideologues are going to be very happy because the offer has many are far fewer palestinians in it in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven israel occupied the west bank and the gaza strip as well as the golan heights from syria and sinai from egypt essentially this formed a bit of a problem for the israelis in the sense that given the underlying maxim of the zionist movement maximum land under exclusive jewish control and minimum palestinians on it there were many more palestinians now under israeli control and now what happened in one thousand sixty seven was israel forcibly expelled a further another four hundred fifty thousand palestinians half of them were refugees from one thousand nine hundred eighty eight being displaced for the second time the so they needed a plan on how to deal with this much larger number of palestinians under their control  and the solution sort of came from military officer and minister by the name of you go along and this alon plan basically calls for first of all residents of these villages are immediately expelled and the villages are flattened today on the site there is a jewish national fund park funded by the canadian arm of the jewish national fund it's called canada park and  visitors can come and picnic on the ruins of the village and what remains of the ruins of the village there's little signs that talk about how this is an ancient bath or an ancient well but nothing of course and this is the case throughout forty eight palestine or israel where any kind of historical plaque or official history will completely erase and not mention any palestinian presence if palestinians are mentioned there mentioned as kind of barbarians so you'll see in the effort for example plaques that talk about the history of the afa over thousands of years but the only time that arabs and palestinians are mentioned is to say that in the twenty's or thirty's they attacked the jewish community there was a savage attack so this is the case in canada park as well the two central parts of the along plan are one to split the west bank into two parts a northern part and a southern part with sloan as the divider idea being that drew some would become completely under israeli control and then would be continued down to the dead sea in the jordan valley using perhaps the most important israeli settlement in the west bank which is called  and then the second crucial part of the year long plan is to eliminate any palestinian presence on the border with jordan specifically the jordan valley so the area of the west bank north of the dead sea and where it's the lowest point in the world  altitude wise and it's also one of the most fertile areas in palestine there's a lot of water groundwater and surface water wells and the river and because it's warm all year round you can grow two or three crops in a year so there were a lot of people living there only about ten thousand people remained syncrude the city of jericho which is the oldest city in the world to stop the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world stop or something like nine thousand b in so the jordan valley was in sort of jerusalem the initial sites of what we can call the ongoing mecca in the west bank in jerusalem many residents of course are plan two thousand or something like this which is the sort of the master plan for the city the municipality and other organizations really sort of that are part of the israeli state and the zionist movement heavily fund jewish settlement in the city particularly the palestinian neighborhoods and the old city and licensing for palestinian homes even if you want to build an extra floor on top of your existing house are virtually impossible to get  people's homes are destroyed pretty consistently under the pretext that they're not licensed and more recently they're using the excuse that to the effect that you know the destruction of your home will serve the purpose of the jewish state will serve the purpose of judaizing the city so more explicit even on this front palestinian religious and cultural life in jerusalem is heavily restricted over the past year people trying to commemorate the or this initiative to to nominate jerusalem as the arab cultural capital for two thousand and nine and most of these of activities have faced police repression arresting the organizers and shutting down the events in the jordan valley like i said most of the residents were expelled with only about ten thousand people remaining since then is israel had reclassified the area largely as military zones so close military areas basically that the emergency laws military laws that were implemented against palestinians in the forty eight areas were then implemented against palestinians in the west bank and  gaza so it's the same it's military order one twenty five that declares an area closed military zone in forty eight areas in israel and also here so most of these areas in the jordan valley were declared closed military area is but there's other sort of more seemingly benign ways of displacing people some areas are declared natural reserves you know for animals or for trees and power and the palestinian residents have to leave these areas so passim presence in the jordan valley is very i mean has been under ongoing forests placement over the past forty years but today there's a push to essentially eliminate palestinian presence outside of five villages in the jordan valley and the city of jericho or their towns actually their own this area be under the oslo agreements the so through the seventy's and eighty's basically and particularly beginning in the late seventy's there's a big push seventy's the idea being one we can give a green light to the more religiously motivated zionists who see the west bank which they called today and some area as the si of the old kingdom of david and solomon and will want to go and settle there and so the light is green light is given and the idea being that civilians can come in and set up homes or even like tents or caravans anywhere and then the army would be obligated to go and protect them and saw through the seventy's eighty's and definitely in the ninety's there's a big explosion of these kinds of activities and the idea being that and always invariably settlements are on hilltops so they always take the most strategic part of the land and then this divides palestinian communities from one another and then as these settlements expand palestinian farmland and in some cases the villages themselves become the land that the village the settlement once and the people are displaced as a result now so this is called the actually in the late seventy's and is the kind of the blueprint for what became the lower courts the main obstacle for shit on and for any israeli regime to implement this vision of palestinian sort of encircled within their communities where the the rest of the land is taken control of by the israeli government again under the idea maximum land under exclusive jewish control minimum palestinians on it so the idea would be that if we can't kick all the palestinians out those who remain can be encircled this is what's happening in the negev is what's happening in the galilee and in the triangle and definitely in the west bank gaza has been encircled since the mid ninety's completely blocked and for the past two years has this encircled and has meant a siege nothing comes in nothing goes out unless you know they can dig a tunnel which is what they've done with the border with egypt but other than that it's a pretty tight siege which has cost thousands of lives but also made life hell in addition to the constant military bombardment and military assaults that take place all under the pretext of there's some homemade rockets that are gaza's one and a half million people one point one million people in gaza are refugees so over two thirds of people in gaza are refugees the issue of gaza in addition to being an issue of military occupation and humanitarian crisis is primarily a refugee issue gaza would not be a problem if the refugees were allowed to go back to their homes in the case of the west bank the main and this is also applies to gaza the main issue facing the israeli regime was in order if we're going to en circle and segregate palestinians into these small pockets that israel controls the surroundings there needs to be a palestinian partner who controls the daily lives of palestinians and police is inside these areas so that they don't form any threat to the israeli state or israeli security outside so in the late seventy's they israeli government initiates a plan to form something called village leagues which is this kind of palestinian partner that's essentially a proxy for the israeli government this is not a new thing in north america for example indigenous native communities are governed by their tribal councils and canada they're called band councils and these are very tightly controlled at least their budgets are from washington or from ottawa in palestine the village the exhaust of the main reason for their failure was that the palestine liberation organization which the campaign against it and i mean the main one of the central mottos of the past and the british an organization is that the p l o is the sole legitimate representative of the palestinian people and so people didn't fall for the village the this was the lesson for israel that either we have to eliminate the p l o in order to sort of implement this idea of the encircled palestinian communities governed by loyal obedient palestinians are waiting to get the p l o itself to play this role for us and the combination and the result was the combination i mean through the series of defeats in the  eighty's the leadership for what remained of the leadership of the p l o accepted the osce the agreements and the oslo agreements are at their core the blueprint for the implementation of this kind of system this ban to stand apartheid system