Tel Aviv, August 31— A multi-ethnic group of 1,500 protesters marched in central Tel Aviv today to demand the cancellation of the racist Prawer Law. The essence of this law is the theft of the land of tens of thousands of Bedouin workers for the sake of U.S. real estate tycoons and their allies in the Israeli ruling class. The demonstrators called for the recognition of all Bedouin villages and for the abolition of the government’s plans of demolition, removal and land theft. Several protesters raised the workers’ red flag to challenge the fascist Israeli regime.
Although Bedouins make up 30 percent of the population of the Negev, the desert of southern Israel-Palestine, their villages contain only three percent of the region’s land area. Under the Prawer Law, which was passed by the Israeli Knesset in July, the capitalist government’s “solution” to the “problem” of spontaneous Bedouin settlements is a mass eviction of 40,000 Bedouin workers and peasants. They would be resettled to “recognized” ghettos where unemployment stands at 50 percent and where 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
The confiscated land, meanwhile, will be used for towns for the rich. The Israel Land Administration ignores the fact that many Bedouins hold title to their land. So much for the capitalists’ sacred principle of “private property”!
Zionism = Theft
This is a war of attrition, with the forces of the regime pitted against the working class. It also reflects the same colonialist policy that dates from the birth of modern Zionism in 1882. The Zionists made their move in the Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were deported from what is now the State of Israel. They consolidated their control in the violent confiscations of “Land Day” in 1976, and in the murder of 13 Palestinian Arabs by cops in October 2000.
The essence of Zionism may be summed up in one sentence: As many Jews on as much land as possible, as few Arabs on as little land as possible. Since the days of the Rothschilds, the Zionists have deported and robbed native Palestinians for the sake of the Zionist colonial project and the profits of Zionism’s patrons: U.S. and Western European capitalists. Even as the regime sheds tears over the alleged “robbery of open lands” by the Bedouins, it hands out property to private farms owned by the capitalists. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish settlements known as kibbutzim and moshavim benefited from their strong ties to the Israeli Labor party, which was in power until 1977. But residents of the Development Towns, the state-built industrial slums where Jews of Middle Eastern origin were sent to live, received minimal land and resources. The Palestinians, including the Bedouins, were simply robbed.
Billionaires Profit, Peasants Starve
Among the beneficiaries of the theft of Bedouin land is Ronald Lauder of New York, the billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire and president of the World Jewish (read: Zionist) Congress, as well as Irving Moskowitz, the Miami casino tycoon who is behind the robbery of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the rest of the country. Lauder sits on a $3.3 billion fortune while his servants at the Jewish National Fund evict workers and peasants from their lands to plant the “Forest of Ambassadors” in the Negev. Lauder and his ilk are following in the footsteps of the U.S. ruling class, which deported Native Americans from their lands in a genocide that took millions of lives.
Jewish workers in Israel-Palestine, now suffering from a severe housing crisis, will gain nothing from this land grab. In fact, they will only lose from it. The racist ideas pushed by the government divide Jewish and Arab workers, allowing the capitalist bosses to rule us all. The same government that robs Bedouin workers of the right to live on their ancestors’ land also robs Jewish workers of the right to roofs over their heads. The struggle to recognize Bedouin “unrecognized” villages, and to give the land to its tillers, is the same as the struggle for public housing and for housing for all.
The time is ripe for Arabs, Jews, and Christians, for workers and peasants who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, to take charge of our destiny and put an end to the deadly profit system that serves only the big bosses. We fight for bread on every worker’s table, for collective ownership of resources, for multiracial unity, and for uncompromising class war against the capitalists.