Hard Words but No Stick : Objections to Israeli Deporting of Palestinians Will Accomplish Little

The deportation or expulsion of Arab inhabitants from the West Bank and Gaza is one of several measures used by Israeli military authorities to deal with what they term “incitement to subversion.”

Because deportations occur precipitously, without any preliminary hearing or trial, it is difficult to pin down just what is meant by “incitement” or “subversion.” Since the intifada began in December, it could mean participation in any of the local committees organized in Palestinian towns and villages to protest against and to organize resistance to the 21-year Israeli occupation. These committees not only include those to plan civil disobedience or rock throwing; they also involve teachers organizing instruction for students shut out of their schools, social workers providing for families left without resources, agricultural advisers issuing instructions on how to raise home vegetable gardens, and so on.

Israel claims the authority to deport “troublemakers” under legislation that is still on the books from British rule. These World War II-era emergency regulations and security enactments empower the military government to issue a deportation order “whenever necessary or desirable to preserve public security, defend the area, secure public order or to put down sedition, revolt or riots.” Since the occupation began in 1967, more than 2,000 Palestinian Arabs have been deported, among them mayors, teachers (including the president of Bir Zeit University), journalists and editors of Arabic newspapers.

Recipients of deportation orders could appeal to an advisory committee for redress, although local military authorities were not bound to accept the committee’s recommendations. Appeals also could be made to the High Court of Justice. Few such appeals were ever made, and only a handful of deportation orders have been rescinded in the past 21 years.

Between 1980 and 1985 no deportations were carried out. But the military reinstituted the measures three years ago, and the pace has been intensified since the intifada . In recent days it reached a point characterized by the U.S. State Department as “the norm rather than the exception.”

Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead’s warning to Israel on Monday that failure to reconsider the latest deportation orders could “damage our bilateral relations” is not the first U.S. or international remonstrance against the policy. In January the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution, with Washington’s approval, condemning the deportations. Since 1967 both Washington and the United Nations have censured Israel on several occasions for expelling Arab residents of the occupied territories.

According to the international consensus, the deportations and a variety of other measures used by the military violate the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilians in occupied lands. The regulations specifically bar individual or mass deportations. Although it signed the protocol, Israel maintains that the provisions do not apply to the West Bank or Gaza since they are not enemy territories. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his predecessor, Menachem Begin, have said that neither Gaza nor the West Bank is “occupied” but that each is a liberated part of the land of Israel.

Escalation of the deportations as part of the tough new occupation policy worries a number of dovish Israelis, as well as Palestinians and Americans. Since December the total number of deportees has reached 60; the most recent orders call for expelling 25 more. Could this be the beginning of a more extensive plan to rid the territories of local leadership? These concerns are especially pertinent in light of recent public discussion of “transfer” as a way to resolve the problem. Transfer, a euphemism for diminishing the large Arab population in the territories, was favored by 49% of the Jewish population in a June poll conducted by the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research.

Until now, Israel’s deportation policies have been rather inconsistent. There seems to be no reluctance to expel suspected troublemakers at middle and lower leadership levels, yet many more prominent personalities--like Al Fajr editor Hanna Siniora and Faisal Husseini, both known to have contacts with the PLO--remain in the country even though they have been arrested from time to time. Some Israelis explain this inconsistency as a way to ensure that not all lines of communication are severed. After all, if the intifada is to be ended by means short of mass deportations, there has to be someone to communicate with.

As for censures from Whitehead and the Department of State, they are not the first to fall on Israel in critical times. Attempts to apply similar constraints have been used throughout the Israeli-American relationship. But unless accompanied by some tangible sanctions, verbal threats of this type have not been effective; in a U.S. election year it is unlikely that there will even be the threat of any sanctions that would undermine in the least Israel’s security or well-being.