After being beaten back by Palestinian resistance in Gaza and halted in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah, an Israeli government of ultra-Zionists and war criminals is regrouping for conquest. It is intensifying and militarising colonial plans from the occupied Syrian Golan in the north to the southern expanses of historic Palestine. In January 2022 there was an explosive reignition of confrontation in the Naqab region, which Israel calls the Negev, where a third of the region’s 300,000 Palestinians inhabit villages spuriously labelled as illegal by the Israeli state. The Zionist plans are being propelled by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose nine decade history of land theft has been backed consistently by British imperialism. But they are being resisted by villagers on the ground. The fires of Palestinian resistance continue to spread among youth faced with further dispossession.
On 10 January protests escalated around the Palestinian Bedouin village Sawa near the southern city of Bir Al Saba, the largest city in the Naqab. They were sustained over the course of the next week as JNF bulldozers razed Palestinian farmland, in the name of a ‘tree planting’ project. Huge crowds of protesters were met with brutal repression from Zionist occupation forces, who used rubber-coated metal bullets, teargas, stun grenades and skunk water. Three protesters were shot in the face and needed surgery; one suffered a haemorrhage as a result.
Over 150 protesters were arrested in the first nine days of protests in Sawa. Waves of arrests and raids targeted whole families. 26 women were imprisoned, including 25-year-old Nawal Abu Kaf who was badly beaten during her arrest. Children accused of attending the protests have been placed under military house arrest and barred from attending school. Though the law stipulates that children must appear in court within 12 hours of arrest, extensions to their detention are repeatedly granted by Israeli judges. Marwan Abu Frieh of legal solidarity group Adalah reports that children have suffered strangulation and other forms of abuse during their arrest. The Zionist state aims to intimidate the movement into submission. So far, this repression has had the opposite effect.
Palestinian Bedouins hold deeds long preceding the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, but Zionist law sees them as ‘squatters’. Based on indigenous communities from Sawa and other areas, the protests highlighted the youth of the Palestinian population in the Naqab, and featured the defiant, leadership role played by young women in particular. Calling on the spirit of May 2021’s Unity Intifada, which confronted Israeli ascendancy across the lands of historic Palestine, activist Riya Al Sanah writes that: ‘The current protests against dispossession and displacement indicate that Israel’s perceived absolute control is an illusion’ (The Independent, 20 January 2022).
The movement has spread, with solidarity mobilisations across Palestine. In Gaza, thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand Palestinian rights to the Naqab; over 90,000 refugees left the Bir Al Saba region during the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948, with a majority ending up in Gaza. In Umm Al Fahm, a northern city witnessing huge demonstrations last May, dozens were arrested as hundreds faced down heavily armed police. One protester told Al Wafa news agency that: ‘The issue of Naqab is the issue of every Palestinian facing the policies of occupation and apartheid. Naqab is not alone.’
Solidarity protests have included placards featuring song lyrics composed by Salah Abd Al Ruba during the 1987 uprising at the notorious Naqab prison:
O Naqab, be strong
Be glorious and pioneering
Become a sword, a lesson
From the teachings of the intifada
Green Zionism and imperialist sponsorship
Liberals have long proclaimed the ‘greenness’ of Israeli policies, but the current onslaught on the Naqab under the guise of a ‘tree planting’ project reveals the racist, terroristic reality of Zionist rule. Military-grade bulldozers are uprooting farmland that has been in Palestinian hands for centuries. The $48m JNF project is supported directly by the government and plans to turn Beer Al Saba to rubble and expel the inhabitants of Sawa and other villages. Planting 250 million trees on stolen land since 1948, the JNF has a long history of importing forests to prevent Palestinians accessing or reclaiming their lands.
In 1918 Britain and France promised the inhabitants of Bir Al Saba total independence once the Turks had been defeated in the First Imperialist War. Courting wealthy donors in the US in particular, the JNF now boasts of receiving record, ‘game changing’ donations, which it openly declares will go to support ‘Israel’s pioneers [settlers] in the Negev and Galilee.’ The JNF has earmarked a one billion dollar ‘roadmap’ for the next decade. In Britain, successive governments have sustained the JNF’s status on the Charity Commission, as ‘an organisation raising funds for environmental and humanitarian causes in Israel.’ Latest figures show an annual income in Britain of over £15m, with charity tax breaks, a government grant of £85,000 and – under Britain’s ‘Gift Aid’ programme – a 25% contribution from the British state.
Calls by Palestinian revolutionaries for action against the JNF and in solidarity with the Naqab uprising reflect a determination not to allow the fires of May 2021 to be doused. As the Masar Badil (Alternative Path) movement points out: ‘This is a policy of displacement and war crimes supported by the imperialist and colonialist powers, aiming to control all of the land and deport the rightful owners of our homeland and confine them to ghettoised belts of misery.’
Britain’s supposedly pro-Palestine MPs have all but disappeared. Though Jeremy Corbyn had supported a Stop the JNF campaign in 2010, this demand was totally absent from his Labour leadership and those who supported it have retreated behind the openly Zionist leader Keir Starmer. Like the corrupt Palestinian Authority, Labour has nothing to offer. A new movement must be built to break Britain’s Zionist links, alongside the steadfast youth fighting for a Palestine liberated from the river to the sea.
Louis Brehony
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 286 February/March 2022
