Forced evictions in Israel-Palestine

By Amelia Smith and Penny Green

This report examines the ongoing role of Israel’s systematic and criminal programme of forced evictions in mandate Palestine. Our fieldwork took us from East Jerusalem and Ramallah, to the northern reaches of the Jordan Valley, Yafa [Jaffa] and unrecognized villages near Tel Aviv, to Hebron in the southern West Bank, Bethlehem and into the heart of the Negev where 70,000 desert Palestinian Bedouins are under threat of mass forced displacement.

We focus on the key political, ‘legal’, strategic, ideological and violent mechanisms Israel has deployed in its programme of expansion. Through the use of a number of case-studies we hope to provide clarity and understanding to a planned and intentionally complex set of criminal state practices employed by the state of Israel to remove Palestinians from their historic lands. Those practices are best defined as ethnic cleansing within a system of apartheid and include: village destruction, house demolitions, the destruction of farmland and olive groves, land confiscation, access restrictions to natural resources, denial of residency rights, denial of refugee return, all underpinned by a process now defined as Judaisation.

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