SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: It has always been about a Jewish state designed to create and maintain a Jewish majority on a land that was 90 percent non-Jewish before the mass arrival of Zionists

Translated from French

Scholars, journalists, and jurists around the world are compiling a detailed inventory of all the ways in which the crimes committed by Israel since October 2023 constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides that could lead to legal proceedings. But history goes far beyond the horrors of the past year. Citizenship, as I possess it, has been a material element of a long-standing genocidal process. Since its creation, the Israeli state has relied on the normalization of supremacist laws based on ethnic criteria to support a military regime whose clear colonial objective is the elimination of Palestine. At the top of the form I had brought to the consulate that day is a quote from the 1952 citizenship law, the legal basis on which my status was conferred at birth. The reason I am renouncing this status is indeed directly linked to this law—or rather to the situation on the ground in the 1950s, the context of the Nakba, which shaped this law.
In 1949, in the months following the signing of the armistice agreements that ostensibly ended the 1948 war, the Zionist settlers, who had succeeded in massacring and expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population in the territories now under their control, began seeking ways to secure their militarized garrison state. Their most pressing concern was to ensure that the Palestinians who had been driven from their ancestral villages and farms would never return, that their lands would pass into the legal possession of the new state, ready to be occupied by the next waves of Jewish immigrants from abroad. More than 500 Palestinian villages and towns were emptied of their substance in the space of a year, and it was now time to erase them forever from the map.
Although it took many decades for the settler-colonial state to officially recognize that it was a Jewish supremacist entity de jure, the practice of ethnic cleansing was embedded in the state’s military, social, and legal strategy. It has always been about a Jewish state designed to create and maintain a Jewish majority on a land that was 90 percent non-Jewish before the mass arrival of Zionists in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The completion of the ethnic cleansing process would indeed require aggressive engineering and, given the strong indigenous resistance, would never fully succeed. In 1949, the arbitrarily drawn borders were still porous, and the rural territories under Zionist occupation were far from fully under their control. The newly displaced Palestinians lived in tents just a few kilometers from their homes. Many of them survived on a single meager meal a day and were determined, after the armistice, to return to their houses and harvests.

Avi Steinberg was born in Jerusalem to American Orthodox Jewish parents who returned to the USA in 1993.
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