Notes on the Palestinian Diaspora

Here I'm puzzling together several links that at first glance appear disconnected, but share several common threads: faith, migration, land claims, cultural identity and even suicide. Here are the three links:

• 'This Place Is Only for Jews': The West Bank's Apartheid Springs -- Settlers have taken over dozens of springs in the West Bank, all of them on private Palestinian land, and are keeping the owners away. Rina Shnerb, a Jewish teen, was murdered last week at one of them.
• Bomb Kills Israeli Girl, 17, at a West Bank Oasis (August 23) An Israeli teenager was killed and her father and brother were wounded on Friday when a homemade bomb exploded near a natural spring in the occupied West Bank, one of many small oases where Palestinians and Israelis seek to cool off but that have become hot spots in the conflict.
• “We Refugees” – an essay by Hannah Arendt Originally published in January 1943 as “We Refugees” in a small Jewish journal called Menorah, the piece captures what it really means to be a refugee – the endless anxiety, ravaging despair, deluded optimism, jolting absurdity and even the humour of the “refugee.”

The first link is from Israel's Haaretz, the second from the New York Times, the third from Amro Ali's blog (faculty at American University, Cairo) whom I follow via Twitter.

The first link caught my eye with the reference to apartheid. I was expecting as I read to find yet another example of how Palestinians are considered and treated as second-class people, both inside Israel and the Occupied Territories. I knew about settlements in the Occupied Territories, formerly Palestinian land now designated for the exclusive use of Israelis. But I don't remember reading about open discrimination on the part of civilians, not to this extent:

According to Dror Etkes, the founder of Kerem Navot, an organization that studies Israeli land policy in the West Bank, there are today more than 60 springs in the central West Bank that settlers coveted and seized as part of a project of plunder that began 10 years ago. The landscaping and renovation work at about half of them has been completed, the dispossession made absolute, the Palestinians blocked from even approaching the springs and their lands. Other springs targeted by the settlers are in various stages of takeover. 

Etkes explains that the seizure of the springs is part of an ambitious plan of a far larger scope – to take control of the remaining open spaces in the West Bank. This is being done by way of creation of bathing areas and hiking trails, designation of graves of Jewish spiritual figures as “holy sites,” and development of picnic sites, all on Palestinian-owned private land. The aim: to isolate the Palestinian villages, instead of isolating settlements, and of course to seize more and more land. 

Last Friday this criminal undertaking claimed a high price: The gurgling waters were tainted with red – the blood of Rina Shnerb, a teenager who was killed by an improvised explosive device that had been planted next to the Ein Bubin spring; her father and brother were also wounded in the blast.

The rest of the article is interesting with more information. But the report of a young Israeli woman killed by an IED, immediately assumed to be of "terrorist" origin, got me sidetracked. Why has this not been another big news story? Every time yet another rocket is intercepted by Israel's iron dome defense, every time there is an assault or attempted assault by a Palestinian on a Jew, it always seems to make headlines. So why not this? The NY Times article has the answer.

The second link from NY Times was a way of validating facts in the first. 

An Israeli teenager was killed and her father and brother were wounded on Friday when a homemade bomb exploded near a natural spring in the occupied West Bank, one of many small oases where Palestinians and Israelis seek to cool off but that have become hot spots in the conflict. 

Government officials declared it an act of terrorism, and security forces set up roadblocks near Ramallah to try to catch those responsible. 

The attack at Ein Bubin, a spring in the wooded hills near the small settlement of Dolev, roughly midway between the cities of Ramallah and Modiin, killed the teenager, Rina Shnerb, 17, the authorities said. She had visited the spring with her father, Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, and an older brother, Dvir, 19. Both men suffered shrapnel injuries and were airlifted to Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. (...)

Springs on the West Bank have become flash points between Palestinians who bathe or water their flocks in them and Jewish settlers who have increasingly sought to prevent them from doing so. A 2012 United Nations report identified 30 springs that had been completely “taken over” by settlers and another 26, including Ein Bubin, that were “at risk” of takeover, whether by frequent tourism or by the presence of armed patrols seen as intimidating to Palestinians.
To the settlers, however, the security precautions are necessary, as shown by Friday’s attack, as well as by a chilling murder in 2015 at the same spot.

Near the end of the report this event in the Occupied Territories, not in Israel proper or even in any of the settlements, adds fuel to the anti-Palestinian themes of Israeli politics.

Israel has an election on Sept. 17, and Ayelet Shaked, the former justice minister who is battling Mr. Netanyahu for right-wing votes, called Friday’s attack “a punch in the stomach” that damaged the sense of security of every Israeli.
“Today it’s Dolev, tomorrow it’s Tel Aviv,” she told the nationalist news outlet Arutz Sheva.

This brings me to the third link, the extended Hannah Arendt quote.
I have been trying to find the right language to fit these links together. The commonality is not just the violence or even the legal/protocol entanglements. The part that's easy to overlook are the features that both Jews and Palestinians have in common.

• Refugees Both groups have experienced life as refugees
• Immigrants It follows that all refugees must become immigrants elsewhere.
• Migration Even if moving from one place to another is not forced, migration is a natural impulse throughout human history. 
• Displacement There are many reasons for people to relocate, including needing more land, expanded commercial activity and religious freedom. 

Both groups have been persecuted over time, even to the point of ethnic cleansing. Both have been forced to flee to safety when forces out of their control became existential threats. Both have generational roots as refugees (migrants, if you like), relocating whole families, even communities, to places with different customs, languages, political environments and cultural traditions. One might think they share enough in common that embracing one another would be more appealing than fighting. But instead the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has endured all my life, ever since the birth of Israel. Few people alive today remember a time when these two groups were not fighting.

In 1943 Arendt says:

...as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several times—we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans. The most optimistic among us would even add that their whole former life had been passed in a kind of unconscious exile and only their new country now taught them what a home really looks like. It is true we sometimes raise objections when we are told to forget about our former work; and our former ideals are usually hard to throw over if our social standard is at stake. With the language, however, we find no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language—their German is a language they hardly remember.

It is a historic irony that Israel bases her claims to all the real estate from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River on biblical promises, together with historic tribal origins. Palestinians make the same claims, pretty much on the same grounds, because they are the ones who have actually lived on that real estate most of that time. Bones and other archaeological remains from from both sides lie buried all over the place, including Jerusalem, so both sides can point to hard evidence.

A Palestinian diaspora has historic roots much further than the Nakba. The History of Palestine at Wikipedia is quite a long article. The geopolitical divisions of what we call the Middle East together made up historic Palestine. This is elsewhere at Wikipedia:

Palestinian individuals have a long history of migration. For instance, silk workers from Tiberias are mentioned in 13th-century Parisian tax records. However, the first large emigration wave of Arab Christians out of Palestine began in the mid-19th century as a response to the oppression of Palestinian Christians in Ottoman Palestine.
Since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Palestinians have experienced several waves of exile and have spread into different host countries around the world. In addition to the more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948, hundreds of thousands were also displaced in the 1967 Six-Day War. In fact, after 1967, a number of young Palestinian men were encouraged to migrate to South America. Together, these 1948 and 1967 refugees make up the majority of the Palestinian diaspora. Besides those displaced by war, others have emigrated overseas for various reasons such as work opportunity, education and religious persecution. In the decade following the 1967 war, for example, an average of 21,000 Palestinians per year were forced out of Israeli-controlled areas. The pattern of Palestinian flight continued during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Non-violent conflict resolution is the only way past challenges like this. Even then generations of hard work are sure to follow.