Copyright

Penny Green; Amelia Smith

Published On

2023-06-26

Page Range

pp. 193–210

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

Media

Illustrations1

12. Evicting Palestine

  • Penny Green (author)
  • Amelia Smith (author)
Chapter of: For Palestine: Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group(pp. 193–210)
Through the use of a number of case-studies we have documented a planned and intentionally complex set of criminal practices employed by the state of Israel to remove Palestinians from their historic lands. Those practices include: village destruction, house demolitions, the destruction of farmland and olive groves, land confiscation, access restrictions to natural resources, denial of residency rights and the denial of refugee return, all underpinned by a process now defined as Judaisation. These are facilitated through a range of formal and informal practices, notably discriminatory zoning and planning restrictions, the creation of militarised zones, forestation programmes, the illegal settlement programme, ‘unrecognising’ Palestinian villages, the separation wall, security checkpoints, service removal, a programme of Bedouin urbanisation, suppression of resistance and impunity for state and settler violence. We examined forced evictions not only inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Gaza was closed to us) but inside that part of mandated Palestine which became Israel, where 1.4 million Israeli Arabs/Palestinians still live, many under threat of forced eviction.

Contributors

Penny Green

(author)
Professor of Law and Globalisation, Head of the School of Law and Founder/Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary, University of London

Penny Green, who gave the twelfth Hurndall Memorial Lecture in 2017, is Professor of Law and Globalisation, Head of the School of Law and Founder/Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London. Professor Green has published extensively on state crime, state violence, mass forced evictions/displacement and resistance to state violence. She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, Palestine/Israel, Tunisia and Myanmar. Professor Green’s most recent projects include a comparative study of civil society resistance to state crime in Turkey, Tunisia, Colombia, Myanmar, PNG and Kenya; Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya; and forced evictions in Palestine/Israel. Her books include State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption (2004) and State Crime and Civil Activism (2019). In 2015 she and her ISCI colleagues Thomas MacManus and Alicia de la Cour Venning published their seminal work on the Rohingya Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar and in 2018 published Genocide Achieved: Genocide Continues.

Amelia Smith

(author)

Amelia Smith is a recognised name within the human rights and global issues sector. As a columnist and author of features she works closely with communities facing the most serious challenges within the UK, Egypt, Syria and the MENA region. She has edited two non-fiction books about Egypt and the Arab Spring and interviewed scores of political prisoners and their families. Her work has been translated into many languages.