Israel Turns "Creeping Transfer" into "Hidden Transfer"

By Jerry Levin

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin says Israel has responded to US protests by temporarily halting its eight-month campaign of family de-unification in the West Bank, also known as "creeping" or "silent" transfer. Don't believe it for a minute.

On Jan. 31, after complaints from human rights activists in Israel, and US State Dept. intervention described by the Washington Post as a "call ... for Israel to be more flexible about expulsions," Rabin announced they would be "frozen for the time being." Taken at face value, this would end the military's practice of swooping down on West Bank villages late at night, barging roughly into preselected homes, and prodding into commandeered taxicabs frantic "non-resident" wives, pregnant women, children and even four-day-old babies.

These expellees, who have included the very old, the sick, and the infirm, are given little or no time to dress, pack diapers or grab milk for babies before being rushed to the border, told they will never be allowed to return, and forced across the bridge into Jordan.

One woman in her nineties was roused from her bed, pushed by soldiers into an auto before she could even put on shoes, and forced penniless and barefoot out of the country of her birth.

A Crucial Census

Like her, many of the so-called non-residents and virtually all of their families had been living in Palestine since long before the creation of the state of Israel. But because Israel has conferred the right to live in their own land only on Palestinians who were present and counted in a crucial census immediately after the Six-Day War, when some 200,000 Palestinians had taken refuge or been driven into Jordan, tens of thousands of Palestinians who came back on visitors' permits are aliens so far as the Israeli occupation is concerned. Israel admits that since 1967 it has only approved 13,509 of 88,429 (15 percent) requests for humanitarian "family reunification," a mechanism supposedly created to allow husbands, their wives and children to live together.

That is a "natural right," says Israel Shahak, the long-time Israeli civil and human rights activist. "There is no other place in the world where this is done. Not even Hong Kong. The Vietnamese who were expelled from Hong Kong were not from Hong Kong. Hidden transfer is like expelling the people of Hong Kong from Hong Kong."

Besides the obvious fact that Rabin described the halt as only temporary, my interviews on both sides of the Jordan River with West Bank families, their expelled relatives in Jordan, and Jordanian officials revealed that what he proffered was not a concession but a smokescreen. He had already found other ways to accomplish the same purpose.

Those interviews disclosed that Israel has successfully diversified its creeping transfer program—not with exact copies of the original, but with equally virulent mutants extremely difficult to document.

"Hidden transfer is like expelling the people of Hong Kong from Hong Kong."

For instance, I talked to several young men who had applied for permission to leave the West Bank to visit their expelled wives for short periods. They say they were told they would be allowed to leave only if they signed an agreement promising not to return for three to five years. Corroboration was given by their wives in Jordan.

Other young men tell of having their ID cards confiscated with the warning that they will not get them back until they send their wives back across the border.

An increasing number of young men were threatened with jail if they fail to sign an agreement that says they will send their nonresident wives back over the border by a specified date.

Since, technically speaking, such actions are voluntary, those removals of Palestinian spouses and children are harder to document. They are, in fact, expulsions, but without the attention-attracting pre-dawn raids, screaming wives and wailing babies. They create only confused, harassed and frightened men and women who may or may not think to let one of the documenting human rights agencies know what is happening.

Jordanian officials revealed to me yet another form of expulsion. This involves Palestinians who possess valid West Bank identification and the necessary documents permitting them to travel outside the occupied territories but who are nevertheless refused entry to the West Bank by Israeli authorities when they try to go home. Some are given no reason for being turned back at the bridge crossings, while others are told that there is simply no record of their West Bank identity in the Israeli computer. Jordanian Interior Ministry officials gave me a list of 450 such Palestinians.

Another Rabin "concession" was removing the power to order expulsions from midlevel functionaries and granting it solely to the chief military administrator for the occupied territories, Shmuel Goren.

But specialists point out that kicking the decision upstairs will not necessarily reduce dark-of-night expulsions if they resume. It should not take a high-level administrator like Goren long to review and sign a series of orders that would result in expulsions at the same rate as before, or even greater.

The Underlying Problem of Family Reunification

Since Rabin was dealing with the problem of expulsion, not the underlying problem of family reunification, he did not talk about liberalizing the policy or about allowing the return of those expelled since creeping transfer began in late May 1989. Although Rabin talked about only "one or two" expulsions, Israeli officials admitted to 251 individuals expelled in 1989. Jordanian officials told me the number was closer to 400.

Liberal Knesset member Dedi Zucker of the Civil Rights and Peace Movement (Ratz Party), an outspoken opponent of family deunification, charges, "At the same time that Israel is using the argument of family reunion to get Jews from the Soviet Union, we don't have a family reunion policy that lets Palestinians live together normally as wives and husbands ... It is not only a double standard, it is hypocrisy."

And that double standard is motivating Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to draft legislation that would raise US aid to Israel by providing an additional $500 million to resettle Soviet Jews. Even as some Israelis are refining "creeping transfer" into "hidden transfer" of Palestinians from their homes on the West Bank, other Israelis, with the help of powerful friends in the US, are perhaps insinuating Soviet Jews into the same area, and seeking US help to offset the costs of building them homes.

Jerry Levin, former CNN Bureau Chief in Beirut, was the first of the "forgotten"American hostages in Lebanon. Kidnapped on March 7, 1984, he spent 11-1/2 months in solitary confinement.