In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East
Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live
in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the
1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger
in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting
abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.

There
is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers
barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last
winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the
Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without
permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted.
It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the
certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.

But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest.
The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000
Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians
have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme
park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by
trigger-happy security guards.

Throughout the Arab areas of
Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with
land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the
prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third
of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was
occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant
violation of international law.

Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday.
But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and
attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation
goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the
demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has
accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.

About 87,000 Bedouin live in
45 “unrecognised” villages, without rights or basic public services,
because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the
land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of
Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.

The
Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a “ticking time bomb”. The
village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and
each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government
wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships.
But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.

At
the weekend, a mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat was torn down by the
army in the night. By Sunday afternoon, local people were already at
work on rebuilding it, as patriotic songs blared out from the PA system
and activists addressed an angry crowd.

The awakening of the Negev
Bedouin, many of whom used to send their sons to fight in the Israeli
army, reflects a wider politicisation of the Arab citizens of Israel.
Cut off from the majority of Palestinians after 1948, they tried to
find an accommodation with the state whose discrimination against them
was, in the words of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, “deep-seated and
intolerable” from the first.

That effort has as good as been
abandoned. The Arab parties in the Israeli Knesset now reject any idea
of Israel as an ethnically defined state, demanding instead a “state of
all its people”. The influential Islamic Movement refuses to take part
in the Israeli political system at all. The Palestinians of ’48, who now
make up getting on for 20% of the population, are increasingly
organising themselves on an independent basis – and in common cause with
their fellow Palestinians across the Green Line.

Palestinian
experience inside Israel, from land confiscations to settlement building
and privileged ethnic segregation, is not after all so different from
what has taken place in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. After 1948,
the Palestinians of Jaffa who survived ethnic cleansing were forced to
share their houses with Jewish settlers – just as Rifka al-Kurd is in
Jerusalem today. The sense of being one people is deepening.

That
has been intensified by ever more aggressive attempts under the
Netanyahu government to bring Israel’s Arab citizens to heel, along with
growing demands to transfer hundreds of thousands of them to a future
West Bank administration. A string of new laws targeting the Palestinian
minority are in the pipeline, including the bill agreed by the Israeli
cabinet last month requiring all new non-Jewish citizens to swear an
oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.

Pressure on
Palestinian leaders and communities is becoming harsher. A fortnight ago
more than a thousand soldiers and police were on hand to protect a
violent march by a far-right racist Israeli group through the
Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm. The leader of the Islamic Movement,
Ra’ed Salah, is in prison for spitting at a policeman; the Palestinian
MP Haneen Zoabi has been stripped of her parliamentary privileges for
joining the Gaza flotilla; and leading civil rights campaigner Ameer
Makhoul faces up to 10 years in jail after being convicted of the
improbable charge of spying for Hezbollah.

Meanwhile Israel
is also demanding that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah recognise
Israel as a Jewish state as part of any agreement. Few outside the
Palestinian Authority – or even inside it – seem to believe that the
“peace process” will lead to any kind of settlement. Even Fatah leaders
such as Nabil Sha’ath now argue that the Palestinians need to consider a
return to armed resistance, or a shift to the South African model of
mass popular resistance, also favoured by prominent Palestinians in
Israel.

As for the people who actually won the last elections,
Mahmoud Ramahi, the Hamas secretary general of the Palestinian
parliament, reminded me on Monday that the US continues to veto any
reconciliation with Fatah. He was arrested by the Israelis barely 24
hours later, just as talks between the two parties were getting going in
Damascus.

The focus of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has
shifted over the last 40 years from Jordan to Lebanon to the occupied
territories. With the two-state solution close to collapse, it may be
that the Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre stage.
If so, the conflict that more than any other has taken on a global
dimension will have finally come full circle.