People who see Netanyahu as the great Jewish avenger should know how low he’s willing to go in exploiting the memory of Jewish suffering.  

I can never get over the shamelessness with which Israeli nationalist power freaks will exploit people’s memories of anti-Semitic persecution for their own low purposes. Nobody’s better at it than Netanyahu; he can barely make a speech without waving around a document or two from some Holocaust-era archive. And he’s always got that furious expression on his face, as if to warn his audience not to even dare think that he’s faking it, that he’s using the memory of Jewish tragedy in the most calculated way, strictly to help him and his team get away with some new or old outrage – bombing Iran, killing Palestinians, building settlements, whatever. Netanyahu is very far from being the only Israeli nationalist known to work this scam, of course, but he’s the best at it. He looks so hurt and angry up there when he’s going on about Jewish victimhood, and he’s so audacious in wrapping himself in that mantle, that the average shmo is too intimidated to even say to himself that this guy is obviously laying it on too thick, he’s been doing it for 30 years, it’s a highly polished act. After all, that’s Bibi Netanyahu up there; snickering at him is like snickering at the Holocaust. So our leader goes on getting away with it.

I wish people who see Bibi as the Jewish avenger, brave and true, would be aware of how this guy used the memory of Jewish persecution yesterday. He broke new ground. For the purpose of removing Yair Lapid as the obstacle to his forming a right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government, Netanyahu likened the Yesh Atid party leader’s refusal to sit in a government with Haredi parties to past boycotts against Jews. He also identified Lapid’s stance with current international boycotts of Israel and of products made in the settlements. For the goal of pressuring Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler-backed Habayit Hayehudi party, to break his alliance with Lapid and join up with the Haredi parties in his next government, Netanyahu told a news conference last night:

As Jews who have suffered from bans, we cry out in protest. So, Mr. Bennett, are you with Lapid, that boycotter of Jews, or are you against him?

I suppose I should give Bibi...

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How the British Board of Jewish Deputies and its allies are smearing a decent critic of Israel as an anti-Semite – and the success they’re having.

The view in Israel of British Jewry is that they’re cowed by traditional British anti-Semitism and running scared from the “Muslim takeover” of the country. They’re not as chutzpahdik as the American Jews, supposedly. But I think Israel is selling the British Jews short, or at least their leaders. For the last month, the country’s Jewish machers have been smearing a member of Parliament as an anti-Semite with the sort of cynicism and relentlessness that could make their American counterparts envious. Chuck Hagel, meet David Ward.

A month ago, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ward, an MP from the Liberal Democratic party, posted this statement on his website:

Does that sound anti-Semitic? To the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and other stalwart communal bodies, it most certainly does. They immediately seized on Ward’s use of the term “the Jews” to accuse him of being an anti-Semite, and since then have been pressuring the Lib Dems to teach him a lesson. The party has obliged, chastising Ward publicly and ordering him this week to consult the party’s “Friends of Israel” organization to “identify and agree [on] language that will be proportionate and precise” when speaking out on the Mideast conflict, according to yesterday’s Jerusalem Post. (Note: In its properly outraged coverage of this story, the Jerusalem Post has taken to omitting Ward’s opening phrase, “Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools,” when quoting the statement from his website. Wonder why.)

Ward, an MP from Bradford East and a member of Parliament’s Britain-Palestine caucus, has been pretty defiant. While taking pains to say he didn’t mean to offend Jews, he’s stood by his statement about Israel. When Sky News suggested he was blaming Jews in general for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, he replied:

He went on to tell The Guardian:

The British macherdom is not amused. The Deputies and Leadership Council rebuked the Lib Dems for “a pedestrian and lackluster response to what amounts to anti-Semitism at the heart of parliament.” The Holocaust and Educational...

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Threat of Palestinian Authority’s collapse forces Netanyahu, who has humiliated Abbas and his people as often as possible, to try to placate them.

At the beginning of this week, when Palestinian riots threatened to get out of hand, especially if one of the hunger-striking prisoners died, what did Netanyahu do? He gave in. He announced on Sunday he was giving the Palestinian Authority its customs taxes for January, which he’d held back to punish Mahmoud Abbas for winning recognition for Palestinian statehood at the UN last November.

Palestinians throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, PA security troops do nothing to stop them – and Bibi Netanyahu immediately rewards them with a hundred million dollars! (That’s how he would frame it if some other prime minister had done what he just did.)

What’s going on here? Answer: Netanyahu is scared. What he’s scared of most, I think, is that the PA will collapse, or effectively collapse, meaning it will stop playing Israel’s collaborator by keeping a tight lid on Palestinian rebellion, and thereby force Israeli troops to go back into the cities, villages and refugee camps of the West Bank and do all the dirty work themselves – 24/7, just like they did before the Oslo Accords.

That is the Israeli nightmare, or at least the nightmare of Israelis who get paid to oversee the West Bank. If the PA stops policing the Palestinians and the IDF and Border Police take their place, not only is this going to require tens of thousands of Israelis, including reservists, to go put the Palestinians back in their cages and keep them there, it’s going to mean a return to the world’s TV screens of the David vs. Goliath scenes of the first Intifada 25 years ago. It’s going to mean not only Israeli deaths and injuries, but a much, much greater number of Palestinian ones.  If, in such a situation, the Palestinians were to stick to rocks and Molotov cocktails against Israel’s firepower, and, above all, if this were to happen on the watch of right-wing rejectionist Netanyahu, this would be a disaster for Israel and victory road for the Palestinians.

It may not happen, but that’s the direction things...

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After signing Tzipi Livni onto his coalition, Netanyahu doesn’t need Yair Lapid anymore – he can have the haredim and Naftali Bennett while pacifying Obama.   

Give the devil his due: Bibi pulled off a masterstroke yesterday by signing Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party to his coalition. Now he’s got clear sailing to his ideal government – one made up of the right wing and ultra-Orthodox, his base, but one that also keeps Obama and the Europeans off his back by giving the appearance – completely hollow – that he intends to try to move toward peace with the Palestinians. That’s Livni’s role, and she’ll be happy to play it; she’s been given the job of heading up negotiations with the Palestinians, which is what she always wanted, and it saves her from dying politically in the opposition with her six measly Knesset seats.

The important thing is that Netanyahu doesn’t need Yair Lapid anymore. Lapid was a problem – if Netanyahu gave in to his core demand to draft the haredim into military or civilian national service, he would have a haredi intifada on his hands and the haredim for enemies. But if on the other hand he rebuffed Lapid, whose Yesh Atid is the second largest party, he wouldn’t have enough support in hand to build a coalition, for which he needs a majority of the 120-member Knesset. But now he’s got Livni’s Hatnuah. Which means he can scoop up the haredim as well as Naftali Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party, which, despite Bennett’s rhetoric, doesn’t want to draft the haredim because that would mean a schism with the settlers, and really only wants to expand settlements, strengthen Jewish nationalism and bash the Palestinians, which Likud-Beiteinu and the prospective haredi parties in the government want to do, too, and which Livni won’t have the power to stop.

Given the choice of making an enemy out of Lapid or out of the haredim, Netanyahu was always a thousand times more scared of alienating the haredim. After all, they will be around long after Lapid is gone, which may happen earlier than expected if and when he is consigned to the opposition, where neither he nor his middle-class constituency ever wanted to be.

So Bibi, after seemingly being stymied...

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Over the violent protests of its fascist fan club, Beitar Jerusalem makes good on its promise to bring two Muslim players onto team. A small victory over racism, but a victory nonetheless. 

Even if it’s a drop in the ocean, it’s a pretty big drop: the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team, symbol of Israeli racism at its rawest, has been integrated with Muslim players – and it was done, in a manner of speaking, over the dead bodies of the team’s fascist youth movement, La Famiglia. The turning point came in the middle of the night last Thursday when arsonists torched the team’s headquarters, destroying its old pennants, jerseys, photographs and other mementos of its 76-year history. At yesterday’s game, dozens of La Famiglia fans were barred by police from entering Teddy Stadium, another bunch were kicked out during the game (along with some Israeli Arab fans of the opposing Sakhnin team, who were whistling during the singing of “Hatikva”). When one of Beitar’s two Chechen Muslim players made his debut, the cheers from the home stands reportedly were louder than the boos.

“We took an important step and we’re moving forward. In the end all the fans will understand that this is a done deal and there’s no turning back,” Beitar chairman Itzik Kornfein told Yedioth Ahronot.

Still, La Famiglia, whose ranks number in the thousands and who scream every sort of filth at Arab and black players, is not going away. When the police presence at Beitar games starts to thin out, probably next weekend, they will be back in full cry, or close to it. Anti-Arab and anti-black racism is seen and heard from hardcore fans of many Israeli teams (and from those of many European teams, for a little perspective) and this disease is not about to be eradicated. But its spread in Israel was just stopped; in fact, it was forced to retreat. Beitar’s ban on Arab players, unique among Israeli sports teams, is La Famiglia’s honor, and it enforced this ban from year to year through a reign of terror on Beitar’s management. “70 years of principle,” as a placard at a recent game put it. But despite the movement’s best efforts, Muslims Jebrail Kadiev and Zaur Sadayev, even though they have to go around with bodyguards off the field, are playing for Beitar Jerusalem. The soccer fascists of Israel’s capital...

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This week’s publication of a U.S.-funded study cleared the Palestinians of charges that their schoolbooks ‘demonize’ Israel. This was not, however, the first hoop they’ve been made to jump through, and it won’t be the last.

The Israeli and U.S. Jewish establishment reaction to the terrible news that the Palestinians don’t demonize Jews in their textbooks reminded me of the long-forgotten uproar over the Palestinian Covenant.  Same bullshit. The stout-hearted nationalist Jews in the U.S. and Israel were saying in unison, “How can we ever trust the Palestinians to make peace when their covenant talks about ”liberating all of Palestine’?” And they made this their cause celebre – they lobbied Congress, they lobbied Clinton (this was in the mid-to-late 1990s), and Clinton pressured Arafat, until finally Arafat convened the relevant PLO council and they voted to take out the offending phrases. Clinton even went to Gaza at the end of 1998 for the historic event. He told the assembly: “You have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there.”

I loved that. Nobody in Israel, no Jew on earth gave a good goddamn that they changed the Palestinian Covenant. But then none of them cared about the original “liberating all of Palestine” Palestinian Covenant, either. As soon as the vote in Gaza to amend it was finally taken, the whole issue vanished for the Israeli and American Jewish right as if it had never existed. This particular orange had been squeezed dry, and now it was time to move on – to find another issue over which to put the Palestinians on the defensive, to keep the world’s flashlight in their eyes and not in Israel’s, to find another hoop for them to jump through before Israel might be asked to slow the occupation train down just a tad.

So it is with the Palestinian textbooks. All this supposed distress over what the Palestinians are teaching their children about Israel and the Jews, this insistence that they clean up their textbooks as a condition for “peace”  - it’s another one of the old “stop Oslo” ploys of the Israeli and American Jewish right. A bunch of right-wing propagandists like Itamar Marcus and Palestinian Media Watch have been harping on all this “demonization” in Palestinian textbooks,...

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Under pressure over the issues of Iran and Israel at his Senate confirmation hearing, Obama’s nominee for defense secretary caves in completely.

Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing of Chuck Hagel was something out of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee sessions. “Senator Hagel, are you now or have you ever been a realist?” “Your soul is in peril, Senator – recant!”

And Hagel recanted, over and over again. Under pressure on Iran and Israel (among other taboo subjects), he apologized to his inquisitors for referring to the “Jewish lobby” (“I should have said ‘pro-Israel lobby’”), apologized for saying it “intimidated” people (“I should have said ‘influenced’”), caved in over saying the lobby had gotten Congress to do “dumb” things (couldn’t think of a dumb thing it had ever gotten Congress to do).

On Iran he recanted for opposing military force to stop it from going nuclear (“All options must be on the table,” and “My policy is one of prevention, and not of containment”), recanted for suggesting that the Revolutionary Guard was not a terrorist organization, also recanted for suggesting that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization.

Best of all, he apologized for having said Israel was not justified in “keeping Palestinians caged up like animals.” (“If I had the opportunity to edit that, like many things I’ve said, I would like to go back and change the words and meaning. I regret using that choice of words.”)

What an embarrassing thing to watch. What a blood-chilling, Orwellian  bunch, these interrogators, especially Lindsey Graham. Feeding them is the most virulent branch of the pro-war/anti-Muslim lobby: Sheldon Adelson, the Emergency Committee for Israel and Weekly Standard magazine, led by their hit men William Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Noah Pollak.

Hagel needs five Republican votes to get confirmed as secretary of defense; reports are that it’s touch and go. At this point, I don’t think it matters; he’s been so compromised, so smacked around by Israel’s enforcers, that he’d probably be afraid to say anything but “yes” to Netanyahu once he got to the Pentagon.

This was a spectacle of America and Israel at their worst. It was the worst of the Obama administration, too, a reminder of why this president’s second term is unlikely to be any better than his first as far as the Middle East...

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Yesterday morning’s air strike in Syria was apparently the latest instance of Israeli aggression posing as self-defense.

No Israeli public figure I’m aware of has spoken out against yesterday morning’s attack on an arms convoy transferring weapons (reportedly not chemical ones) from Syria to Hezbollah, which, according to foreign news agencies, was carried out by the Israel Air Force. Everybody here is scared – look what’s happening in Syria, there’s chemical weapons up there, the country’s breaking up. “The entire area is raging and we must be prepared and strong and determined in the face of any possible development,” Netanyahu said this week, and everybody, as usual when the leader invokes national security, is dutifully quiet.

But the jet bombers, according to those foreign sources, didn’t hit chemical weapons. And the air strike wasn’t aimed at that butcher Assad, whom everybody’s afraid of.

No, yesterday morning’s attack was part of the old war Israel’s been fighting, the one against Hezbollah. In it, Israel’s right to self-defense includes possession of weapons that can destroy Lebanon, as well as the continual dispatch of spy planes over that country. But if Hezbollah tries to get anti-aircraft missiles against those spy planes, or long-range, powerful missiles against Israel’s cities, then what’s that? That’s not Hezbollah arming itself in self-defense, that’s Hezbollah threatening Israel’s existence, which gives Israel the right to attack it. In self-defense, of course.

Yesterday morning’s air strike, according to AP, Reuters, the New York Times and other international media, hit a convoy of trucks in Syria that was likely carrying anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, and possibly heavy, long-range missiles, to Hezbollah. Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel wrote today:

Imagine what Israel would do if any foreign entity tried to fly spy planes over its airspace. But we’re entitled to because we’re good, and they’re not because they’re bad.

The new fear of chemical weapons “falling into the wrong hands” – as if Assad’s are the right hands! – was not addressed by this attack. “In the estimation of experts, the target was not chemical weapons – due to the fear that they could disperse in the air,” wrote Yedioth Ahronoth, citing foreign reports. (So chemical weapons can disperse in the air if they’re hit by bombs. Interesting thought. Does this mean that jet bombers may not be the best way to deal with them?)

The...

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If Yair Lapid’s party takes over the Education Ministry, it could bring an end to the Greater-Israelization of the country’s schools and universities.

After 45 years of occupation and no end in sight, it would be better for Israel to have a completely right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government than a right-wing/centrist one with Yair Lapid, Kadima and possible other fig leaves. A purely hardline government would attract more opposition, especially abroad, while a right/center amalgam will fool a lot of people into thinking things aren’t so bad. In short, a Bibi/Lapid government is more beneficial to the occupation than a Bibi/Yishai government – and it looks virtually certain that a Bibi/Lapid government is what we’re going to get.

Yet while ending Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is the overriding need, and while a wall-to-wall extremist government is preferable to an extremist/moderate cabinet for that reason, there is one very important accomplishment that only a centrist party like Lapid’s Yesh Atid could make in the next government. I’m not talking about his goal of mainstreaming the haredim into the army and workplace, or of lowering the cost of living. I think the haredim are too numerous and zealous to be overpowered, and I don’t see a go-go capitalist system, which is what Lapid supports, making life much easier for average people. Instead, what I mean is putting an end to the radical right-wing politicization of Israeli schools and, to a lesser extent, universities at the hands of the education minister, which is what Likud’s Gideon Sa’ar has done over the last four years.

In an op-ed earlier this month titled “The subduing of academia,” Haaretz education writer Or Kashti listed the afflictions Sa’ar has visited on the schools:

That was in the schools; in the universities, Kashti wrote, Sa’ar was responsible for “the threat to close the politics and government department at Ben-Gurion University, the upgrade to university status of the University Center of Samaria in the settlement of Ariel, and recognition … of the [right-wing] Shalem Center in Jerusalem as an institution authorized to award bachelor’s degrees for two programs.”

More than any education minister I can remember, Sa’ar has imposed the governing Israeli worldview...

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Our post-election depression comes from being reminded that an end to tyranny and inevitable war is as distant as ever. It’s time for new ideas – or old ideas that haven’t been tried.

Well, that was fun. And now it’s over, and who really cares whether Yair Lapid becomes minister of this or minister of that; the twin elephants of tyranny over the Palestinians and the inevitability of war are still in the living room, and if anything, the country seems more determined than before to pretend they aren’t there.

For those who do see those elephants, there’s a sense of let-down, of anti-climax: all that excitement for nothing. It’s post-election depression, caused by the realization that after all the excitement over Da’am or Meretz or Hadash or whoever, an end to the tyranny and the automatic wars remains so damn far away. After all the excitement, we’re back to normal with a thud, and we remember with depressing clarity that this gradualism isn’t working, that it plays right into Israel’s hands, and that something has to change. So I think it’s time to forget the election, to treat the formation of the government as entertainment at most, and think anew about how to force the change, how to uproot the status quo.

I keep coming back to one conclusion: Israel isn’t going to do it, and the West isn’t going to force Israel’s hand, certainly not now. It’s up to the Palestinians. That’s not fair, but that’s reality.

The best that I or any other non-Palestinian can do is offer ideas and support for supportable Palestinian goals and tactics. And it seems to me that the Palestinians have to scare the shit out of this country, and the best ways I’ve heard of to do that are 1) taking Israel to The Hague, and 2) demanding Israeli citizenship for the 4 million-plus Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Regarding the first tactic, taking Israel to the International Criminal Court, the Palestinian Authority would face a backlash from the United States, and very possibly a cutoff of U.S. funds. But at some point, the Obama administration would be disgraced, while the Palestinians would gain huge international political support (and probably money). Punishing the Palestinians for taking their case to the world’s highest arbiter of justice is a losing proposition for Obama, and it seems he’s decided he...

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Bibi will be the lamest of ducks in his next and last term as PM. Hold the applause, though – what’s rising up to take his place is worse. 

If, as expected tomorrow, Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu gets in the low-30s in Knesset seats, this election will mark the beginning of the post-Netanyahu era. Bibi will remain as prime minister as long as the new government survives, but he will be a lame duck, helpless to rein in the demagoguery and wild initiatives of the quasi- and not-so-quasi-fascists in his coalition. He will watch the chasm widen between Israel and the West, Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and Egypt, Turkey and the rest of the Middle East, and be unable to slow things down with some phony ameliorative. Whether there will be a full-blown confrontation between Israel and any of its adversaries during Netanyahu’s coming term, I don’t know, but I feel pretty sure that one of the things that will fall into that chasm is his political career.

Why do I say this? Because winning in the low 30s in Knesset seats – or even in the mid-30s – means a huge defeat for Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu, which went into the campaign with 42 seats combined. Joining the two parties on one ticket was Bibi’s doing, he ran a one-man campaign (again), so the electorate’s verdict stands as a rejection of him personally, and the bitterness inside Likud for all the Knesset seats they didn’t win and all the party hacks who didn’t get elected falls on him, too.

As the old L.A. Lakers announcer Chick Hearn used to say when a player tried to get too fancy and ended up losing the ball, the mustard’s off the hot dog. Bibi, whatever anyone could say about him as a statesman, knew how to appeal to the public, to attract support and votes – but even this is gone now. His handling of the 2013 election campaign will go down as one of the worst political performances by an Israeli leader ever. Yesterday’s pathetic attempt to win back Mizrahi votes by rolling out the popular Likudnik Moshe Kahlon is just the latest example.

Bibi, 63, is now the second-longest serving Israeli prime minister after David Ben-Gurion. After...

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The actual right-wing bloc looks set to win over 100 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in Tuesday’s election. There’s only one reason to vote against it: the future. 

“Right-wing bloc’s majority slashed,” read the headline over today’s election poll in Haaretz. “The gap is closing,” according to the poll in today’s Yedioth Aharonoth. Both surveys showed the right-religious bloc getting 63 Knesset seats and the center-left-Arab bloc getting 57, and both showed the steadily weakening Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu down to 32.

Even if it is still clear to everyone that Netanyahu will lead the next government, many people will likely gather from these findings that maybe the next government isn’t going to be “the most extreme in Israel’s history,” as has been the expectation.

Forget it. This will be the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, because what passes for the “center-left” is actually the right. There are two overriding questions in this country, two issues that define left and right: occupation and war. Occupation and war are the status quo, and there’s no center about it: You’re either trying to end it, which puts you on the left, or you’re not, which puts you on the right.

Under Shelly Yachimovich, the Labor Party has emphatically stopped trying to end the occupation, and continues in its support of any war any Israeli government wants to start. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party follows the exact same line. Meanwhile, Hatnuah’s Tzipi Livni has focused her campaign on ending the conflict with the Palestinians, which would seem to put her on the left, but her positions are so vague – except her refusal to accept even one Palestinian refugee back into Israel – that it’s hard to take her seriously. Worse, she seems bent on joining the next government; if she’s not decisively on the right yet, that appears to be where she’s heading. And if Shaul Mofaz’s Kadima gets the two seats that the Haaretz and Yedioth polls give him, he’ll go into Bibi’s government like a freight train.

But the most obvious thing that makes the “center-left-Arab bloc” an illusion, that prevents it from being even a potential alternative, is that none of these so-called center-left parties would ever form a government with any of the three Arab parties. (The oldest of them, Hadash, has a Jewish Knesset member and many Jewish supporters, but remains predominantly Arab.)...

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It’s not what the Jewish majority likes to believe. 

A common Jewish Israeli criticism of Arab Knesset members is that they do a disservice to their constituents by focusing on high politics, mainly the Palestinian issue, instead of dealing with bread-and-butter economic issues that would really help them. (There may be something self-serving about this line of criticism, but who knows?) Last week I went to Jedeida-Makker, an Israeli Arab village a couple of miles inland from Acre, to hear Balad MK Haneen Zoabi give a campaign speech. The residents, including the local council head, indeed told her that she and her Arab colleagues in Knesset should concentrate more on the day-to-day problems of Arab citizens and less on the occupation. However, their complaints offered no vindication whatsoever to Israeli Jews who believe they know what’s best for the Arabs of this country, better than the Arabs do themselves.

The day-to-day, bread-and-butter economic problems the residents talked about all exemplified Israeli contempt for Arab rights. In other words, for Israeli Arabs, the issues they care most about are as highly political and uncomplimentary to Israel as can be.

Before Zoabi’s speech to about 50 people in a Balad campaign office, a local party activist and former Jedeida-Makker deputy council head, Mohasen Kais, showed me a court order he’d gotten a few weeks before. It said he owed the Israel Lands Authority – the state – about $80,000 for nearly a half-century of unpaid land use fees, and that if he didn’t pay it within 30 days, it was up to him to demolish the house and vacate the land, otherwise the “rightful” owner, the ILA, would do the job at his expense.

Kais, 60, says he’s lived in the house since his father bought it in the mid-1960s; his family lives on the top floor now while his brother’s family lives below. The Kaises come from what used to be a nearby Palestinian village – Mohasen said its name was Qurqurdani – that was destroyed in the 1948 war. The family migrated to different villages, to Lebanon, and finally in the early 1950s to Jedeida-Makker.

“First they destroyed our villages, took our land and made us refugees, now they want to do it again,” he said.

About three-quarters of Jedeida-Makker’s 19,000 people are former refugees and their descendants. Dozens of local households have received court orders like the one that...

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