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Israeli
soldiers storming the house of Etaf Qassem whom they killed in Tulkarm
on 01/05/2006. |
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Palestinian demonstrators and International peace activists run away
from a stun grenade explosion during a protest against the
controversial Israeli Separation Wall in the West Bank village of
Bilin May 5, 2006. |
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Palestinian policemen struggle with Palestinian youths as they
start to remove dozens of stone throwers from the Karni border
crossing with Israel to prevent serious clashes with Israeli
soldiers |
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Reports |
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Israeli Palestinian Arabs Poorest, Most Marginalized Citizens
By Reilly Vinall*
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Although much of the
outside world's attention to the Israel/Palestine conflict is
focused on the occupation of the Palestinian territories, there is
another great injustice that is often overlooked: the situation of
the population of over one million Palestinians who live inside
the borders of Israel and hold Israeli citizenship. Although they
represent almost 20% of the country's population, the "Israeli-
Arabs" have long been among the poorest and most marginalized of
Israel's people. "The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across The
Jewish/Arab Divide," is an autobiographical account by Susan
Nathan, a British Jewish woman who immigrated to Israel in 1999 in
accordance with the Law of Return. However, in 2002, she left her
home in Tel Aviv to live in Tamra, an ethnically Arab town in
northern Israel, in order to experience for herself the conditions
of Israel's Arab minority. Her experience is a remarkable story
that poignantly exposes the inequality that continues to exist
within Israel.
During her youth, Susan Nathan spent much time with her family and
friends in apartheid-era South Africa. The terrible injustices of
that county's society at the time left a great impression on her,
and helped her towards her eventual decision to cross the
Jewish/Arab divide in Israel. Although she arrived in Israel in
1999 as an ardent Zionist, over several years she became more and
more interested in discovering the true situation of the Arabs
inside Israel, who despite their sizable proportion of the
population, seemed all but invisible to her. This led to her
decision to move to Tamra, a single Jew in a town of over 25,000
Arabs. This was an unprecedented action in Israeli society.
Ms. Nathan befriended many people in the town of Tamra, and was
accepted by an Arab family as one of their own. The deep
friendships she developed reflect her view that despite the
unofficial policy of separation that is actively promoted by the
Israeli government, there is true hope of reconciliation and
cooperation. The situation in Tamra itself is a prime example of
the poor living conditions many Arabs face, largely as a result of
government policies.
Tamra grew very quickly over more than a half a century, due to an
influx of internally displaced refugees whose villages were
destroyed during the 1948 war. Large amounts of land that were
previously farmed by the area's Arab population had been
confiscated by the government and given to Jewish farming
cooperatives and hilltop settlements, whose inhabitants live in
luxury in comparison to Tamra's population. For example, in one of
these settlements, Mitzpe Aviv, the Jewish population is given
free access to the farmland that was confiscated from Tamra. On
average, each resident of Mitzpe Aviv has access to over ten times
the amount of land available to each resident of Tamra.
Despite having a rapidly growing population, the government
strictly defines Tamra's city limits and expansion outside of
those limits is forbidden. Any buildings erected outside the
delineated area will invariably be demolished or repossessed by
the state. As a result, Tamra has a terribly high population
density, with homes pressing upon each other. Moreover, the
Israeli state does not provide the city with anywhere close to
sufficient funding to provide such a dense population with a
modern standard of living. Nathan describes haphazard electric and
telephone lines and a poorly maintained and confusing network of
roads, which are lined with uncollected garbage. Since Tamra's
people are forbidden to expand outwards, they are forced to
continually increase their density and expand upwards in crowded
tenements. Despite the warmth and friendliness she received from
the population, Nathan admitted that the town sometimes felt like
"ghetto living," and described a "sense of suffocation."
The warmth with which Nathan was greeted in Tamra contrasts
sharply with the hostility that Arabs often encounter in Jewish
areas. According to Nathan's Arab friends, to visit a city like
Tel Aviv is to be a target, identifiable by language and
appearance. They feel a profound sense of being unwelcome, and
fear encountering overt hostility, or even violence. The Arabs
Nathan spoke to cited polls that have been published which
indicate that a majority of Israeli Jews want all Arabs expelled
from the country. They also mentioned hearing of attacks on Arabs
by Israeli youths and racist police officers.
The housing crisis and "ghettoization" of Tamra is a familiar
facet of life for Arabs in Israel. Across the country, Arabs are
refused building permits, so as to strictly define the land area
of Arab communities, and preserve land for Jewish farms and
settlements. As such, thousands of families build their homes
without official permits. Judged to be "illegal" by the
government, these homes are subject to demolition. Many families
recall police with bulldozers rolling into town at the crack of
dawn and tearing down houses, rendering them homeless in an
instant. Often these "illegal" homes rest on land that has been
inhabited for many generations by the Arab families.
An example of the discrimination and suspicion that Arab citizens
of Israel encounter, described by Nathan, is the security
procedures at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion International Airport. The
personnel at the airport use a main criterion of whether a
passenger is a Jew or a non-Jew, rather than an Israeli or a
non-Israeli, to determine threat. Jewish passengers are nearly
always given free passage without questioning. Foreigners are
asked questions, such as whether they have had dealings with
Arabs. Arab citizens themselves are inherently assumed to be a
danger. They are subject to long periods of questioning on their
activities, their acquaintances and reasons for travel. Body
searches are common. The treatment described is not only applied
to Arab youths, or those known for involvement in "subversive"
activities; even prestigious Arab journalists and university
professors have been given the same humiliating treatment.
The author also notes that many businesses, such as airlines and
hotels, do not have Arab towns, even fairly sizable ones such as
Tamra, registered on their computer databases. She was only able
to persuade Bezeq, the national telecommunications company, to
install a new line in her apartment in Tamra after several weeks
of requests, finally threatening to go to the media with
complaints of discrimination. It is Ms. Nathan's view that such
entrenched discrimination is intended to keep the Arab population
perpetually segregated, afraid to venture out of their confined
towns and villages. The only way to avoid getting into trouble
with the authorities, which is seemingly inevitable for Arabs in
predominantly Jewish areas, is to remain in their delineated
communities. As a result, "citizenship" of Israel takes on a
wholly different meaning, dependent on ethnicity.
Nathan describes at length the inequities of the country's
education system. Israel has developed two systems, separating
children along ethnic lines, with the ostensible justification of
allowing Arabs to preserve culture and heritage. However, it is
her view that this only permits the state to maintain a weak and
under-funded Arab educational system, with greatly lower academic
standards. Teachers for the Arab schools are approved by the state
security service, the Shin Bet, and the curriculum is designed to
remove references to Palestinian history and culture. For example,
there are no references to the Nakba, the forced depopulation of
Arab Palestine in 1948. One teacher lost his job for giving his
students a brief history of the PLO. The Shin Bet prohibits even
great Arab and Palestinian literature from inclusion in the
curriculum. Nathan tells another story by citing figures for
school funding in 2001, published by the Central Bureau of
Statistics in 2004, indicating that the average Arab student
received resources of approximately 105 British pounds yearly,
compared to 485 pounds spent on Jewish students.
Nathan describes the inherent discrimination against Arabs in
Israel's economy. Even highly educated Arabs are often forced to
work in sectors such as construction or factories because many
areas of the economy are strictly off-limits to Arabs, under the
pretext of the work being "security-related." According to Ms.
Nathan, the prohibited sectors include Israel's large
establishment of military industries, prisons, the aerospace
industry, airlines and airports, telecommunications firms, water
and electricity companies, the state textile industry and even the
Bank of Israel. Unemployment figures for the Arab population are
approximately double the national aggregate.
Another topic touched upon in the book is the plight of thousands
of internally displaced refugees in Israel. Many have been forced
into a semi-nomadic lifestyle, particularly the Bedouin people of
the Negev region in southern Israel. Approximately 70,000 Bedouins
live in terrible conditions in the Negev. Because the state is
unwilling to apportion them land and building permits to establish
proper towns, they must resort to living in tents and tin shacks.
Anything more permanent that is built is quickly deemed "illegal"
by the authorities and demolished. The same situation is true of
Arabs living across the country in temporary housing, grouped
together in what are officially termed "unrecognized villages."
The residents of these villages cannot hope to receive basic
services, such as electricity, running water, sewage services, or
well-built roads. At any moment, the bulldozers may roll in if the
residents attempt to erect permanent housing.
Nathan grew disenchanted with the supposedly "dovish" left-wing
parties in Israeli politics. Despite the Left's ostensible
position of supporting some level of Arab rights and statehood, it
is in fact the Labour Party that has overseen the most aggressive
periods of expansion of the illegal settlements in the occupied
territories. Labour contributed as much as Likud to producing
"facts on the ground." Even the most left-leaning parties that are
accepted into the political mainstream do not support "conceding"
any more to the Palestinians than the end of the occupation and
the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza - less than
one quarter of historic Palestine. They reject any notion of a
right of return for the Palestinian refugees expelled from their
homes since 1948. Additionally, even these supposedly left-wing
parties rarely, if ever, raise the issue of the injustices and
discrimination facing Palestinian citizens of Israel. Indeed, just
like the "hawkish" right-wing parties, the Israeli left is fully
determined to maintain demographic superiority over Arabs, no
matter how marginalized the Arab minority is to become. The number
of Israelis in the mainstream that truly support equality and
rights for Palestinians is appallingly low, Nathan believes.
Nathan visited the West Bank and observed the desperate situation
of its residents. She noted the complete dominance of the Israeli
Defense Forces in the territory, and how quickly homes and
infrastructure can be destroyed. One prominent issue is that of
the lack of access to water. The West Bank rests atop the largest
aquifers in Israel-Palestine, which is one reason cited for the
reluctance to end the military occupation. Despite the plentiful
source of water, most of it is taken by an Israeli company for
sale in their country and to settlers in the West Bank. Indeed,
Palestinians have access to water only at certain intervals, while
the illegal settlements throughout the territory have swimming
pools and sprinkler systems.
On one occasion, Ms. Nathan spoke to a former Israeli soldier who
served in a tank unit in the West Bank. The young man told her of
incidences during which he received direct orders to fire on
children throwing stones, civilian targets that could not possibly
be interpreted as posing a real threat to a tank.
Susan Nathan's eye-opening account of "The Other Side of Israel"
is rarely reported to the outside world. Although the war crimes
committed by the occupation forces have been documented, outsiders
rarely hear of the equally important issue of rights and equality
for Palestinians, both those under occupation and those in Israel
proper. Ms. Nathan's choice in moving to an Arab town represented
an action that is currently taboo in Israel - crossing the ethnic
divide. Having already been deeply influenced by her experiences
in apartheid South Africa, Nathan was equipped to recognize the
core issue that blocks understanding between Israelis and
Palestinians - the institutionalized segregation and state-induced
fear of Palestinians that undermines future peace and
understanding. Until the Israeli government is prepared to conduct
a massive reform in its treatment of Arabs, it is likely that
peace and reconciliation will remain nothing more than a dream.
*Reilly Vinall was an intern at the Council for the National
Interest in Washington, D.C. when he wrote this review.
Source: The
Arab Americans News.com
http://www.arabamericannews.com
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