It seems like the issue of Palestinian freedoms in Israel proper has come up a few times already today, and I finally want to publish a note that my friend the Queen of Sheba sent to a few friends a few weeks back. She is a European woman, half-Muslim, who worked in Haifa for an NGO. The issue is not whether Palestinian Arabs would prefer life in Israel to life in neighboring countries, a "specious" point Anees of Jerusalem has addressed here before. The point of this post is: What does it mean to be a second-class citizen?
My work here is very difficult. To be honest there isn’t a single day
when I don’t leave work completely depressed, sometimes in tears. The
amount of abuse is at a level that you cannot even imagine unless you
live here.
The majority of my work is with Palestinians living in
Israel. These people suffer the most outrageous discrimination within
a country where they are meant to be equal citizens. There are little
things- for example, when you get your dorms at university they are
given based on a point system, and you get points if you serve in the
military. Since the Palestinians don’t serve, they don’t get points
and they live in the worst dorms. If you want to study medicine there
is a minimum age of 21 for entry, which is how old the Jewish kids are
after 3 yrs of the military, so Palestinian students need to just
waste 3 years waiting if they want to do medicine and end up studying
something else instead. [Palestinians are exempted from mandatory military service; though the IDF has many Druse members] And on top of this there is actually an
exception to the rule and you can start at 18 IF you are endorsed by
the military- so again only Jews. These are the small issues.
Then
there is a place near me which is an Arab village and because the
funding in Arab areas is so much less the government decided not to
fund the public school anymore, and not to provide buses for the
children to go to the nearest town to go to school so a few weeks ago
a 5 year old girl was walking to school and the road passes train
tracks- and the girl was hit and killed by a train. In another area-
the Negev valley- where the Bedouins live- the government says that
because they do not have the deeds to the land that they have been
living on for centuries it will not recognize their towns and
therefore no services are provided. There is one village which has an
electricity pole right in the middle of it, but the village itself has
no running water or electricity.
These are a few among hundreds of things; I could go on for pages, so
if you are interested I can write more about it. The area where I live
in Haifa is the most run-down because it is an Arab neighborhood; so
the government does not repave the roads, fix the pipes, etc.
