More and more, the discrimination and repression faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens is surfacing in the mainstream, through media reports and alarmed NGO briefings. The stories just keep on coming: this week, Arab Knesset Members like Haneen Zoabi were accused of treachery, and threatened with expulsion from the Knesset and criminal proceedings (the ‘crime’ was to meet with the Palestinian Legislative Council speaker in the West Bank, a Hamas politician).
Then there was the High Court’s rejection of an appeal against the Citizenship Law which separates Palestinian families where one spouse has Israeli citizenship and the other is from the Occupied Territories. Praise for the ruling came from hard-liners and ‘liberals’ alike, and was explicitly framed as a victory in the battle to maintain a ‘Jewish majority’.
The various laws and proposed laws that have emerged in recent years – like the targeting of Nakba commemoration or the official legalisation of ‘selection committees’ in hundreds of communities – are laying bare a systematic pattern of discrimination that has been present since 1948. From the years of military rule over Palestinian citizens (which did not technically end until 1966), to the demolition of homes in an-Naqab (the Negev) in 2012, the aim has been the same: to ensure Jewish privilege and control over the indigenous Palestinians.
The mainstreaming of a critique of the occupation – and in particular, the settlements, or the actions in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ – has been undoubtedly beneficial, but has often been accompanied by an affirmation that Israel is, for all its ‘mistakes’, a beacon of democracy. This routine endorsement of Israel’s “democracy” goes hand in hand with a taboo on questioning Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, a juxtaposition that points towards the tension in Western liberal support for a state of affairs many would consider appalling in other circumstances.
Israel only has a ‘Jewish majority’ because of the expulsion and legislated dispossession of Palestinians. Israeli policies with regards to land, housing, immigration, and budgets, explicitly and implicitly favour Jewish citizens (and even Jewish non-citizens) at the expense of Palestinian citizens (and those Palestinians still excluded from their homeland).
This is the reality I have attempted to highlight in my new book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (which I’m thrilled to say comes with a foreword by MK Haneen Zoabi). This is what Israel advocacy groups don’t want to talk about: the truth behind the myth of a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state, and how that contradiction is at the heart of the conflict.
I really enjoyed your book. You are really freaking out the Hasbarists. I wish I had read it prior to visiting Israel. I asked my guide for an example of a mixed city where Jews and Palestinians lived side by side. He said Nazareth and pointed to the courthouse at Nazareth Illit and said there were Palestinian judges there.
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=254429
Sounds like a good book. The fictional ‘two states’ has been a very succesful sales policy by the Israeli propaganda machine. Despite the reality that Israel controls, and has done for a very long time, the land between the Jordan and the sea, the mythical two states has allowed Israel to promulgate the myth that ‘its’ bit is democratic, unlike the ‘other’ bit. In fact it is one entity which has been successfully gerrymandered to ensure an always Jewish majority and control. It is gerrymandered to consign nearly half of the citizens into a fictional, non-existent state which Israel allows the status of municipalities wholly and solely dependent on their benevolence (or otherwise, as they see fit). Since the state is the guarantor of human rights, the non-existent state of modern Palestine cannot guarantee or provide any human rights to its banished exile population – in fact Israel has robbed them of any rights, and thus self determination or democracy, by placing them in this limbo of a fictional state. Israel is steadily building over any geographical separation, and disallowing any division of resources to underline the point that the so-called ‘two states’ exist only notionally, both of them virtual states created by Israel to justify the gerrymandering of its vote and its privileges. Israel is overlaid on Palestine, adjusting and appropriating its history and culture to make Palestine look like Israel, and thus Palestine to look like the nothing which Israel has decided it is. Israel is conducting a vanishing act on Palestine, slowly erasing it from the map and its own perception, trying to convince everybody else of its manipulated fiction of history and geography. And what will be left is Gaza and mini-Gazas, stateless people, impoverished by, and held hostage by, a ruthlessly controlling dictatorship who will erase Palestinian and its people from their consciousness by building walls around them where it can’t see them. Thus they pretend they are a ‘democracy’.
Ben, I am sorry to ask you a question without reading the book.
Quite standard “hasbarah” claim is that Israel is an ethnic democracy not particularly different from tens of other such countries. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia etc. have some privileges for the dominant nationality. For example, Lithuania imposes Lithuanian first names on the citizens (I am not sure about permanent residents) and Lithuania alphabet which would perhaps change Benjamin White into Beniaminas Yaitas. My impression, however, is that Israel is quite extreme. Do you compare Israel with other “ethnic democracies”?
Wonderful title. How about, “Indians in the United States of America.”
2 other books which may interest your readers along similar themes:
‘The Other Side of Israel’ by Susan Nathan
And from a Mizrahi persepctive:
‘We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands’ by Rachel Shabi