At J Street, Leonard Fein, the tall and now white-haired Forward columnist, said in a promotional video that the greatest achievement of the Jews in the 20th century was the creation of Israel. I admit that his comment affected me. I have deferred a little in my mind to his feeling– out of respect for an elder. This is not so different from the feeling David Zellnik expressed to me, that he is a post-Zionist not an anti-Zionist, out of politeness toward the feeling of achievement Zionists have for what they’ve done. Well then I read the latest Middle East Report, and a shocking story by Monica Tarazi, describing in cold straightforward terms the treatment of the Bedouins in the Negev (in Arabic, the Naqab) desert, and I think, I really don’t care who regards this as an achievement, it is institutionalized racism, and a blot on my community.
The ethnic cleansing and discrimination that Tarazi exposes– well, it’s just like what happens on the West Bank. And I wonder how Leonard Fein can defend this, and when he thinks it will end, and what he thinks American Jews have gained by blindly supporting Israeli Jews in this disgraceful behavior– four decades after the end of Jim Crow in this country.
It’s not online, but I’ve typed out one of Tarazi’s most damning passages. Read this and you will understand why young American Jews write private emails to me saying that they are anti-Zionist; they wish to dissociate themselves from the unending Nakba of the Selfish state.
Considering the characteristics of the Jewish town of Omer and the Bedouin township of Tel Sheva side by side reveals two completely different realities separated by less than a mile.
Ranked second in Israel for socio-economic indicators, Omer is a development town founded in 1975. It has a population of 6,000 and is built on 17,000 dunams of land, 2.8 dunams per capita. More than 90 percent of its students graduate from high school. The town abuts a high-tech industrial zone and its municipal website brags of its "spectacular landscape of forest green vegetation and blooming flowers"… When Omer decided it wanted to expand, the [local planning commission] simply annexed an area of 7,000 dunams of land from the neighboring unrecognized Bedouin village of Tarabin al-Sana’. Rather than permit the 5,000 Bedouin residents of Tarabin al-Sana’ to move into Omer the Omer authorities are trying to force them into a specially created township. In 2007, Omer planning officials issued 75 demolition orders to all the remaining Bedouin homes in the Taraban al-Sana’.
Tel Sheva, by contrast, has 10,000 residents and is built on 4,00 dunams, 0.4 dunams per capita. It has been accorded no territorial expansion despite its considerably higher population density. It is the poorest locality in Israel and has little in the way of a "spectacular landscape." Less than 5 percent of students graduate from high school and Tel Sheva has no industrial zone to provide jobs and no economic infrastructure. It has no sewage system or paved roads, substandard municipal services and has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Israel..
