Israel hostile toward its Arab citizens

by Hussein Ibish

The state of Israel and its supporters never tire of trumpeting Israel's claim to be democratic, tolerant, and inclusive--in contrast (it is generally added) to the chauvinistic and fanatical tyrannies that surround it in the Middle East. Exhibit A in this parlor trick is Israel's Palestinian citizenry, who are presented as enjoying full and equal rights as citizens of the Jewish and democratic state.

This hackneyed sleight-of-hand leaves out a number of crucial points, most obviously the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule suffer from a formalized and overt apartheid enforced by military occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Also missing, of course, is the significant discrimination, both de jure and de facto, that Palestinian citizens of Israel face. The reality is that the Palestinian community within Israel's internationally recognized borders has proven entirely inassimilable by the Jewish state, and constitutes a source of profound and growing anxiety for the majority.

These anxieties are most evident in rhetoric about demography and population in Israel, in which Palestinian citizens are routinely described not as human beings but as a "population time bomb" or a "demographic threat."

These fears were on full display at the December 2003 Herzliya Conference at which former Israeli prime minister and current finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinian citizens of Israel represented the true "demographic threat" to the Jewish state, and if this population grew from its current 20 percent to 35-40 percent, Israel would become--horror of horrors--a "binational country."

Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher at the Israeli government's Armaments Development Authority, went further, demanding at the conference that Israel "implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population." He warned, "The delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'ersheba have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."

While no such policies have yet been implemented, discriminatory measures to prevent the increase of Israel's Palestinian citizenry have been. In July 2003, the Knesset enacted the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, forbidding Israeli citizens married to residents of the occupied territories to live in Israel with their spouses. The law was specifically designed to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel from extending the benefits of their citizenship status to Palestinians from the occupied territories through the instrument of marriage. All other spouses of Israelis are, of course, permitted to move to Israel to live with their families.

What lies at the heart of these anxieties is not only the fear that Palestinian citizens will undermine Israel's Jewish majority, but also the suspicion that they constitute a disloyal fifth column. Their presence is a constant reminder of the displaced Arab population, of the original sin of ethnic cleansing and depopulation that was a necessary element in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

As Palestinian citizens of Israel have grown in confidence and learned to deal with the paradox of their national identity, efforts to suppress their political self-expression have intensified.

In October 2000, Palestinians inside Israel launched a number of demonstrations in support of the uprising in the occupied territories that had begun a few weeks earlier. Israeli forces suppressed these demonstrations with a brutality that would never be used against Jewish demonstrators, killing 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel and wounding hundreds. These incidents demonstrated both the political division between the Palestinian and Jewish populations in Israel, and the essentially hostile attitude of the Israeli state toward its Arab citizens.

A similar tale is told by the political career of the leading Palestinian political figure in Israel, Azmi Bishara. Bishara is the only member of the Knesset ever to have been shot by Israeli troops, and he faced charges of treason for supporting the right of Lebanese and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation to resist. His right to run in Knesset elections had to be upheld recently by the Supreme Court over challenges from both the election commission and the attorney general. Both cited Article Seven of the Basic Law on the Knesset, which states that candidates for Knesset cannot oppose the Jewish character of the state.

The hostility of the Israeli state toward its Arab minority is, if anything, outdone by the hostility of the public. A June 2004 poll showed that 64 percent of the Jewish public in Israel believes that the government should encourage Palestinian citizens to leave the country. Moreover, 55.3 percent of Jewish Israelis said Palestinian citizens endangered national security, and 45.3 percent said they should be banned from voting or holding political office.

Israel's unstable self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state is in reality an oxymoron, as the experience of its large and growing Palestinian minority--to say nothing of the disenfranchised millions living as subjects of military occupation--readily attests. Indeed, the present trends are that Israel is becoming both less Jewish, in demographic terms, and even less democratic.

-Published 24/6/2004