Apr 3rd 2008
Arab-Israelis are increasingly treated as the enemy within
We could do with a bit of multiculturalismWHETHER you call it Shafa Amr, as the residents do, or Shfaram, its name in Hebrew, is already a political statement. This sleepy, hilly Arab town of 33,000 people in northern Israel was where a 19-year-old Jewish soldier, Eden Natan-Zada, boarded a bus in August 2005 and shot dead four people before being overpowered and lynched.
The town is populated by a mix of Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs and has an ancient Jewish history too. It still has a small and rarely used synagogue, the keys to which are entrusted to one of the Christian neighbours. Just up the hill is a Jewish-Arab peace centre, the House of Hope. Its founder, the perpetually sunny Elias Jabbour, is proud of the way the townspeople kept their calm in the aftermath of the killings and welcomed Jewish dignitaries to the funerals. Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister, took the unusual step of calling Mr Natan-Zada a “terrorist” and ensuring that the families of the dead got the state compensation usually reserved for victims of Palestinian terrorism.
But increasingly, Palestinian-Israelis (as distinct from the Druze, around 9% of the country's Arabs, who are traditionally closer to the state) feel that their government is hostile to them. Their status had gradually improved since the early years of martial law and explicit budgetary discrimination against their towns, but the intifada has made things worse again.
Thus, a law making it next to impossible for West Bankers and Gazans to get Israeli residence or citizenship through marriage has made it much harder for Palestinians in Israel to marry their own kind in the occupied territories, as they used to. Earlier this year the attorney-general finally ruled out any prosecutions against police suspected of killing 13 Arabs during riots in October 2000, citing lack of evidence. Several other killings by police since then have remained unsolved.
Talk of the “demographic threat” has led more Jews to believe in a Palestinian state, but has also made them see Arab Israelis as part of the threat. It has become less taboo to talk about “transfer”: stripping Palestinian-Israelis who live near the West Bank of their citizenship and redrawing the borders to include them in a Palestinian state, in return for Israel keeping some of its West Bank settlements.
All this serves to remind Palestinian-Israelis of the many other ways in which they are treated as second-class citizens—for example, that their refugee relatives abroad cannot return to Israel whereas Jews automatically qualify for citizenship, or that they find it near-impossible to get jobs in “strategic” state industries such as energy and water. The government has stonewalled in the face of a decision by the Supreme Court that the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-state body that owns 13% of Israel's land, must stop its practice of leasing only to Jews. Some 70,000 Bedouin Arabs live in villages without official recognition that lack basic services. In the private sector, attempts by various business leaders and co-existence organisations to end job discrimination have made a difference, but change is achingly slow.
Our state as much as yours
Which is why, at the Adalah legal-advice centre a few minutes' drive from the House of Hope, sedition is brewing—at least as Jews see it. Last year, after the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think-tank, issued a “Constitution by Consensus” drafted by a group of experts that included a wide range of Jews but not one Arab, Adalah and several other Arab organisations responded with a series of documents calling for a more democratic kind of state, including equal immigration rights for everybody, giving minorities autonomy in certain spheres like education, giving them a veto over new laws that could affect them, and including non-Jewish elements in the state's symbols and anthem; in sum, making the state multicultural rather than preferentially Jewish.
This caused a furious Jewish backlash. The head of the Shin Bet security agency described Israel's Arab citizens as “a strategic threat”. Liberals, on the other hand, wrung their hands and called for redoubled efforts to end discrimination against Arabs. Both groups insisted that the documents were the work of radicals and did not reflect Arab-Israeli opinion.
Hassan Jabareen, the head of Adalah, is a radical. He believes that a two-state solution cannot work and that Israel and the occupied territories should become a single state with equal rights for all, a minority view even among Palestinians. But according to polls by Sammy Smooha, a sociologist at Haifa University, the multiculturalist proposals for Israel itself have widespread support among Palestinian-Israelis. He points out, though, that they emphasise legal, non-violent methods and show that Palestinian-Israelis want to realise their ambitions as Israeli citizens.
And yet it would be dangerous to underestimate the alienation that even the less politicised among them are feeling these days. Yusuf Abu Warde is one of those rare Israelis who truly straddles the cultural divide. A prominent actor, born in 1953, he has spent most of his career playing Hebrew roles. Like about a fifth of Palestinian-Israelis, he comes from a family that was evicted from its village at Israel's founding. As a teenager he rejected the Jewish state, but when the Oslo peace process began, “I felt more Israeli than ever.”
But with the intifada and the atmosphere that followed, he says, “I realised I would never be able to be equal, never be able to get my land back, because the whole tendency is to present me as a potential enemy or demographic threat...there is some kind of improvement from time to time, but not from a vision of allowing me to live here as an equal citizen, but rather so it won't hurt me too much to live here.” He sees a younger generation with little belief in integration; he notices that his Jewish and Arab friends' pages on Facebook, a social-networking website, are almost totally segregated. He tries to empathise with his Jewish friends, “but we don't rejoice and we don't cry about the same things. For them, [Israel] going into Gaza to murder someone is a victory, and for me it's terribly painful and sad. And this cannot be bridged.”
It is ironic that the fundamental disagreement between Jews and Palestinians today is not about whether there should be a Palestinian state; most Israeli Jews accepted that long ago. It is about whether there should be a Jewish one.
But this isn't Denmark
To Jews the answer is obvious. There are over 20 Arab states but only one that is Jewish. Why, especially if the Palestinians will eventually get a state of their own, should they want special recognition in the Jewish state too? “The Jews in Denmark don't insist that the Danes put the star of David on their national flag,” scoffs A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's most eminent novelists.
Besides, the frequent claim by Israel's critics that the nation-state is obsolete is clearly nonsense, as demonstrated by anti-immigrant feeling and ethnic separatism in Europe. Kosovo's recent secession, says Mr DellaPergola, the demographer, “is a good example of a phenomenon that is widening, not disappearing.” To Israel's Jews it is an uncomfortable reminder of why they wanted a state in the first place.
To Palestinian-Israelis, on the other hand, to be the poorest group in a state that is Jewish in its symbols, holidays, ethos and historical narrative is not merely to be second-class citizens, or to be treated like immigrants in a country where they are actually natives. It is to be, in a way, non-persons. Unlike Jewish identity, a hardy blend of history, religion and culture that has survived two millennia of exile, Palestinian identity is a fragile thing, rooted largely in the land that they, their parents or their grandparents lost. Ethnic nationalism provides a kind of substitute. “Zionism threatens my existence,” says Mr Abu Warde. He does not mean his physical survival, but his sense of who he is. If a Palestinian state does come to pass, Israel's Palestinians will face a grim choice: move there and lose their homes, or stay in Israel and lose themselves.
Their multiculturalist proposals are an attempt to pre-empt that dilemma by creating a space for a Palestinian identity in Israel. Even in Mr Jabareen's vision of a combined binational state, Hebrew would be an official language, Judaism an official religion and the star of David an official symbol—just not the only ones.
But for most Jews, the idea of a state that guarantees both numerical and cultural Jewish dominance is essential to its being a safe haven against future Holocausts. It is hard to reconcile these concepts. But it is also hard to imagine Arab-Israelis putting up with second-class status for ever.
