20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians; there are about one million in all. In March 2006 a poll for the Centre for the Struggle Against Racism, founded by Arab-Israeli academics, revealed that more than two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. Nearly 50% would not allow an Arab in their home and 41% want segregation of entertainment facilities. The survey also found 40% of Israel’s Jews believe ‘the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens’, that 63% of Jewish Israelis consider their country’s Arab citizens a ‘security and demographic threat to the state’ and that 34% agreed with the statement that ‘Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture’. In other words, a substantial minority of Israelis would support a policy of ‘transfer’ or ethnic cleansing, and a majority are explicitly racist towards the Palestinian population. BARNABY MITCHEL reports.
During the recent elections to the Knesset [Israeli parliament], the Yisrael Beiteinu party advocated redrawing the border to place about 500,000 Israeli Palestinians inside a Palestinian state. Theodore Herzl, considered the father of Zionism, talked about ‘spiriting’ the native Palestinians out and across the border. Discussion of ‘transfer’ was common among the Zionist leadership in Palestine in the 1930s. In the Knesset, the idea of ‘transferring’ the Palestinian population by encouraging them to leave Israel is now openly debated and prominent politicians have argued for loyalty oaths and related schemes to revoke the Palestinians’ status as citizens. The racism among the Jewish population against Palestinians is flagrant and open. Shouts of ‘Death to the Arabs’ are frequently heard at football matches when Arab and Jewish teams play in Jewish areas.
Israel: founded on ethnic cleansing
The Israeli state was founded in 1948 to the accompaniment of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in terror at the series of massacres such as Deir Yassin. From that date until 1966, Palestinians within the pre-1967 borders lived under formal military rule and were subject to a different set of laws to the Jewish population. The Defence Regulations of 1945 were introduced by the British colonial administration and inherited by the Zionists. Under these laws the army could uproot entire communities and either transfer or deport them, imprison people without trial, create special security and closed military zones, restrict Palestinian freedom of movement and expel them from their native land. The only redress for Palestinians, through a military court, was pointless. After this military rule was lifted, a new set of discriminatory laws and practices was created and the Palestinians resident in Israel experienced little social, political or economic advancement.
From the outset the Zionists created a racist myth that Israel was ‘a land without people for a people without land.’ Former Prime Minister Golda Meir declared that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. Excluding the native population, by any means necessary, was essential for the realisation of the Zionist project. Racism is therefore fundamental to the colonial settler mentality in order to justify the stealing of the land of a native people. Zionist settlers share a similar racist viewpoint to British colonialists during the British Empire or Boer settlers in South Africa, primarily that they are bringing a higher civilisation to the indigenous population.
A ‘State of the Jewish people’
Israel is defined as the State of the Jewish people. It is not a state for all its citizens or of all its nationalities: non-Jews are excluded from the Jewish state. It is built on fundamentally racist principles and a structure of systematic racism and discrimination against its Palestinian citizens, who make up 20% of the population. Zionist double-speak constantly emphasises the democratic nature of Israel whilst simultaneously discriminating against non-Jews. Whilst Palestinians may have individual citizen’s rights, these are always circumscribed or undermined by an absence of collective rights which exist only for Jews. Palestinians in Israel are defined as an ethnic and religious minority, not as a national or indigenous minority. Calling them Arab Israelis is an expression of this. The issue of definition is crucial since it underpins the limits to economic, social and cultural rights given to the minority. In 1998 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reported that Israel’s ‘excessive emphasis upon the State as a “Jewish state” encourages discrimination and accords a second-class status to its non-Jewish citizens’. Yet this is essential to sustaining a Jewish majority.
Under Israeli law, Jews from anywhere in the world have the right to settle in Israel and automatically receive full citizenship, regardless of their nationality. Palestinian refugees who were driven from their land in 1948 by Israeli terror do not have the right to return to their homes inside Israel, even those who are internal refugees. Every Israeli citizen carries an ID card which states whether a person is Jewish or an Arab. This definition is now in the form of a code. In 1975 the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 3379 which determined that, ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’. In 1991, under huge pressure from the US, the UN revoked this resolution.
According to Adalah, an Arab rights organisation, today there are at least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined on the basis of religion. The Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed virtually all cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens. One example of such discriminatory laws is the Nationality and Entry into Israel law, enacted on 31 July 2003. This law prohibits the granting of any residency or citizenship to Palestinians from the 1967 Occupied Territories who marry Israeli citizens. It applies only to Palestinian spouses and is based on their national origins. As a result hundreds of families are separated. On 15 May 2006 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld this law against petitions submitted by Adalah and other human rights organisations. This ruling contravenes international human rights treaties to which Israel is a signatory.
Under a National Insurance Law, Israel voted for a 25% cut in child allowance for families without a member serving in the army. 90% of Arabs do not serve in the Israeli army. In all, Arab families were slapped with a 37% cut in child allowances.
The Incitement Law forbids Arabs in Israel from supporting or sympathising with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who are resisting the Israeli occupation. Under this law, anyone who supports acts of violence or terror against Israel will be sentenced to five years in prison. Anyone caught with material considered hostile to Israel can be sentenced to one year in prison. The law undermines freedom of speech and any attempt by Israeli citizens to challenge the government’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.
It was not until 1980 that Palestinians in Israel were allowed to form their own political parties. Under Israeli law, any person or party that directly or indirectly denies that Israel is a democratic Jewish state and a state for the Jews will be barred from running for the Knesset.
92% of the land in the state of Israel is ‘held in perpetual trust for the Jewish people’. Article 3 of the constitution of the Jewish Agency provides that: ‘Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and subject to the provisions of article 10 of this agreement, the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish People.’ Over 80% of the land within Israel that was once owned by Palestinians has been confiscated by the Israeli State without compensation and the one million Palestinians live on 3% of the land. Of these, 250,000 are internal refugees. Since the establishment of the Jewish state, 800 new towns have been built for the Jewish population and none for the Arabs.
Within Israel there are roughly 100 Palestinian villages which are simply unrecognised by the state. In law they do not exist and they are not shown on maps. These ‘un-recognised villages’ are denied basic services such as electricity and water and are subject to periodic demolitions and land confiscations.
The impact of this systematic discrimination against Arabs is manifested in the huge disparities in the standard of living within Israel. In 2002 the Israeli health ministry allocated only £200,000 of its £35 million budget to Arab communities. In 2002 the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions based in Geneva awarded Israel joint first prize for being the worst housing rights violators in the world. In the 2002 budget the Israeli housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities, compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish communities.
According to the Israel National Insurance Institute 2004 annual survey, 49.9% of Arab Israeli families live below the poverty line, compared with 20% of Jewish families; 60% of Arab children live below the poverty line. This is due primarily to high unemployment among the Arab population. While 87% of Jewish men aged between 45-54 are employed, only 36% of Arabs have work. In the 55-64 age group, 70% of Jewish men are employed compared with 40% of Arab men. In the female workforce, 54.6% of Jewish women are employed, compared to 23.4% of Arab women. More than half of the employed Arabs work in construction (37.2%) or as unskilled labourers (14.7%) compared with a fifth of employed Jews who work in these sectors. The academic, professional and management fields, all of which require more extensive higher education, employ some 20% of working Arabs compared with 38% of working Jews. Only 5% of civil servants are Arabs and in the Foreign and Finance Ministries there are fewer than a dozen Arabs employed.
There are also huge disparities in educational spending. The state does not allocate 20% of its budget to Arab sectors, in proportion to the population. There are no Arab citizens in the organisations that draw up the education ministry policies and members of Israel’s security organisation (Shin Bet) sit on teacher selection boards. The curriculum in the Arab schools emphasises Jewish and Zionist values and denies and ignores Palestinian culture, history and literature. In 2002, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, only 3.2% of Arab two-year-olds could get a place at nursery compared with 39.7% of their Jewish peers.
The exclusion of non-Jews is therefore built into the structure of Israeli society. Created by imperialism, Israel still relies on material backing from the US to the tune of $3 billion a year in financial support. Total US aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the US foreign aid budget, even though Israel comprises just 0.001% of the world’s population. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than the people of oil-rich Saudi Arabia. In the West Bank settlers enjoy swimming pools and water-intensive agriculture while Palestinians are forced to queue for contaminated water. The Israeli economy alone could not sustain this standard of living, essential for continued Jewish immigration from the imperialist world. Hence the continuing need for imperialist aid, and the simultaneous exclusion of non-Jews from these material benefits. It is therefore Israel’s dependent relationship with imperialism which underlies its fundamentally racist character.
FRFI 191 June / July 2006
