Is Israel Ready to Be Judged by Its Second-Class Treatment of Its Arab Citizens?

By Alan C. Brownfeld

It has been said, by Jews and others, that a good way to determine the state of democracy, equality and human rights in any society is to see how it treats its Jews. There is merit in this formula. If Jews are not free to practice their religion there, the political and religious rights of others also are very likely to be limited.

If this is a proper assessment, perhaps it is also proper to judge the state of democracy, equality and human rights in Israel by looking at the condition of minorities in that country. Many thoughtful Israelis and Jews elsewhere in the world have been examining the status and treatment of Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arab minority. Their findings are revealing indeed. At the same time, some respected voices in Israel finally are beginning to confront that country’s second-class treatment of its Arab citizens.

A report issued in April 1999 by Sikkuy, a nonpartisan association that promotes equal opportunity for Arab citizens of Israel, declares that, “Arab citizens of Israel have not yet attained the expression of full civic partnership, as evinced, among other things, in their marginal representation in the civil service, especially in government ministries in Jerusalem...Since the state was established, the Arab population in Israel has grown sixfold but its land reserves have contracted steadily…Public housing does not resemble that offered to Jewish citizens, thus, Arab citizens rely almost solely on private land. However, the shortage of private land thwarts further building possibilities....As for services to citizens: the land earmarked for service and public use is only 40 to 70 percent of that customarily reserved in Jewish counties...About 70 percent of the Housing Ministry budget is offlimits to Arab citizens because it is reserved for ‘special population groups,’ all of which are Jewish. Even the remainder of the budget reaches Arab citizens only in part.”

The chairman of Sikkuy is Hanan Bar-On, adviser and former vice president of the Weizmann Institute. Other members include Dr. Israel Katz, minister of labor and social affairs in 1977-1981, Prof. Aharon Layish of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Miriam Ben-Peretz of the University of Haifa. Arab members include Dr. Sami Geraisi, director of the International Christian Association in Israel, and Khaled Abu Asba of the Brookdale Institute and School for Senior Teaching Faculty in Jerusalem.

“Not everything that is legal is moral and just.”

There also is growing opposition within Israel to the government’s policy of destroying allegedly illegally constructed Arab homes, 6,000 of which have been destroyed since 1967. An active group, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD), has emerged as an umbrella organization of Jewish human rights and peace groups. Its members spend their weekends building houses for Arab families left homeless when Israeli authorities destroy houses built in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The U.S. government has cited home demolitions as examples of unilateral Israeli policies detrimental to the peace process. Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom, field director of Rabbis for Human Rights, a member of ICAHD, says: “It’s particularly counterproductive now because you’re talking about people who have not been involved in any security threat and are close to being as innocent as anyone can be.”

ICAHD founder Jeff Halper says that demolition is part of a carefully calculated matrix of Israeli control of the occupied territories, which includes physical barriers such as Jewish settlements or roadblocks, and the confiscation of natural resources, a policy designed to herd Palestinians into impoverished enclaves that can never form a viable state. “The peace process is going to work or not depending on the extent to which that matrix can be dismantled,” says Halper, an immigrant to Israel from Minnesota.

Those opposed to house demolitions say that Israeli figures on “illegal” Arab construction disguisethe fact that it is much moredifficult for Arabs to get building permits than it is for Jews. “Demolishing these houses is legal only in the most narrow sense of the word, and not everything that is legal is moral and just,” says Reform Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights. “It’s cynical manipulation of the law. You basically have a Catch-22 where [Arabs] cannot get a legal permit and then have to build an illegal house that is subject to demolition.”

Rabbi Lev Weiman Kelman, chairman of Rabbis for Human Rights, declares: “It’s a concerted effort by the authorities to encourage the Arab population to leave Israel. I think the term ethnic cleansing is a little harsh, but it definitely has overtones of a very slow incremental move to change the demographics of Jerusalem and the West Bank by making [the Arabs’] quality of life so difficult.”

“Natural Racism”

Mossi Raz, secretary-general of Peace Now, says two factors combine to make it nearly impossible for Arabs to get building permits: government policy and the “natural racism of almost all Israelis. I’m sure no one told [the relevant officials] not to allow them to build, but it’s almost the expected outcomeof the basic approach of almost every Israeli.”

A 1994 survey commissioned by the Education Ministry and published in 1996 found that 37 percent of Israeli youth surveyed said theyhate Arabs, while two-thirds say: “There is no need to give Arabs in Israel full, equal rights.” Less than a third said they would be willing to host an Arab in their home. Twelve percent said they had an Arab friend. The survey was conducted by the Carmel Institute for Social Research.

A typical example of Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens, critics declare, can be seen in the case of Jabbour Jabbour, who wanted to be a flight attendant for El Al. He was undeterred by the fact that not one of the Israeli national airline’s 1,000 flight attendants is an Arab. Jabbour, a Christian, is a 30-year-old travel agent, Israeli citizen in good standing, fluent in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and well-traveled. In the early 1990s he studied travel and tourism in Toronto. But in July 1999, for the third time in three years, El Al turned him down, saying that he had failed its tests. Jabbour, however, is certain he passed the tests and accuses the airline of screening out Arab applicants. He states: “They don’t want to give us any answers. They won’t say where I failed or what’s wrong with me or what my negative side was.”

Civil rights activists in Israel say that the facts speak for themselves. Among El Al’s 3,400 workers there is scarcely an Arab employee. At the electric company, just a few dozen of the 14,000 employees are Arabs. In government ministries, perhaps 1 percent of employees are Arabs. The employment pattern helps fuel 20 percent cent unemployment among Israeli Arabs, more than twice the national average. On July 2, The Washington Post noted: “It serves as a reminder that 51 years after its independence, Israel has still not settled the question of whether it is a country of all its citizens. Some Israeli Arabs say it is a system of apartheid masquerading as a democracy.”

The fact that many Jewish Israelis have expressed opposition to the pattern of discrimination, however, is a hopeful sign. Writing in The Jerusalem Report of July 19, Ze’ev Chafets declares: “All things being equal, I’d rather fly on my own national carrier. But it turns out that all things are not equal at El Al. The shining happy face of the New Israeli Flight Attendant conceals a simple fact: Of the 1,500 stewards and stewardesses the company employs, not one is an Israeli Arab. Could this be coincidence? El Al spokesman Nachman Kleiman says it is. According to him, the airline hasn’t found a single qualified Arab applicant. In fact, it hasn’t even looked...Perhaps Arabs, thousands of whom, including college graduates, work in top Israeli hotels and restaurants, simply aren’t up to El Al’s exacting standards. Or maybe they just don’t want high-paying, glamorous jobs.

“Sure, that sounds right. The other day, El Al President Joel Feldschuh was asked about this at a press conference. He responded that there is no discriminatory policy. He says that El Al welcomes Arab flight attendants. I hope that’s true. The day I see one on an El Al commercial is the day I will consider flying once again on the airline that aspires to be our national symbol.”

In its section on Israel, the U.S. State Department’s first Annual Report On International Religious Freedom released in September 1999, notes that, “Arabs in Israel...are subject to various forms of discrimination” and that the Israeli government “does not provide Israeli Arabs...with the samequality of education, housing, employment opportunities as Jews.”

At least some Israelis are now beginning to acknowledge this in signifcant ways. New textbooks now use the word “Palestinian” to refer to a people and a nationalist movement which were completely excised from earlier texts. They refer to the Arabic name for the 1948 war—the “Nakba,” catastrophe—and they ask the public to put themselves in the Arabs’ shoes and consider how they would have felt about Zionism.

Eyal Naveh, a history professor at Tel Aviv University and the author of one of the new textbooks, says:“Only 10 years ago, much of this was taboo. We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way the Americans deal with Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths.”

A New Kind of Textbook

One new ninth grade text, Passage To The Past by Kezia Tabibyan, not only mentions the 1948 massacre carried out by radical Zionist forces in the village of Deir Yassin, something Ms. Tabibyan says had never been done in a ninth grade text before, but also engages in a kind of historiography byasking students to reflect on the use of myths in nation-building. She says: “If we want to educate the citizens of Israel after 2000 they must know that there is another point of view...They must deal with Deir Yassin. They must know that there was another people that had their life here.”

Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, recently urged Israeli teachers to face a dark chapter in the country’s past and recommended that a massacre of Israeli Arabs 43years ago at the village of Kafr Kassem be marked for the first time in the nation’s classrooms.

In a letter sent to civicsteachers across the country, Sarid declared: “We do not seek to hide and obscure, we do not seek to cover up the shame, but to deal with it openly and honestly.”

In Kafr Kassem on Oct. 29, 1956, border policemen under orders to shoot to kill curfew-breakers, fired on villagers returning to their homes from the fields in which they had been working when the curfew was imposed, killing 47 men, women and children.

A recent special issue of the journal Theory And Criticism, published jointly by the Van Leer Institute and the United Kibbutz Movement Press with the support of Israel’s Education Ministry, is devoted to the 50th anniversary of Israel’s independence and features articles by a number of prominent writers and academicians.

An article by Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University’s Sociology Department on the subject of “The Palestinian Tragedy: Al Nakba,” discusses the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabsduring Israel’s War of Independence. He writes: “The Palestinians expect that even if we don’t return their land and houses to them—because we are the strong ones here, and they are weak—that at least we should acknowledge their tragedy and suffering, and the fact that our society and state has, to a large extent, been founded on the ruins of the Arab society and culture. They do not even expect us to ask forgiveness—only that we acknowledge the facts.”

Oren Yiftahel of Ben-Gurion University’s Geography Department disputes “the common assumption regarding the state’s democratic nature.” An alternative political analysis, he concludes, “points to a governmental reality which I term ‘ethnocentric.’”

In his introduction in Theory And Criticism, Adi Ophir, who is a lecturer in philosophy at Tel Aviv University, declares: “The contributors write out of fear that control over the Palestinians in particular, and the adoption of the political forms of an ethnocentric and racist nation-state in general, are turning Israel into the most dangerous place in the world for the humanity and morality of the Jewish community, for the continuity of Jewish cultures and perhaps for Jewish existence itself.”

Discussing the willingness of more and more Israelis to reject the myths of their country’s early years and to face the harsher reality, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland notes that, “This is admirable truth telling, the beginning of coming to terms with the long suppressed Palestinian existence and history, even if there is not an immediate political response availablefor those who have lived as refugees for over half a century. This is history as prologue...”

These hesitant steps toward acknowledging the legitimate grievances of Israel’s Arab citizens represent an important beginning in the long healing process which people of good will in Israel and the Arab world hope will lead to a lasting peace in the region. It is something which the humane Jewish tradition demands as well, if Israel is, in the long run, to be in any sense a genuinely “Jewish” society.

Alan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.