Israel's
Palestinian Minority Thrown into a Maelstrom
Jonathan Cook
Middle East Report Online
June 16, 2010
Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth. He is author of
Blood and Religion (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilizations (2008) and
Disappearing Palestine (2008).
The first reports of Israel’s May 31 commando raid on a
Gaza-bound aid flotilla surfaced among the country’s 1.4 million Palestinian
citizens alongside rumors that Sheikh Ra’id Salah, head of the radical northern
wing of the Islamic Movement of Israel, had been shot dead on the lead ship, the
Mavi Marmara. Salah is alive, but at the time his demise seemed confirmed when
it emerged that large numbers of police had been drafted into northern Israel,
where most of the Palestinian minority lives, in expectation of widespread
violence.
At the first spontaneous demonstrations in the north,
participants expressed shock that Israel had killed international peace
activists in international waters -- a rumored number of 20 dead later dropped
to nine. But in a community used to intermittent bouts of extreme violence from
Israel’s security forces, few seemed to doubt that the order might have been
given to execute Salah. The sheikh, who has repeatedly been arrested and is
facing a series of trials, has long been public enemy number one among Israeli
Jews for his campaign to protect the Haram al-Sharif from what he regards as an
attempted Israeli takeover. The Haram al-Sharif is a compound of mosques in the
Old City of Jerusalem that includes al-Aqsa and is believed by Jews to be built
over two ancient Jewish temples. Half-jokingly, a protester in Nazareth wondered
aloud whether a military commander had overheard the prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, ask: “Who will rid me of this turbulent sheikh?”
Breaking the Siege of Gaza
The flotilla, which was attacked more than 60 miles off Israel’s
coast early in the morning, was not the first to bear aid for Gaza, but it was
the first to include a delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel.
Palestinians are roughly one fifth of Israel’s population. Most of the main
Israeli-Palestinian political factions and institutions were included: Salah and
his counterpart in the Islamic Movement’s more moderate southern wing, Sheikh
Hamad Abu Da‘bas; Muhammad Zaydan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the
umbrella body dominated by local mayors; and Hanin Zu‘bi, a first-term member of
the parliament, the Knesset, from the nationalist Tajammu‘ party (Balad in
Hebrew). Alongside them was Lubna Masarwa, a resident of Kafr Qara‘ in northern
Israel and an activist with the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the aid
convoy.
Before they set off, the group of Palestinian-Israelis knew their
participation would upset a broad swath of Israeli Jewish opinion. Since 2006,
when Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, Israel has been
progressively tightening a blockade of Gaza to the point that today only a few
dozen items are allowed in and less than a quarter of the cargo trucks that once
entered the enclave each day are still permitted to do so. The policy has become
more severe as its goal has become less clear: Is it to stop “arms smuggling” by
Hamas, as Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shinbet, Israel’s secret police, claimed
on June 15; or to wage “economic warfare,” as suggested by a recent Israeli
document, punishing Gaza’s inhabitants for voting for Hamas; or to act as
leverage on Hamas to stop rocket fire on nearby Israeli communities, although
such attacks all but ceased long ago; or to force the release of Gilad Shalit,
an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas since 2006? Most Israeli Jews do not
seem overly concerned which justification is deployed.
Meanwhile, in strenuously denying aid agency reports that the
blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israeli officials have left
the Jewish majority to conclude that those who oppose the blockade do so because
they support Hamas -- “a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of
Israel,” as commentators regularly remind the public. It was therefore hardly
surprising that, a few days before the flotilla set sail for Gaza on its stated
mission to “break the siege,” the popular news website Ynet claimed that Knesset
member Zu‘bi would be traveling on a ship alongside “prominent Hamas-affiliated
activists,” while the headline asked rhetorically: “MK in Service of Hamas?”
But what Zu‘bi and the other Palestinian-Israeli leaders probably
could not have appreciated was that this flotilla, unlike its predecessors, was
about to make waves not only domestically but internationally. They were about
to be thrown into a maelstrom of events that would provoke denunciations from
around the globe, turn a spotlight on the legitimacy of Israel’s blockade, tear
apart Israel’s key regional alliance with Turkey and further embarrass a weak US
administration that is desperately trying to breathe life into a sham
Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as its own occupations, in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continue to falter. As a result, the participation of
Palestinian-Israelis in the flotilla dangerously reinforced the Jewish
majority’s perception of the minority as a fifth column.
War and Loyalty
‘Adil Manna‘, a Palestinian historian at the Van Leer Institute
in Jerusalem, notes that, when Israel feels isolated and under threat, “it
becomes much more intolerant of criticism from inside the country, from the
[Palestinian] Arab minority especially. Dissent is seen as a strategic danger.”
And Israel has rarely felt so isolated or perceived its international standing
to be so threatened.
The raid on the flotilla, in which eight Turks and a dual
Turkish-American citizen were killed and dozens of other passengers wounded by
Israeli commandos, followed two regional confrontations involving Israel still
at the forefront of the international community’s memory: a month-long clash in
2006 with the Lebanese political party-cum-militia Hizballah, in which more than
1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed; and a three-week assault on Gaza in
2008-2009 in which some 1,400 Palestinians died, again most of them civilians.
An international consensus regarded the large-scale loss of civilian life in
both confrontations as constituting at the very minimum a “disproportionate”
Israeli response, whereas Israel maintained it had a right to wage its own
version of the “war on terror.” A UN-mandated report on the Gaza attack by
Richard Goldstone, a respected international jurist, tipped the balance of world
opinion decisively against Israel by suggesting that, while both Israeli forces
and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israeli forces had committed the bulk of
them.
As international opprobrium has grown, Israel has subjected the
leaders of its Palestinian citizens to ever greater scrutiny, not only over
their positions on the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
but also on Israel’s regional confrontation with Hizballah and wider
confrontation with the international community. In the minds of most Israeli
Jews, the question of where the Palestinian minority stands on these issues
overlaps with the question of whether Palestinians can be trustworthy citizens.
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, and his Yisrael Beiteinu party rode to
success in the 2009 general election, winning 15 seats and becoming the third
largest faction in Knesset, by exploiting popular suspicions of the minority
with the campaign slogan, “No loyalty, no citizenship.”
The issue of the minority’s loyalty had been widely debated since
the beginning of the second intifada, in October 2000, when Palestinian citizens
protested in support of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Police
entered their towns and villages to greet the demonstrators with rubber bullets
and live fire, killing 13 and injuring hundreds in a few days. Those events were
misleadingly presented by the Israeli leadership as an internal uprising by
rebels conspiring with the Palestinians under occupation to overthrow the state
from within.
But the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon and the later attack on Gaza
have been equally significant for majority-minority relations, expanding the
dimensions of the loyalty debate. The Jewish majority perceived these two
confrontations as the salient battles in a clash of civilizations that pitted
Israel against the region and its aspiring hegemon, Iran. The Palestinian
minority, on the other hand, regarded the confrontations as further proof that
Israel was a militarized and militaristic state with an insatiable appetite for
territory and no ability to make peace with the Palestinians and its other
neighbors. This unbridgeable gulf in worldviews was bound to set Palestinian
citizens on a collision course with their own state.
The Enemy Within
In the summer 2006 Lebanon war, Palestinian communities, like
Jewish ones, came under Hizballah rocket fire from southern Lebanon. Although 18
Palestinian citizens were killed in the north, the minority’s political
sympathies remained largely with Hasan Nasrallah, Hizballah’s leader,
throughout. Most Palestinian citizens were impressed by Nasrallah’s knowledge of
the Israeli political scene and grasp of their experiences inside a Jewish
state, and also believed -- unlike their Jewish compatriots -- that Israel, not
Hizballah, had willed the hostilities. But even after a truce was called in its
battle with Hizballah, Israel entered a new phase of conflict with its
Palestinian citizens. The first major political casualty would be Azmi Bishara,
the outspoken leader of the Tajammu‘ party, who had been a thorn in Israel’s
side for a decade with his popular campaign to reform Israel from a Jewish state
into a “state of all its citizens.” In the wake of the 2006 war, Bishara found
himself facing a new and potent “one-size-fits-all” accusation of spying for
Hizballah. The charge, publicized by the Shinbet while he was abroad in the
spring of 2007, left him in exile.
The Gaza attack of 2008 further stoked suspicions of Palestinian
citizens’ disloyalty. Reflecting the polarization of majority-minority
worldviews, demonstrations against Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, Operation
Cast Lead, were organized and supported chiefly by the Palestinian minority.
Historians have noted the decades of quietism from the
Palestinian minority that followed Israel’s establishment in 1948. That trait
can be attributed, initially at least, to the destruction of Palestinian society
before and during the 1948 war: Most Palestinians left in the new Jewish state
following the flight of 80 percent of their compatriots lived in poor, rural
communities that had little direct involvement in national politics and were
administered by the Israeli army until 1966. For two decades, Palestinian
society would struggle to regenerate a leadership under the strictures of
military rule. When a leadership did belatedly emerge in the late 1970s and
1980s, the minority’s representatives remained largely passive, awaiting
directions from the PLO leadership in exile. In essence, they needed an answer
to the question of what ultimate goal the Palestinian struggle aspired to: Was
it to liberate the minority from its compromised existence in a Jewish state,
presumably in some variation of the one-state model, or to trade the minority
for peace in a partitioned territory?
When the answer came with the 1993 Oslo accord -- they were to
remain inside Israel as an ethnic minority -- the Palestinian leadership
responded with a tentative civil rights movement aimed at ending Israel’s
self-definition as a Jewish state. Bishara’s “state of all its citizens” slogan
would be the rallying cry through the late 1990s. But the October 2000 events
showed in lethal fashion that Israel was not ready to concede, or even debate,
the privileges enjoyed by the Jewish majority. Change was not going to occur
from within.
Looking to the Outside World
Faced with Israeli intransigence, the Palestinian minority’s
leadership began looking outside Israel for support. Civil society organizations
led the way by focusing on advocacy that highlighted the minority’s plight to
international bodies such as the UN and the European Union. In quick succession
in late 2006 and early 2007, two Palestinian NGOs, Mada and Adalah, and the
Higher Follow-Up Committee each published a separate position paper in English
-- collectively nicknamed the “Vision Documents” -- that argued for Israel’s
transformation into a liberal democracy. The Shinbet signaled clearly that it
regarded these documents as an “existential threat” to Israel. With the approval
of the attorney general, the Shinbet’s director, Yuval Diskin, issued a stark
warning to the authors: “The Shinbet is required to thwart subversive activity
by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic
Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by
virtue of the principle of ‘defensive democracy.’”
This political backdrop was on view as Palestinian NGOs in Israel
not only led non-violent demonstrations against Operation Cast Lead in December
2008 but also highlighted to the world the police repression of their protests,
which led to the arrest of many hundreds of activists, including children. The
involvement of Israeli-Palestinian NGOs in assisting the Goldstone
investigations in 2009 only fueled the sense among Israeli Jews that the
minority had been unmasked as a fifth column. And almost as background music to
these developments, the separate prosecutions of two Palestinian MKs have
gathered steam: Muhammad Baraka, head of the joint Palestinian-Jewish Communist
party, Jabha (Hadash in Hebrew), is charged with attacking security personnel
during protests; and Sa‘id Nafa‘, a Druze member of the Tajammu‘ party, is to
stand trial for traveling to Syria with a delegation of Druze leaders.
In addition, since Cast Lead, Israeli-Palestinian NGOs have
deepened their solidarity with Palestinians under occupation by becoming
actively engaged in a fledgling international movement to boycott Israel. Their
intimate familiarity with the self-defined Jewish state and their direct
experiences of institutional discrimination make them persuasive advocates for
such a boycott, as Israel’s leadership appeared to appreciate. It was not
surprising, therefore, that in May Amir Makhoul, head of Ittijah, an umbrella
organization for Palestinian civil society groups in Israel, became the latest
major public figure to run afoul of the Shinbet.
During Cast Lead, Makhoul had been called in for interrogation by
the Shinbet over his role in organizing the protests, and threatened that, if he
continued his activities, he might be “disappeared to Gaza.” His brother, ‘Isam
Makhoul, a former Jabha MK, said he now regarded that threat as tellingly
prophetic. In early May, Amir Makhoul was arrested and effectively “disappeared”
when a blanket gag order was imposed on his detention. The gag was only lifted
when word spread on the Internet. After nearly two weeks, during which time
Makhoul was denied access to lawyers and says he was repeatedly tortured, the
Shinbet had the confession they were seeking. (At the same time, another
community activist, ‘Umar Sa‘id, was arrested. Apparently his confession will
provide a vital link in the Shinbet’s claims against Makhoul.) In a pattern now
becoming familiar, Makhoul was charged with spying on behalf of Hizballah,
supposedly providing the Lebanese militia with the locations of security
facilities and, more vaguely, helping it with analyses of Israeli society and
political trends.
Kidnapped on the High Seas
Following the May 31 attack on the flotilla, Palestinians inside
Israel waited anxiously all day for news of Sheikh Ra’id Salah’s condition, and
that of the other four Israeli-Palestinian participants, as nearly 700 peace
activists were forcibly brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod on their captured
vessels. As the world debated the finer points of maritime law, Palestinian
citizens who are Muslims wondered whether their state’s act of piracy -- or
“state-sponsored terrorism,” as the Higher Follow-Up Committee referred to it --
had included executing their spiritual leader. In Umm al-Fahm, Salah’s home town
in northern Israel, stone-throwing youths and police briefly clashed. Apparently
keen to preempt further damage to Israel’s image from the sheikh’s presumed
death, the Israeli media reported that commandos had fired at Salah in an act of
self-defense, after shots had been seen coming from his cabin. Later, Salah’s
wife was escorted to a hospital operating room by Israeli officials who appeared
to believe the sheikh was the seriously injured man on the operating table. He
was not.
A little more than 24 hours after the Israeli navy’s raid, it
emerged that Salah and three other Israeli-Palestinians had been remanded into
custody for a week, while suspicions that they had attacked the commandos were
investigated. The next day, June 2, as Israel was forced to release the
international peace activists under severe US and Turkish pressure, Adalah, a
legal center for the Palestinian minority, pointed out that the four were facing
“selective” investigation and possible prosecution for alleged acts committed
outside Israel’s jurisdiction. The courts released them to a week of house
arrest, though they are still being investigated for possession of weapons and
conspiracy to commit an offense, and are banned from leaving the country.
Salah’s release provoked a flood of complaints from Jewish politicians. A
typical response came from Yisrael Hasson, of the supposedly centrist Kadima
party and a former deputy head of the Shinbet, who equated the release of Salah
with that of the late Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, founder of Hamas. “In 1997 Bibi
[Netanyahu] and Lieberman released Sheikh Yasin, and in 2010, they’re releasing
Salah,” he said. (Yasin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.)
In his court appearance, Salah confirmed the minority’s
suspicions of an attempted assassination, saying the “soldiers tried to kill me.
They fired in the direction of someone else they thought was me.” Salah’s
deputy, Sheikh Kamil Khatib, claimed Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak
had plotted to kill the sheikh.
One of the first people on the flotilla to be released, on the
morning following the commando attack, was Hanin Zu‘bi, after police were
advised that her parliamentary immunity ruled out her continuing detention. In
the short time she was held, however, she says she was interviewed three times
by police, who questioned her about possessing a weapon. Zu‘bi hurried back to
her home town of Nazareth to hold a press conference. She offered an account of
the commando raid that would be substantiated by the other passengers after
their release but at this early stage was chiefly notable for conflicting in
almost every respect with a narrative being hastily constructed by Israeli
officials. Israel, which had seized all the passengers’ cameras and video
equipment, slowly released heavily edited, and in some cases doctored, video and
audio footage to try to support its claims. (Huwaida Arraf, a
Palestinian-American in the convoy, identified her own voice in recorded
transmissions said by Israel to be from the Mavi Marmara. But Arraf had been
aboard a smaller vessel.)
Israel argued that many of the passengers had been armed with
knives and even guns; that they had attacked and tried to “lynch” soldiers who
arrived “almost barefoot,” as minister Benny Begin told the BBC; that several
soldiers had been “kidnapped” and their lives put at risk by armed passengers;
and that the soldiers had held off opening fire until the last possible moment,
when their lives were in substantial danger. To make this improbable story seem
more plausible, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, also claimed
that many of the passengers, particularly the Turkish contingent belonging to an
Islamic humanitarian organization, were really terrorists allied with al-Qaeda
-- an allegation the Foreign Ministry eventually had to withdraw, though the
claim that there were terrorists on board the Mavi Marmara was maintained.
Zu‘bi, by contrast, argued that their ships
had been attacked far out in international waters in darkness, creating
confusion and panic; that the navy had opened fire on the lead ship, the Mavi
Marmara, where most of the activists were, before a single commando had stepped
onto the deck; that she was sure there were no weapons on board the Marmara and
that a later search by the navy that she witnessed revealed none; that two of
the three bodies she saw had gunshot wounds to the head, indicating executions
(later autopsies in Turkey would reveal five had wounds to the head, and that
the nine dead had been shot a total of 30 times, often from close range); and
that she had witnessed two passengers slowly bleed to death after her attempts
to alert the soldiers in Hebrew were ignored. She concluded: “Israel had days to
plan this military operation. They wanted many deaths to terrorize us and to
send a message that no future aid convoys should try to break the siege of
Gaza.”
Fisticuffs in the Knesset
A brief but stormy debate between Palestinian and Jewish MKs on
Israel’s attack on the aid flotilla took place the next day, June 2, but was cut
short by Matan Vilnai, the deputy defense minister, who transferred it to the
less public arena of the foreign affairs committee. Zu‘bi, however, managed to
revive the debate in the chamber by demanding her right to make a five-minute
statement. The ensuing scenes took aback even seasoned politicians such as Yossi
Sarid, a dovish former minister. He observed: “For the first time in its
history, the Knesset came dangerously close to fisticuffs, with only a small
step separating an exchange of words and an exchange of blows.”
Many MKs, including ministers, had left the chamber in protest as
Zu‘bi rose to speak. As she stood at the podium, a deputy speaker who had been
left in charge struggled to contain the outpouring of loathing directed at Zu‘bi
as Jewish parliamentarians shouted the epithets “traitor,” “terrorist” and worse
at the novice legislator. Anastasia Michaeli, a far-right MK from Lieberman’s
party, charged the podium and was intercepted by security guards as she tried to
grab Zu‘bi. (Michaeli was later invited to address an anti-violence conference
sponsored by the Interior Ministry in which she defended her actions, saying: “I
couldn’t allow myself to stay silent. I acted out of a conviction that we will
not allow anyone to harm Israel’s sovereignty.”) After five minutes of
pandemonium, the speaker, Reuven Rivlin, arrived to try to restore order.
Despite a dozen MKs being ejected, Zu‘bi barely uttered a few sentences, between
long enforced pauses as MKs spewed out abuse and personal insults -- including
one who yelled “Check if she has a knife!” -- before Rivlin brought her speech
to an abrupt end.
Some observers were surprised that the insults hurled at Zu‘bi
were not restricted to the right-wing MKs. In fact, legislators from the
opposition Kadima party were as vehement and abusive in their denunciations.
One, Yulia Shamalov Berkovitz, called out that the Palestinian MKs were
“parliamentary spies.” Zu‘bi, an articulate woman who previously headed a media
monitoring center, deftly pressed the buttons most likely to produce uproar in
the Knesset. In her brief address, she told the MKs that it was a “mitzvah,” or
Jewish holy commandment, to join the flotilla and break the siege of Gaza; she
called for an international inquiry to hold Israel to account; and she demanded
the return of photographs and video footage confiscated from the passengers,
noting that this evidence would prove who was telling the truth about what had
occurred.
Sarid, the former leader of Israel’s tiny
left-Zionist party, Meretz, may have been appalled by the behavior in the
chamber but he was no more sympathetic to Zu‘bi than the rioting MKs. He did not
accuse her of treason like the right wing, but he was equally dismissive of her
participation in the flotilla. He blamed her for grandstanding and, smugly
positioning himself as if separating disputatious children, castigated her in
the same terms as her near-assailant Michaeli. “Don’t think for a moment that
the vitriol on either side was born of genuine outrage. Everything was
pre-planned and calculated to gain the public’s adoration, whatever the
constituency,” he observed.
A Darker Agenda
Sarid’s putdown was by far the gentlest
treatment Zu‘bi would receive at the hands of Jewish politicians, public and the
local media. In a poll conducted by Tel Aviv University for Ha’aretz, 80 percent
of Israeli Jews said they thought Zu‘bi should be punished for joining the
flotilla. Shortly after her Knesset appearance, a Facebook page in Hebrew was
set up calling for her execution, quickly garnering thousands of members who
appeared unashamed to put their names to such a campaign. Death threats poured
into Zu‘bi’s office -- more than were ever sent to Azmi Bishara, according to
Zu‘bi’s assistant who once ran Bishara’s office -- and flowed at a lesser rate
into the offices of the other Palestinian MKs as well. Overnight Zu‘bi had swept
Salah from the top slot in the Jewish majority’s list of monsters. Knesset
officials outfitted Zu‘bi with a bodyguard after the Shinbet reported that it
was aware of more than a dozen concrete plots to kill her.
The focus in the days following the commando raid has been
chiefly on Zu‘bi. Eli Yishai, the interior minister and demagogic leader of the
ultra-Orthodox Shas party, got the ball rolling by announcing that he was
applying to the attorney general for approval to revoke Zu‘bi’s citizenship.
Legal safeguards should mean he is unlikely to succeed, but the struggle to do
so will strengthen the right and weaken the already besieged legal establishment
in Israel. Yishai has also promised to present legislation to revoke the
citizenship anyone defined as a traitor, saying of such a bill: “I believe most
of the people support this and that the Supreme Court will accept it.”
In a further indication of the right’s ascendancy, the Knesset’s
house committee agreed a week after the attack on the flotilla to strip Zu‘bi of
several parliamentary privileges, including banning her from leaving the country
by confiscating her diplomatic passport and denying her the right to claim legal
costs -- moves that are designed to look as though the ground is being prepared
to put her on trial. State prosecutors told the committee that she is still
being investigated for attempting to enter a closed military zone (that is,
Gaza) and violence against commandos. Yariv Levin, head of the committee and a
senior member of Netanyhu’s Likud party, claimed: “The committee’s decision
expresses the feelings of the entire nation that harsh steps should be taken
against MKs who harm Israel Defense Forces soldiers and question our ability to
be here. MK Zu‘bi now knows that she will be made to foot the bill for her
behavior.”
The campaign to denigrate Zu‘bi, as Levin’s comment and Yishai’s
proposed bill suggest, has been hijacked by a darker agenda of suggesting more
generally the treachery of the Palestinian leadership in Israel and, mostly
implicitly so far, the Palestinian citizens whom they represent. The most
significant move against the minority since the commando raid was the submission
of a bill -- already nicknamed the “Zu‘bi law” -- that would allow a sitting MK
to be expelled from the parliament if he or she does any of the following: deny
Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state; incite racism; or support
the armed struggle of a terrorist group. Given the highly distorted definitions
used in Israeli political discourse, such legislation could easily be used to
expel all ten of the Palestinian MKs serving in Palestinian parties or the joint
Palestinian-Jewish Communist party. The bill’s backers appear to believe that
this may be a more effective way to ban the Palestinian parties than their
previous attempts during general election campaigns through the partisan Central
Elections Committee. The courts have consistently, if narrowly, overturned the
Committee’s decisions.
The Zu‘bi law is only the latest in a steady stream of what have
been termed “loyalty laws” submitted since Netanyahu came to power in 2009.
Ja‘far Farah, director of the Mossawa advocacy group for the Palestinian
minority, says 23 bills have been proposed to limit the freedoms and rights of
Palestinian citizens or their leaders over the past year. The flagrantly
anti-democratic nature of these bills has resulted in most being rejected at an
early stage by a ministerial committee on the advice of legal officials. But as
pressure builds -- and incidents like Makhoul’s arrest and Zu‘bi’s defense of
the aid flotilla outrage the Jewish majority -- breaches in the dam are
widening. The Nakba Law, which can be used to end state funding for any
organization or institution that commemorates the dispossession of the
Palestinians in the 1948 war, is the most notable to have passed. Many similar
loyalty bills directed at the minority and their leaders are in the pipeline.
One being considered would require MKs to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish
and Zionist state, and another would revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted
of spying or terrorism.
In a commentary in the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, Ruth Gavison,
a distinguished law professor and founder of the Association for Civil Rights in
Israel, the oldest and largest human rights group in the country, hinted at an
emerging Jewish consensus against the Palestinian minority that cuts across all
Jewish political divisions. While denouncing the demagoguery of the right, she
observed that “it can be argued -- even if it is not necessary to do so -- that
participation in international activities likely to embarrass the state and
thwart its policies (such as unofficial visits to enemy states) should be seen
as reason enough to prevent a person from serving as a member of Knesset, in
accordance with reasonable judicial review process.”
Darker Still
Unlike the case of Operation Cast Lead, protests by Palestinian
citizens against the lethal raid on the aid flotilla have been mostly muted,
apart from the brief period when it appeared that Salah might have been killed.
The relative quiet may in part reflect the short timeline of the events: The
last peace activists had been deported within three days. But the strength of
feeling among the minority was evident from the strict observation of a general
strike called for June 1 by the Palestinian leadership. More likely, the
reluctance by Palestinian citizens to come out onto the streets to protest can
be ascribed to the current political climate in Israel. When Palestinian
students demonstrated alongside small numbers of Jewish left-wing activists in
the main universities, their numbers were dwarfed by counter-demonstrations by
right-wing students, mobilized by a rapidly growing nationalist youth movement
called Im Tirtzu. The defining image of Israel’s reaction to the commando raid
was of mobs of young right-wing Jews, almost lost in a sea of blue-and-white
flags, baying through the night in fury at the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv.
If the blockade on Gaza is justified in the minds of Israeli Jews
as collective punishment of the enclave’s Palestinian population for supporting
Hamas, a similar skewed logic is being applied to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
According to this thinking, those who sent Zu‘bi to the Knesset and those who
revere Salah should be held accountable -- and punished -- for their
representatives’ actions. The minority seems only too aware that the calls to
expel Zu‘bi from the Knesset or revoke her citizenship will not end there. A
poll by Haifa University in May showed that 62 percent of Palestinian citizens
feared they are under threat of expulsion from Israel. And Israel’s mood is
likely to grow darker still.
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