This is the text
of a talk delivered to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian
popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21.
Israel’s
apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out
for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most
discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features
of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any
other democratic state.
That is not
surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor
even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an
apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza,
but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid
nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western
politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and
hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.
I say “a little”,
because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this
topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between
Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli
population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are
also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an
outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination
explicit.
So instead of
trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me
concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on
recently.
First, let us
examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.
A few weeks ago I
met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the
Technion
university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a
nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal
records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose
Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical
authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved,
mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only
nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why
Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be
registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason
alone they are certain to lose. Why?
Far more is at
stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of
“Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish
state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective
“nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its
territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by
creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish
nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were
effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.
This
differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return,
for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who
wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely
separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship.
Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian
citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their
homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in
Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are
Jews or Palestinians.
That, in itself,
meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973:
“Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group
or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural
life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the
full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following
rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a
nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to
freedom of opinion and expression.”
Such separation
of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish
state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be
only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would
follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease
to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to
bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In
either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and
Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.
There would be
many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish
settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West
Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the
same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as
an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a
state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the
brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely
that the status quo could be maintained.
In other words,
the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds
its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.
Next, let us look
at the matter of land control.
Last month I met
an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly
because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside
Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I
cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in
quite the way the Zakais do.
True, there are
many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that
they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car.
There are also Israeli Jews -- and they are an extremely important group -- who
stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in
Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have,
against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if
Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.
But the Zakais’
relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of
friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is
itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and
it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship -- or at
least it appeared that way to me -- of genuine equals. A friendship of complete
intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight
that is in Israel.
The reason for
the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian
citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate
physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not
through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the
so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in
distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely
surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of
whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.
The Zakais want
to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village
of Nevatim in the Negev -- currently an exclusively Jewish community. The
Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin
community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming
social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they
are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to
the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.
Nevatim
is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities -- mostly
kibbutzim and moshavim -- that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most
of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians:
either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their
lands confiscated under special laws.
Today, after
these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised -- that is,
it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once
again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated
citizenship we have just considered.)
Access to most of
this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by
quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the
Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such
communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais
and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have
insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy,
property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by
Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a
vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.
Again, the 1973
UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures
“designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of
separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups …
[and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups
or to members thereof.”
If Jewish and
Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively -- and a separate
education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this
emotional and physical segregation -- how did the Zakais and Tarabins become
such close friends?
Their case is an
interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman
Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in
its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out
in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre
of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal
divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent
Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish
Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.
In their case,
Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and
emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other.
But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to
the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais
are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the
community of Nevatim.
Finally, let us
consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.
As I have said,
the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is
veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty
apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets,
park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way --
and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the
border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade
is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and
Palestinians is fully on show.
That lesson was
learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month.
Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the
Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for
Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter,
vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.
Their rude
awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business
trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived
at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s
security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated
and having their bags minutely inspected.
When they were
finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep
them under constant surveillance -- in front of hundreds of fellow passengers --
till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first
seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to
prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court
finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their
“abusive and unnecessary” treatment.
Two things about
this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in
court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only
grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic
belonging. It was transparently a case of racal profiling.
The second thing
to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian
citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur
every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was
that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El
Al.
They did so, I
suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of
believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who
declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if
they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could
become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had
misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.
The most
educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at
the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one
who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal
record.
Israel’s
apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at
the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be
vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above
the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the
enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done.
Apartheid rule,
as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied
territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is
inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in
the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates
a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid
towards Palestinians and about its goals.
Certainly, it is
true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside
Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under
occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than
it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The
second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of
apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel
-- and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the
occupying power to steal your resources -- your land, water and labour -- is in
progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the
considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works
to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little
harder.
In Israel, by
contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched -- it achieved its victory decades ago.
Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had
almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their
ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they
can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but
cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.
Doubtless, a
related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians
inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled -- and more legitimate -- kind of
apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least
those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason,
exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of
resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.
That is why we
must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found -- in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in
Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can
bring justice to the Palestinians.
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