28 April 2010By Jonathan Cook
Below 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.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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