19 August 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Measures designed to benefit Jewish school-leavers
applying for places in Israeli higher education at the
cost of their Arab counterparts have been criticised
by lawyers and
human rights groups.
The
new initiatives are viewed as part of an ongoing drive
by right-wing politicians in
Israel to demand “loyalty” from the country’s
large minority population of Arab citizens.
Critics have termed the measures, including a
programme to provide financial aid exclusively to
students who have served in the
Israeli army, a
form of “covert discrimination”.
While
most Jews are conscripted into the military, Israel’s
Arab citizens are generally barred from serving.
The
issue came to a head last week over reports that
Tel Aviv University
had reserved a large number of dormitory places for
discharged soldiers, leaving Arab students facing a
severe shortage of university accommodation in the
coming academic year.
In
addition, only former soldiers will be eligible in
future for large subsidies on tuition fees under an
amended law passed last month.
Arab
students already face many obstacles to pursuing
higher education, according to the Dirasat
policy research centre in Nazareth.
These include psychometric exams -- a combined
aptitude and personality test that has been criticised
as culturally biased -- and minimum age restrictions
for courses, typically at age 21, when soldiers finish
their three-year service.
But
Tel Aviv university’s decision has come under fire
because it will put further pressure on Arab students
to forgo higher education.
Most
Arab families live far from
Tel Aviv, with
limited public transport connections. High poverty
rates also mean few are able to afford private rooms
for their children, and Arab students already complain
that
private landlords
refuse to rent to them.
Although comprising only five per cent of the student
body at Tel Aviv university, Arabs won about 40 per
cent of dorm places last year, when rooms were awarded
using social and economic criteria, said Mohammed
Awadi, a
Tel Aviv student
leader.
“Now
the university management has told us that most Arab
students will be rejected because preference will be
given to military service,” he said. “The message is
that they would rather have a university without any
Arabs at all.”
Yousef
Jabareen, Dirasat’s director, said the university’s
decision represented an increasingly hardline attitude
from its officials. “What is so worrying is that a
supposedly liberal academic institution -- not the
right-wing government -- is promoting discrimination,”
he said.
Yesterday, Joseph Klafter, the university’s president,
was reported to be inspecting course reading lists for
signs of what officials called “post-Zionist bias”, or
criticism of Israel’s founding ideology.
Sawsan
Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre in Haifa,
said the new rules on subsidised tuition and student
housing were part of the government’s “loyalty drive”,
a programme of reforms that has been decried for
creating an overtly hostile political climate towards
the Arab minority.
The
campaign has been spearheaded by the Yisrael Beitenu
party of the foreign minister,
Avigdor Lieberman,
whose election slogan was “No loyalty, no
citizenship”.
The
use of military service as a criterion for awarding
student housing was ruled discriminatory two years ago
by Haifa district
court. The government, however, quickly amended the
law, allowing universities to change their rules, as
Tel Aviv University has now done.
Haifa
University, which has the largest Arab student
population, also reserves dorm rooms for former
soldiers.
Far-right leaders have suggested in the past that the
Arab minority can be encouraged to emigrate by
restricting access to higher education. Benny Elon, a
former
cabinet minister,
notoriously summed up the policy as: “I will close the
universities to you, I will make your lives difficult,
until you want to leave.”
Last
month the parliament approved a package of additional
financial benefits to encourage former soldiers to
study in “peripheral areas”, including three colleges
in West Bank settlements.
Gush
Shalom, an
Israeli peace group, warned that the law would push
Israel’s academic system “deeper into complicity with
the occupation” and bolster the movement for an
academic boycott of Israel.
Ms
Zaher said the government appeared determined to push
farther along the same path. Last month a
ministerial committee
approved a draft bill that would allow private
businesses to award extra benefits to former soldiers.
Although Arabs are a quarter of the college-age
population, they comprise only eight per cent of the
students attending Israeli universities.
A
Dirasat survey last year showed that half of Arab
students -- about 5,400 -- chose to study abroad,
mainly in neighbouring Jordan, because of the
difficulties they faced in Israel.
Ms
Zaher said that introducing discriminatory measures at
universities would exacerbate already stark
socio-economic disparities in Israel. Poverty rates
among Arab families are three times those of the
Jewish population.
“Rather than trying to remedy the discrimination by
investing extra budgets to help the Arab community,
public and private institutions are being encouraged
to widen the gaps,” she said.
Ms
Zaher was due this week to send a letter to the Yehuda
Weinstein, the attorney-general, calling for the
government to stop tying basic rights to military
service.
At Tel
Aviv University, Arab students expressed concern about
the new rules.
Rula
Abu Hussein, a film studies student from
Umm al-Fahm in
northern Israel,
said she had been told to vacate her dorm by October,
when her second year begins.
“It’s
really hard to find affordable private rooms in Tel
Aviv for anyone but if you’re an Arab it’s especially
difficult,” she said. “A lot of the landlords are
racist and don’t want an Arab in their properties.”
Tel
Aviv university was unavailable for comment.
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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