Israel continues with racist policies
By As'ad Abdul Rahman

According to British historian Arnold Toynbee, the Jewish people, having suffered atrocities, oppression and discrimination throughout their history -- reaching a climax with the Nazi holocaust -- in turn passed their suffering on to the people of Palestine, where they established their political entity. Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker and prominent Israeli public figure, has said that fascism has taken hold in Israel. Israel, he adds, has become a thug state: arrogant, harsh, imperialist, superficial, introverted, and bankrupt of its original principles.

The repeated calls by members of the Israeli government to kill Palestinians, demolish their homes, deport them and legalize this deportation (euphemized as “transfer”) is proof of the widespread presence of fascist thinking among Israeli public figures. In the past few years, as Burg puts it, Israel has crossed a great number of red lines.

The right-wing extremist party Yisrael Beitenu, led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, recently proposed a draft law requiring all citizens of Israel to swear an oath of loyalty to Zionism or face deportation. It is obvious that the Palestinians of the 1948 areas are the targets of this law. Earlier, the Israeli government accepted a draft law forbidding them from commemorating the anniversary of the Nakba. These laws are in line with a longstanding policy by various Israeli governments to push them off their lands and nullify their “demographic threat” to the state's Jewish majority.

Ever since 1948, when Israel forcibly expelled the majority of the Palestinians, those who remained were treated as second-class citizens, subjected to racist laws and discriminatory customs. The policy of hostility towards the Palestinians of the 1948 areas is still in place, for by mid-century, the population of Arabs in Palestine is expected to surpass the Jewish population. For this reason, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists upon a policy that ensures a clear Jewish majority in Israel, and demands recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as a prerequisite to any negotiations.

In spite of these obstacles, the Palestinians of the 1948 areas try their best to safeguard their existence on their native soil, and to protect what remains of the Islamic and Christian holy places in their towns and villages, but this in particular has been a losing battle. After 1948, the Israeli government took control of the Islamic Waqf of the Higher Islamic Council. On the pretext that the council's director, Mufti Ameen Al Hussaini, was absent, the government confiscated this property and gave it to the Israeli Property Administration. The same is true of the Christian Waqf, except that Christian properties belonging to Western countries were kept intact. Abdul Majeed Ighbariyya, secretary of the Al Aqsa Waqf and Heritage Establishment, said, “In Palestine in 1948, there were more than 2,500 holy places, of which only 200 remain. The authorities refuse permission to maintain many of these places, claiming that asking for the right to maintain is asking for the right of return.” “Some of these holy places,” he added, “have been sold by the Israeli authorities and others have been rented.”

Sixty years after its founding, in contrast to most other countries, Israel still has no policy for the protection of minorities. The relationship with the Palestinians of the 1948 areas is still extemporaneous; with no codified set of rights, they are left to the mercy of the government's whims. Their grievances are customarily ignored; for example, the report of the Or Commission, which investigated the killing of 13 Arabs by the police in 2000, remains unpublished.

Some Israeli legal organizations have expressed concern about the increasingly racist sentiments and policies affecting the Palestinians of the 1948 areas, including attempts to encourage emigration among them (i.e., soft deportation and transfer) and to discourage their political participation based on fears that they represent a dangerous fifth column. These organizations worry that with the rise of an extreme right-wing government in the most recent elections, these fears may translate into actions. Former Shin Bet director Yossef Harmelin came to the provocative conclusion that an uprising of the Palestinians of the 1948 areas would pose a grave threat to the lives of Jewish citizens.

In the same vein, Israeli historian Benny Morris, imagining a scenario in which Israel was invaded by a neighboring country, proposed that such a situation would justify the mass deportation of the Palestinians of the 1948 areas. On the other hand, the late Samuel Toledano, former secretary general of Spain's Jewish federation, believed that if Palestinians of the 1948 areas were granted the full legal and social equality they have long demanded, they would pose no threat whatsoever to the Jewish state. Israeli policy, however, has consistently sided with Harmelin's and Morris's paranoid perspective.

Racism against Arabs is deeply rooted in Israeli history and in Zionist thinking. Suspicion and denigration of the Arabs traces its roots to the founding fathers of Zionism, whether expressed softly as in the words of Theodor Herzl or “boldly” as in those of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Today, this tradition, passed on through Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, and inherited by Netanyahu and Lieberman, forms a core principle of Israeli government policies.

Dr As'ad Abdul Rahman is chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia.

(Source: Gulf News

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