March 02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Al
Jazeera"
- For years, Israel has sold, and we in
the United States have bought, the cheap
peel-away sticker that it is the "lone
democracy" in the Middle East.
It has a nice, assuring ring to it, sort of like
"opportunity" or "peace", whatever these chants
may, in practice, mean. But, like beauty, it
remains very much in the eye of the beholder,
and like reality, sooner or later the truth
surfaces, no matter how well its fiction is
packaged.
We in the US are damn good at packaging
ourselves, and our charade of equality and
justice is second to none. We sell stuff; lots
of it. Much of it false. Very much like a
willing stepchild, Israel has learned from us
that if you say something long enough with
vigour, power and money to back it, it begins to
take on a surreal life of its own, no matter how
much reality puts the lie to its embroidery. Indeed,
we are quite accomplished at obfuscation. We
know it all too well. We've hidden behind the
fog of it for so long that, even today, those
who remind us that the earth is, in fact, not
flat, remain heretics to be scorned. Have we
found the weapons of mass destruction yet?
Long before Israel erected separate communities
divided by will of law to segregate its Jewish
citizens from its almost two million Palestinian
Arab ones, the US perfected the art of
artificial divide.
With the accuracy of delusion, from coast to
coast, could be heard the refrain that
race-based segregation was lawful as long as the
facilities provided to each race were equal.
For decades, the legal fiction of "separate but
equal" was the mantra that state and local
governments, throughout the US, held out to
justify the artificial, indeed lawful,
separation of tens of millions of Americans on
the basis of race and nothing more.
Whether in services, facilities, public
accommodations, transportation, medical care,
employment, voting booths or in schools, black
and white were segregated under the cheap
shibboleth that artificial isolation of the
races insured equality, as long as the
conditions of their separation were legally
equal.
These laws came to
be known simply as Jim
Crow.
Indeed, the idea that race or religious
separation was not only preferable, but helpful
to one another's ability to chart their own
separate but equal course, became a perverse
intellectual exercise which fundamentally did
nothing more than exalt the supremacy of one
race at the expense of another.
Putting aside, for the moment, the reality that
facilities and services offered to African
Americans were almost always of lower quality
than those available to their counterpart white
Americans, eventually the US Supreme Court had
had enough. It held that separate could never be
equal, even where there was a match in
opportunity and facilities.
As noted in the
seminal 1954 case of Brown
v Board of Education, a school-based
challenge to the notion of equal segregation,
separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.
In words that eventually took hold first in
education, then elsewhere throughout the US, the
unanimous court noted:
"Today, education is perhaps the most important
function of state and local governments.
Compulsory school attendance laws and the great
expenditures for education both demonstrate our
recognition of the importance of education to
our democratic society ... It is the very
foundation of good citizenship ... Such an
opportunity, where the state has undertaken to
provide it, is a right which must be made
available to all on equal terms ...
"Segregation of white and colored children in
public schools has a detrimental effect upon the
colored children. The impact is greater when it
has the sanction of the law; for the policy of
separating the races is usually interpreted as
denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A
sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a
child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of
law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the
educational and mental development of negro
children and to deprive them of some of the
benefits they would receive in a racially
integrated school system."
These words were
penned but six years after Israel was granted
statehood by the United
Nations.
Nevertheless, some 62 years later, Brown's
command remains a linchpin of any meaningful
democratic ideal and, yet,
evermore elusive in Israel, which takes pride in
the falsehood of the same supremacist claptrap
rejected long ago.
Separate
schools
In Israel,
Palestinian schoolchildren account for about 25
percent, or about 480,000 pupils, of the state's
total student population. Palestinian
and Jewish students,
from elementary to high school, learn in
separate institutions.
As noted in Brown v. Board of Education,
institutionalised discrimination in the
education system impedes the ability of students
to develop the skills and awareness to
participate on an equal footing, as individuals,
in a free society.
In Israel, this is no accident. It is very much
the result of a conscious effort to build a
permanent educational, social and political
advantage of Jews over their Palestinian
counterparts.
READ MORE: Israel tells
Palestinians - Our textbooks or no funding
In 1969, the state passed a law that gave
statutory recognition to cultural and
educational institutions and defined their aims
as the development and fulfilment of Zionist
goals in order to promote Jewish culture and
education.
In that light, in Israel, Palestinian children
receive an education that is inferior in nearly
every respect when compared with that for Jewish
children.
Palestinian schools
receive far less state funding than Jewish ones
-
three times less,
according to official state data from 2004. In
Jerusalem, it
is half the funding.
This underfunding
is reflected in
many areas;
including relatively large class sizes and poor
infrastructure and facilities. Many communities
have no kindergartens for three and
four-year-olds. Some schools lack libraries,
counsellors, and recreation facilities. Their
students get fewer enrichment and remedial
programmes and special education services than
do Jewish children.
Palestinian students are also underrepresented
in Israel's universities and higher education
institutions.
Recent
studies
indicate that only 10 percent of Palestinian
citizens were attending undergraduate programmes,
and 7.3 percent and 4 percent were pursuing
masters' and doctoral degrees respectively.
Palestinian academics account for just about 1.2
percent of all tenured and tenure track
positions in Israel's universities.
Like a full range of public spending policies
that privilege the Jewish majority, government
support for student tuition fees, subsidised
housing and employment opportunities is
available only for those who serve in the
Israeli army which, as a practical matter,
excludes Palestinians.
No less pernicious, for Palestinian citizens of
Israel, is their inability to live and work
where they choose.
Community
segregation
In 1952, the
Israeli state authorised the World
Zionist Organization and
the Jewish
Agency to
function as quasi-governmental entities in order
to further advance the goals of the Zionist
vision, to the detriment of minorities including
those with Israeli citizenship.
Under the Land
Acquisition Law of 1953, the
land of 349 Palestinian towns and villages,
approximately 1,212 square kilometres, was
transferred to the state to be used
preferentially for the Jewish majority.
In 1953, the
Knesset bestowed governmental authorities on
the Jewish
National Fund to
purchase land exclusively for Jewish use. The
state granted financial advantages, including
tax relief, to facilitate such purchases.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
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Today, 12.5 percent of Israeli land is owned by
the Fund, which bans the sale or lease of it to
non-Jews under the admitted premise that it's a
"danger" for non-Jews to own land in Israel.
In 1960, the state
passed a law stipulating that ownership of
"Israeli lands", namely the
93 percent of
land under the control of the state and the
Fund, cannot be transferred in any manner.
In practice, this means that in some 700
agricultural and community towns throughout
Israel, housing applicants are screened by
Jewish boards with the ultimate power to accept
or reject applications to settle in these
locales.
These boards, which include representatives from
the World Zionist Organization and the Fund,
consider a range of criteria such as
"suitability to the community's social life" and
the town's "social and cultural fabric".
The admission process all but guarantees that
almost all Israeli towns and villages will
remain Jewish enclaves, and are but a tease to
those Palestinian citizens who desire to live in
equality in fully integrated communities.
Is it any wonder
then, that today, in Jim Crow Israel,
few Palestinian citizens
have been found to be suitable for these
communities?
By virtue of state control over the racial
makeup of municipalities throughout Israel, most
Palestinian citizens are limited to residence
and employment in the acutely overcrowded
Palestinian towns and villages.
In fact, since 1948, the State of Israel has
established hundreds of additional Jewish
communities, without permitting the construction
of any new Palestinian municipality whatsoever.
Indeed, of Israel's total area,
just 2.5 percent comes under Palestinian
municipal jurisdiction.
Of Israel's 40
towns with the highest unemployment rates,
36 are Palestinian
and the average employed Palestinian citizens of
Israel makes just
58.6 percent of
what a Jewish Israeli makes. About 53
percent of the
impoverished families in Israel are Palestinian.
Inequality from the Israeli Parliament
Over the years, the Knesset has used the veneer
of democracy while acting arbitrarily to ensure
that demographic and political control remains
exclusively in the hands of the state's Jewish
citizenry and parliamentarians.
For example, in an
effort to maintain a Jewish demographic
majority, the
Family Unification Law of 2003 prohibits Palestinian
citizens of Israel from reuniting with their
spouses who live in the West Bank or Gaza. As a
result, more than 150,000 children born of these
so-called mixed marriages are denied the most
elementary rights and privileges attendant to
Israeli citizenship.
In a series of other laws, the Knesset has not
only imposed a broad range of limitations on
freedom of movement, speech and access to the
political system for Palestinian citizens, but
imposed ideological boundaries on the platforms
of political parties to which they may belong.
By design, such laws thwart the ability of
Palestinians to impact upon a political process
which, daily, dictates every phase of their
lives, but yet leaves them essentially powerless
to bring about any fundamental change in the
system itself. These restrictions necessarily
deny Palestinian citizens an equal opportunity
to play a meaningful role in the political life
of Israel, otherwise available to their Jewish
counterparts.
Under its most
recent attempt to stifle its Palestinian
minority, the Knesset proposed
legislation
that would enable the suspension of elected
representatives of the public not because of
criminal wrongdoing on their part, or even
because of a breach of settled legislative
protocol, but simply because their political
agenda is objectionable to the Jewish majority.
Under other
legislation, Knesset members may strip
Palestinian MKs from
their elected seats if they voice opposition to
Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Indeed,
recently a Palestinian MK, Haneen
Zoabi, was
suspended from parliamentary debates for six
months when, on the floor of the Knesset, she
called Israeli soldiers "murderers" for their
role in the Mavi Marmara incident that took the
lives of nine pro-Palestinian activists.
On other occasions, the Knesset has imposed
severe restrictions on travel by Palestinian MKs,
both domestically and abroad.
Currently, there is
a
law that bans
any political party which challenges the
existence of Israel as a "Jewish" state or which
advocates equal rights for all of its citizens
irrespective of ethnicity. Another law empowers
the interior minister to revoke citizenship of
people who violate "allegiance" to the state.
An elusive
pursuit for justice
That Israel has become a land where laws are
enacted to obstruct the free exercise of core
political rights of its Palestinian citizens is
beyond dispute.
Ultimately, in any truly "democratic" society,
citizens are able to seek redress for
institutional or private injuries through an
independent judicial system wed to no result but
equal protection and justice for all, no matter
the race, creed or religion of those who seek
its protection.
It's hard to imagine a more fundamental or
essential arbiter of the rights of all than a
judiciary that operates under no obligation but
to see that justice be done without
consideration of the ethnicity of those who come
before it.
Yet, by design, in Israel, the pursuit of
justice by Palestinian citizens is an elusive
chase indeed; one calculated to perpetuate
second-class citizenship very much the way
African Americans were long held in the US under
the arcane practice of separate but equal.
For example, more
than 200 major rulings issued by the Supreme
Court of Israel have
been translated into English and published on
the court's website along with the original
Hebrew decisions. Although the majority of these
pronouncements are relevant to Palestinian
citizens of Israel, none has been translated
into Arabic.
In the history of Israel's Supreme Court, there
have been but two Palestinian male justices.
Currently, all but one of its 15 members is
Jewish. No Palestinian woman has ever served on
the Israeli Supreme Court. At the district and
magistrates court level, Palestinian judges make
up less than 5 percent of those who occupy a
judicial position, and even fewer who preside
over labour courts.
Historically, the Israeli Supreme Court has
sided with majoritarian values in what can only
be described as a wholesale abdication of its
responsibility to see that justice be done for
Palestinian and Jew alike.
Thus the Supreme
Court has upheld the restrictions of the 1950 Law
of Return which
permits every Jewish person to immigrate to
Israel and obtain citizenship, yet denies the
same protection to Palestinians, even those who
were born in the area that is now the State of
Israel.
Likewise, the Court
has
upheld the
legality of the January 2003
family unification ban that bars a Palestinian
citizen from raising a family in Israel with a
Palestinian spouse from the Occupied
Territories. The controversial law was
introduced as an amendment to the 1952
Citizenship Law, which determines citizenship
for non-Jews.
In 2014, the
Court dismissed a petition by Adalah:
The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in
Israel challenging
the continued Judaisation of Palestinian-owned
land originally confiscated largely from
Palestinian refugees inside
Israel. According to Adalah, the court's
decision "entrenches
racial segregation" and, writes Mondoweiss
Editor-at-Large Annie Robbins, "will result in
the
continued concentration
and containment of the Palestinian population in
Israel".
These are but a few of the many decisions of the
Supreme Court that have adversely affected
Palestinian citizens of Israel on the basis of
their second-class status and little else.
The definition of the State of Israel as a
Jewish one makes inequality and discrimination
against its Palestinian citizens a political
goal.
The marriage of "Jewish" and "democratic"
ensures discrimination against non-Jewish
citizens and necessarily impedes the realisation
of full equality for all citizens of Israel.
Israel has become better at this "subtle"
nuanced sale of an imaginary narrative than we
in the US ever dared dream.
What, however, the "Jewish" state has not yet
come to grips with, is that eventually myths
about equal opportunity and justice for some 20
percent of its population prove specious and
that, ultimately, time swallows all such
fallacy, whether by operation of law or,
tragically, all too often, through violence.
Stanley L
Cohen is an attorney and human rights activist
who has done extensive work in the Middle East
and Africa.
