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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2009, pages 15, 37 The Nakba Continues “Coexistence” and “Mixed Cities”: A Microcosm of Israeli ApartheidBy Isabelle Humphries
Acre is a national test. Acre today is Israel in 10 years’ time. What happens in Acre today is what will happen in Israel… Coexistence is a slogan.—Rabbi Yossi Stern, head of the Hesder Yeshiva in Acre FOR ONCE this writer finds herself agreeing with an Israeli settler. “Coexistence” between Israel’s Palestinian and Jewish citizens is an empty notion indeed, part of the “democratic” image Israel projects in its ongoing international public relations offensive. After the October events in Acre when Palestinian residents were attacked and their homes and property set on fire (see December 2008 Washington Report, p. 15), the media debate focused on how to return to the state of coexistence that the town supposedly once enjoyed. Yet any study of Israel’s “mixed cities” reveals that contrary to serving as models of coexistence, cities like Acre and Jaffa present a microcosm of the state as a whole—a space in which Palestinians are increasingly marginalized and excluded from the benefits of the state of which they supposedly are citizens. The vast majority of the 20 percent of the Israeli population who are Palestinian live segregated from Jewish residential areas. Because the country’s economic life is based in the Jewish sector, most Palestinian employees return at night to the few hundred Arab towns and villages which survived the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. While the bulk of the Palestinian population was evicted that year from the coastal area cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle, Lydd and Akka, in each town a small number remained. In the weeks and months after occupation they were joined by refugees fleeing from other villages destroyed in the area. Israeli policy was to push these Palestinians into one area of each city which became known by Jews and Arabs alike as the “ghetto”—neighborhoods like the Ajami in Jaffa, al-Jamal in Ramle, or the old city of Acre. For years Palestinians in these areas lived with several families crammed into each overcrowded house. These are the origins of Israel’s mixed cities. While those who could afford it later moved to other parts of the town, these original “ghetto” areas stagnated in an even lower economic status than the rest of Israel’s struggling Palestinian community. Today these areas have some of the highest juvenile delinquency and crime rates in the country. Neglected by the state, Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in these areas face a seemingly impossible task. A few years ago I met the head of the Arab parents’ committee in Acre who told me that they were short so many classrooms for the city’s Arab children that one school was even using a converted chicken shed as a classroom. Jewish Israeli entrepreneurs and policymakers alike have their own solutions to these problems—or at least for the way these Arab “problems” affect the Jewish community. Jawarish is an area on the outskirts of Ramle to which refugees of the village of al-Majdal were forced in 1950. Today it is home to around 2,000 residents, most employed in low-income construction or agricultural work. Two decades later, in 1970, the Israeli government settled a community of Bedouin from the Negev next to Jawarish, creating a large low-income neighborhood with which Jewish home buyers had no wish to be associated. With the establishment in the 1980s and ’90s of the nearby high-income Jewish neighborhoods Yefe Nof and Gannei Dan, developers realized that Jewish buyers would be put off by their potential new neighbors. Thus a concrete wall was built, 13 feet high, 1.24 miles long, financed by the promoters of Gannei Dan. The wall is high enough to prevent either side from seeing the other, thereby soothing fears of Jewish buyers. Israel’s apartheid walls are by no means limited to the West Bank and Gaza. Encouraging Jewish settlement is not a preserve of the private sector, of course, but works in tandem with the ongoing and explicit government policy of Judaization of Arab areas. One of the ways this is accomplished in mixed cities is by rehabilitating old buildings and creating expensive tourist or “artistic” areas. While to visitors this looks like careful historic preservation and investment in the area, the result is that any newly refurbished housing and apartment buildings are way beyond the means of the local Palestinian families: segregation through the market. I have previously reported on the effect of this policy of “gentrification” on the people of Jaffa (see July 2008 Washington Report, p. 14). Several hundred homes in the original “ghetto” neighborhood of al-Ajami are under demolition order because authorities claim that families have made “illegal” extensions to their homes. For several decades the government had hoped to demolish the whole neighborhood, and thus had put a ban on any extensions or renovations to Arab homes. As Jaffa community activist Sami Shehadah explained, residents had no choice but to make repairs without official permits as the old houses they were living in crumbled around them. Without the resources to employ lawyers, many gave in and fled the neighborhood. Others, such as Zaki Khimal, the third-generation owner of a seafront café, are braving the fight, but fending off attacks from all sides. After rejecting a $1 million dollar offer from a Jewish foreign developer (who has succeeded in buying other property around the café), Khimal has been bombarded with a multitude of bizarre municipal fines increasing by the day. He has even been fined for the cost of the city’s destruction of a new staircase he built around the side of his house which was deemed illegal. He now has constructed a moveable iron staircase which apparently is acceptable, but he still has to face the court case regarding the destruction of the first version. It would be funny if it wasn’t so appalling. While Jaffa’s proximity to Tel Aviv makes expensive beachfront flats an attractive proposition for Israeli business people and second homes for the wealthy from abroad, Acre is attracting Israelis of a different kind—the West Bank religious settler. “The Ometz (Courage) Group” was established by graduates of yeshivas in West Bank settlements in the Hebron area, where settlers are known for their encouragement of direct violence against Palestinians. Inspired by this group’s call for the settlement and Judaization of Acre, in 1997 a group of young Jewish families arrived in the city. The community has since expanded, especially with settlers forced to leave Gaza in 2005. An emergency report produced by the Akka Residents Coalition following recent events dates the beginning of direct attacks on the city’s Palestinian residents to 2002, just before a religious yeshiva school was established in Acre. Individual non-Jewish residents have been attacked, homes and cars set alight, and a local mosque vandalized. Grafitti urging “Death to the Arabs” can be seen across the city—and all this before the events in October. The Coalition—a group of non-profit organizations, institutes, political activists and public figures from the city—have now enlisted the help of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, in calling on the attorney general to launch an urgent investigation into those responsible for publishing calls for the expulsion of the city’s Arab residents. Following the October clashes, notices were distributed both on the Internet and in Jewish neighborhoods demanding that Arab residents leave the city, encouraging Jews to boycott Arab stores and not to respect any Arab religious festival, events or landmark. Adalah demands those responsible for publishing these statements be investigated, exposed and prosecuted. A Matter of PolicyThe problem with racism in Israel’s mixed cities, however, is that it is not simply a grassroots phenomenon that can be rooted out by catching individual perpetrators—as important as that may be. Exclusion of Palestinians is dictated by the very definition of the state of Israel: a democracy for Jews only. Exclusion, therefore, not only is acceptable, but encouraged, as a deliberate part of policy at the highest levels. As a result, politicians and policymakers openly express racist ideas without any sanction whatsoever. Another of Adalah’s mixed city cases attests to this reality. In October, Israel’s attorney general refused to disqualify the mayor of Ramle, Yoel Lavi, from running for re-election despite public racist statements against Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of his municipality. Adalah had joined with local NGOs to demand that he be prevented from running and that his political party list be disqualified. Lavi has shown consistent racism against Arab residents during his time as mayor—Adalah quotes him as having said, “If Arabs want to deal with me in nationalist issues I will be the first to open fire on them. I have a lot of life experience. Every time I have opened fire on Arabs I have managed to stay alive and they have died.” If Israel’s Jewish politicians are not to be censured for racist incitement, why would the thugs on the streets of Acre worry about the consequences of their actions? The racism and complete lack of coexistence in Israel’s mixed cities thus reflects the apartheid in the country as a whole and Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians on both sides of the 1948/1967 line. Erasing Palestinian identity and history by changing the geographic landscape, increasing impoverishment with discriminatory practice, and encouraging both big business and street thugs to expand the Judaization process and further marginalize the Palestinian community are policies which affect Palestinians from Hebron to Jerusalem to Jaffa to Acre. Just knighted by the British Queen, Israel’s very own Nobel Prize-winning “peace” broker and current President Shimon Peres is always keen to let the world know what he’s doing for peace, so the photo accompanying this article is provided in an effort to help spread the word. Look closely at the image of the construction of the “Peres Peace House”—whose Web site fails to mention that Palestinians protested vehemently against its being built over part of the old Jaffa cemetery in the Ajami neighborhood. So next time you hear an Israeli politician talking about “peace” or “coexistence,” remember the reality behind the rhetoric, the fancy words about peace designed to distract your eye from the bulldozer, the violence and the six decades and counting of Israeli apartheid. Isabelle Humphries is completing doctoral research on internally displaced Palestinian refugees. She can be contacted at <isabellebh2004@yahoo.co.uk>. |
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