Israel Tightens Stranglehold on 1948 Palestinians

By Isabelle Humphries

This past June 12 the Green Patrol, created 25 years ago by then-Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, oversaw the destruction of 14 metal shacks in the Negev desert, leaving some 125 Bedouin citizens of Israel homeless. A week earlier the Israeli Knesset voted to cut all child allowance by 4 percent—but with an additional 20 percent reduction in benefits for a child without a relative who has served in the army. As few Arab citizens serve in the Israeli army, it is the one million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel who will be the primary victims of this policy. At the same time, Israeli courts continue to investigate MK Azmi Bishara’s alleged support of terrorism and restrict the travel of MK Ahmed Tibi and Sheikh Riad Saleh, leader of the Islamic Movement inside Israel. As the media eye is turned to suicide bombs, settlers and Israeli military action in the 1967 territories, Israel is tightening its colonialist control over Arab citizens inside the Green Line.

The destruction of the homes in the “unrecognized” Bedouin village of Al Maqiman is the latest case of a housing demolition and land confiscation policy that effects all Arab citizens of the Jewish state. Some 70,000 Bedouin citizens in the Negev live in “unrecognized” locations—despite the fact that many of their villages existed prior to 1948. The villages’ “unrecognized” status means that, under Israeli law, the Interior Ministry may proceed with housing demolitions at any time. Sharon established the Green Patrol in 1976 to “locate and rapidly evacuate” Negev Bedouin living or working on what was declared as state land. Sharon’s pet project in the Negev was in evidence this June as Green Patrol Inspectors, accompanied by 200 policemen and soldiers, oversaw the bulldozing of the homes of the Al Rabidi clan.

Unlike Christian and Muslim Palestinians, however, many Bedouin do in fact serve in the Israeli army. Although Israel claims that municipal and individual financial benefits are linked to army service, not ethnic origin, the situation for Bedouin citizens is no better (and often worse) than that of other Arabs in Israel—a clear indication that it is Jewish racial identity rather than army service that confers privilege in Israel.

The question of benefits linked to army service is nothing new to Israel’s Palestinian community. Only in the past decade have benefits for children became disentangled from family army service. Israel uses other legal means to discriminate against Arabs in the field of benefits, without actually specifying race in the law. “I tried to get unemployment benefits, but was refused,” said one resident of Sakhnin, a Palestinian town in the Galilee. “I was told that because I owned one dunam of land that I was a property owner and thus ineligible.”

In Israel, however, no Jewish citizen technically “owns” land, because it is all owned by the state. Thus the only landholders are Palestinians who have managed to hold on to a tiny fraction of the land they owned before 1948. The majority of these landholders do not have enough land or capital to make any kind of financial income from the odd dunam that is still theirs, but it is only Arabs who will be penalized in terms of benefits for being landowners.

In June, army service was once more on the agenda as the Knesset voted for a 24 percent cut in child benefits for those families without a serving or veteran member of the military. The increasing financial drain of maintaining the military occupation and the resulting devastation of the tourist industry has contributed to an economic crisis that regularly pushes “security” to the top of the Israeli news agenda. The cut in child benefits strikes directly at 223,000 Palestinian families, of whom more than a quarter are living below the poverty line.

(The racist nature of this policy is seen even more clearly on examining the deals made between Jewish religious groups which, despite their non-service in the army, have succeeded in receiving funds via other routes.)

Arguing that the cuts amount to “intentional discrimination based on national belonging,” the National Committee of Arab Mayors and Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, petitioned the Supreme Court seeking cancellation of the amendment. The state argued in response that preferential treatment for those who serve the state “accords with Israel’s values as a Jewish and democratic state,” and that a 20 percent gap between military and non-military families is not excessive.

Because Israel’s Basic Law specifies that Israel is a “Jewish” and “democratic” state, however, the issue goes beyond the argument over whether it contravenes Israeli law. Rather, it is a question of whether the international community should continue to view Israeli Basic Law as democratic.

Knesset “Representation”

“It is not apartheid because Arabs have representatives in the Knesset,” read an e-mail I received from a 20-year-old British man. In the past two years, however, the cases of “incitement” and accusations of support of “terrorism” against Arab parliamentarians have become too numerous to recall. The latest concern MK Ahmed Tibi, whom the Israelis wish to prevent from visiting the West Bank and Gaza, and MK Azmi Bishara, whom Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubenstein has indicted on two counts.

Firstly, Bishara is accused of making speeches supporting a “terrorist organization”— namely, Hezbollah—and, secondly, he is accused of breaking the law by arranging humanitarian family visits for Palestinian citizens of Israel to an “enemy state,” Syria. Israel is placing limits on the freedom of speech and travel against elected Arab parliamentarians, in violation of the rights accorded them as members of the Israeli Knesset.

Palestinians inside Israel are the people and their descendants who were among the 100,000 Palestinians who remained inside Israeli borders (in their original homes or as refugees) and were accorded citizenship by the Jewish state. Since the beginning of the second intifada there has been an increasing political consciousness among the one million-strong Palestinian community, which now represents nearly 20 percent of the Israeli population.

In October 2000, Arab citizens took to the streets to protest Israeli occupation of the 1967 territories and discrimination against their own community. In the space of four days 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed and hundreds more—many of whom were not even demonstrating—injured on the streets of their own towns. “I knew they killed six of us on Land Day in 1976, but that was in my parents’ generation,” said Ahmed, a 26-year-old Nazareth accountant. “But in October I realized I was naïve to think that it could only happen on the other side of the border. The eyes of my generation have been opened to the reality and there is no going back.”

The oppression of Palestinians inside Israel is part of the wider discrimination and oppression of the whole Palestinian nation, emerging from the tenets of the same ideology: Zionism. It is a mistake, moreover, for the international community to view the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel as a “domestic” issue. On the contrary, it is integral to the whole Arab-Israeli conflict. As non-Jews in a Jewish state, Palestinians inside Israel are excluded from benefits and civil rights accorded to Jewish Israelis, and they will continue to be treated as second-class citizens until Israel is defined as a state for all its citizens. While, currently, the physical assault on the community cannot be compared with Israeli aggression against the West Bank and Gaza, the threat is just as real.

Nor will the two-state solution currently on the agenda deal with apartheid inside Israel. The continuing confiscation of land and building of Jewish hilltop settlements in the Galilee has created a landscape not dissimilar from the mountainous West Bank and the settlements strangling towns such as Nablus and Ramallah. In October 2000 Israel used the hilltop Galilee settlements as military vantage points for police snipers. It is only one step further to place a tank on the same hill to crush a rebellion—a hill that may be only 12.5 miles from Jenin, after all, where the presence of Israeli tanks no longer raises media attention.

Isabelle Humphries is development director at the Ahali Center for Community Development, an NGO based in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian town inside Israel. She is also a regular contributor to the Cairo Times, an Egyptian news magazine with a human rights focus. She can be contacted at <isabellebh@yahoo.com>.