“PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL” Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy

By Ben White   Pluto Press  2012

    

Review by Abe Hayeem

Palestine News   Autumn 2012

Ben White, in this indispensable handy companion to his earlier book on Israeli Apartheid,  has distilled with forensic research from volumes of evidence, the myth of Israel’s claim to be a European style democracy. His wry and lucid commentary, under several headings, highlights the absurdity and paradoxes of Israel’s laws fabricated to institutionally discriminate against Palestinians’ true equality as Israeli citizens. Israel is in reality an ethnocracy, giving pre-eminence to its Jewish citizens. Palestinians are given inferior status as a favour rather than a right, with some trappings of democracy.

Especially in the fields of land and home ownership, labyrinthine and Kafkaesque laws like the Absentee Property Law, expropriated the bulk of land from Palestinians in 1947/48, prohibiting Palestinian ‘citizens’ from living in 93% of Israel. Apart from seven sub-standard Bedouin townships, there has never been a new Arab town planned, in comparison with hundreds of towns for Jewish Israelis, which, in law deter Palestinians from living in them.

Currently, in its drive to further ‘Judaise’ the Negev and Galilee, in effect continuing the Nakba of 1948, the Bedouin are being driven from the unrecognized villages like Al-Araqib, using draconian laws. In this process of ‘de-Arabisation’, Jewish settlers are even infiltrating Arab neighbourhoods in the mixed cities like Jaffa and Acre, parallel to events in East Jerusalem and Bedouin areas of the Hebron Hills in Area C. This is all to counteract the ‘demographic threat’, using extreme force and dispossession, to ‘ensure the homogeneity of Jewish national identity, free from Palestinians with a collective identity.’

Further chapters detail the vast inequalities in provision of education, civic and social services. The unequal legal regime, backed by military brutality was exemplified by the deliberate shooting of Palestinians in the October 2000 protests in solidarity with the Intifada, where the IDF escaped justice. A whole new tranche of discriminatory laws further erode any freedoms.

The paranoid fears of equality are expressed by MK David Rotem :“I am not ashamed that I want to maintain this country as a Jewish and democratic state. In your way there would be no state. Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens.”

Ben’s talent at unearthing damning quotations, reveals the sheer unabashed racism of not only today’s far-right MKs, but of Israel’s founding fathers. His concluding chapter links the situation of Palestinians on both sides of the green line, and asks us to consider the only scenario that can change the current situation of relentless colonization by ‘re-imagining the Jewish and Palestinian presence in Palestine/Israel and a future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation’.