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“In democracies, respecting rights isn’t a choice leaders make day-by-day, it is the reason they govern.” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
“There’s only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests… That’s Israel. Because we’re the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It’s the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law.” - Bibi Netanyahu on YouTube’s World View interview
Contrary to Bibi’s deluded utterances…
2010 Human Rights Report: Israel and the occupied territories
Israel is a multiparty parliamentary democracy with a population of approximately 7.7 million, including Israelis living in the occupied territories. Israel has no constitution, although a series of “Basic Laws” enumerate fundamental rights. Certain fundamental laws, orders, and regulations legally depend on the existence of a “State of Emergency,” which has been in effect since 1948. The 120-member, unicameral Knesset has the power to dissolve the government and mandate elections. The February 2009 elections for the Knesset were considered free and fair. They resulted in a coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli security forces reported to civilian authorities. (An annex to this report covers human rights in the occupied territories. This report deals with human rights in Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.)
Principal human rights problems were institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against Arab citizens, Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (see annex), non-Orthodox Jews, and other religious groups; societal discrimination against persons with disabilities; and societal discrimination and domestic violence against women, particularly in Bedouin society. While trafficking in persons for the purpose of prostitution decreased in recent years, trafficking for the purpose of labor remained a serious problem, as did abuse of foreign workers and societal discrimination and incitement against asylum seekers.
As the Jewish daily Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis wrote about the report…
Citing outside sources in some instances, the report states that:
• Some foreign workers were forced to live in conditions “that constituted involuntary servitude.”
• Laws regarding employment conditions were not enforced for foreign workers.
• The board that processes applications for asylum by refugees recommended granting asylum in just three of 3,211 cases before it between 2008 and 2009.
• Refugees living in Israel were targeted in violent attacks, including a beating in December of three young daughters of African refugees in Tel Aviv.
• Government officials referred routinely to asylum seekers as “infiltrators” in public statements in an atmosphere of increasing public protest against refugees. [In a speech last January, subsequent to the period the report covers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, referring to asylum seekers, “The infiltrators conquered Eilat and Arad, and they are conquering Tel Aviv from north to south.”]
• Spending on public education for Arab children was substantially lower than for Jewish children. The average Arab classroom had four more students than the average Jewish classroom.
• Only 70 students from the West Bank may attend graduate school in Israel at any one time.
• Arab citizens “regularly complained of discrimination and degrading treatment” at airports.
• Despite a law requiring representation of minorities in the civil service, the numbers of Arab citizens in civil service jobs were disproportionately low.
• The unrecognized Bedouin town of al-Arakib was demolished eight times during 2010 in what advocacy groups said was an expropriation of land that historically belonged to the clan that lived there.
As 972+’s Joseph Dana recently wrote…
Racist protest in Tel Aviv targets refugees and migrants
Racism in Israel is nothing new. There is racism against Palestinians, against Arabs, against non-Jews. There is racism between Jews from Europe and Jews from Arab countries. In our racism, we are no different from many other Western countries. However, the past year in Israel has seen an a significant increase in the number of racially motivated attacks on foreign workers and Palestinians by gangs of Jewish nationalists workers and Palestinians who seek to ‘cleanse Israel of non Jewish and dangerous elements.’ The problem is reaching endemic proportions as lawmakers have largely remained silent and the crimes continue unabated.
David Sheen, an Israeli journalist with Haaretz, has been quietly documenting the rise of racism in Tel Aviv. His latest video (above) is a look into the ugly work of nationalism which is the foundation of the current spike in racist attacks. In the video, Sheen attends a rally of Jewish nationalists who seek to expel foreign infiltrators ‘that are taking over the southern part of Tel Aviv.’ The interviews that he conducts on the street show a disturbed society in crisis.
Now, if it walks like a duck…
*gah*
10 Comments
Watching the video I immediately thought this could have been anywhere in the USA.
Same rhetoric, misguided fallacies, anger, hate, fear.
Quite an eye opener, gah indeed CTut . . . thanks and rcc’d.
“Arab” Israelis always refer to themselves as “Palestinians.” Yet time and again in the news, locally and even internationally, they are referred to as “Arabs.” That practice represents a loss of identity, the disappearance of Palestinian nationalism among Palestinians left in Israel after the 1948 ethnic cleansing (the Nakba, as they call it) and their descendents.
This “Arabification” of the Palestinians, however, is nothing more than a propaganda device, started by the past Israeli PM, Menachum Begin, who warned the people, “call them Arabs, not Palestinians.” The purpose was obvious. Since Palestine no longer existed, had been appropriated almost in toto by the Israelis, there was and is no need to emphasize the association of this land, Israel, with a people who are no more.
And the practice has been institutionalized within Israel but also continued by the news media to this day. Still, the Palestinian people do exist, in Israel, in the Palestinian territories, in UNRWA refugee camps throughout the Middle East, and in nations around the world where dispossessed Palestinians, after 1948, emigrated.
In line with this diary about Israeli racism, here is a message concerning American participation in it all:
This Tax Day, Learn Exactly How Israel Misuses U.S. Weapons
There are protests all of the time in Israel and the West Bank, but during cast lead attack on Gaza they were jailed in advance.
Netanyahu is a synonym for liar.
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
“Human rights problems included harassment of religious minorities, violence against women, and trafficking in persons.” This is paragraph two of Canada’s 2010 state department report so you can’t put too much credence in the opening two paragraphs. The body of Israel’s report, however, contains a multitude of incidents that is worth reviewing. I don’t think any player in that region is immune from criticism, regardless of what your views on Palestinian are.
As has been suggested in this discussion, an understanding
of al-Nakba, the Palestinian Calamity of 1947-1949, is
critical to the constructive labors of truth and
reconciliation today, and I say this as a Jew in the
Diaspora.
Certainly the Palestinian citizens of Israel are central to
any just and viable peace process, along with the
Palestinian refugees of 1947-1949 (including descendants)
who, if they choose, have every just right to return to
their ancestral districts and become Israeli citizens also.
A critical step to peace with justice is the recognition
that while United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181
in 1947 established a highly contested and ultimately
impractical proposal to divide historical Palestine into a
“Jewish state” and an “Arab state,” it rightly reflected a
strong consensus of the United Nations Special Committee on
Palestine (UNSCOP) that any state formed must respect equal
rights both for Jewish immigrants and for Palestinian
Arabs. The resolution thus prohibited discrimination “by
race, religion, or sex,” protected the human, civil, and
property rights of members of both groups, and provided for
parliamentary democracy with proportional representation.
Today, the spirit of these provisions can and should be
applied to the State of Israel, now effectively extending
from the River Jordan to the sea.
The idea of a “Jewish state” in the post-1948 sense –
quite opposed to Resolution 181 — of “an overwhelming
Jewish majority” — could be achieved only by ethnic
cleansing past, present, and future, beginning with the
displacement of some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the
1947-1949 conflict, and especially with Israel’s cold and
deliberate policy after the 1949 armistice of excluding and
denationalizing these refugees. Al-Nakba refers at once to
the original tragedy of ethnic cleansing and the ongoing
experience of Palestinian displacement, dispossession, and
disenfranchisement.
Rather than try again to partition historical Palestine, a
constructive approach to address the problems highlighted
in the State Department’s human rights report might invite
the parties to recognize the basic situation of two peoples
and nationalities sharing a single country known as Israel,
and to engage in negotiations exploring four promising
ingredients for a just solution.
These would be: (1) Full, equal, and common citizenship;
(2) Binationalism, a recognition of Israeli Jewish and
Palestinian Arab national identities within a common
political community; (3) Multiethnicity, a recognition of
the ethnic diversity within each of these national groups,
e.g. the Jews of Kurdish or Arab heritage, and the Bedouins
among the Palestinian Arabs; and (4) Decentralization and
the creation of a number of federal districts or cantons,
some strongly Jewish or Palestinian and some decidedly
mixed, to bring a local sense of autonomy and
self-governance within a larger framework of equal
citizenship.
Striking a viable and empowering balance between these four
ingredients will involve tough, intricate, and lengthy
negotiations: but such a framework may finally fit both
with the realities on the ground and with the human rights
standards of the 21st century.
Mahalo for all those great comments…! ;-)
That’s a fine look at the alternatives, but the reality today does not look as if any of them will fit any of them. Israel’s strong ethnocratic push to dispossess even Palestinians living within Israel from any equal standing is a major impediment, one which has really been evident since 1967. A one state solution in any form suggested could not withstand the settlement of over 5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps for 60 years or so waiting to go home. In the opinion of many, two states is still the best option to resolve this dispute. The Palestinians are ready to accept only 28% of original Palestine, a country which was their homeland for over 1400 years.
And mahalo for posting the diary itself, Tuttle.