BAKA AL-GHARBIYA, 21 January 2004 — By now Adel Kadaan was sure he would be living in the house of his dreams — nine years after responding to an advertisement for a plot of land in Israel.
But the dream has turned into a nightmare for the Israeli Arab nurse, who blames prejudice for the delay in moving from the rundown Arab town of Baka Al-Gharbiya to the more modern Jewish suburb of Katzir in northern Israel.
The saga began back in 1995, when Jewish officials in Katzir summarily rejected Kadaan’s housing application. “Let’s be frank, we don’t accept Arabs here,” Kadaan quoted one of the officials as telling him.
Ari Gilad, chairman of the Katzir Residents’ Committee, declined to comment, saying the case was still in the courts.
In a landmark decision in 2000, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that no community in the country was entitled to deny Arabs residence on the basis of ethnic identity.
Arabs compromise about 20 percent of Israel’s population and have long complained about discrimination, including a paucity of funds for housing and education.
Despite the court’s decision, Kadaan does not appear to be any closer to purchasing the plot of land he wanted in Katzir, where local officials have blocked his way with bureaucracy.
Katzir officials said they had a right to interview applicants for residency. Kadaan was told his wife Iman, a schoolteacher, wouldn’t fit in.
He subsequently produced yet another court order, and a battle began over which plot he could buy and the price, which had jumped from $15,000 when he initially applied to $100,000.
“Just like it took me 10 years to win a (court) decision, I guess it’s going to take another 10 until that decision is carried out,” 47-year-old Kadaan told Reuters. “They’re just worried that more Arabs will move in once I do.”
Michael Jankelewitz, a spokesman for the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency which helped to finance Katzir, accused Kadaan of seeking to move there solely “to make a political point” in a community intended as a Jewish township.
Kadaan’s housing difficulty is one of many examples of the obstacles facing efforts to achieve coexistence.
Relations have been severely strained by a three-year-old Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, and hit a low in October 2000 when Israeli police shot dead 13 Israeli Arabs while quelling protests staged in solidarity with it.
A judicial inquiry into the shootings accused police of using excessive force and warned of increasing alienation of the Arab community.
Israelis, in turn, grew openly more suspicious of fellow Arab citizens after some were caught helping Palestinians get past roadblocks to stage suicide bomb attacks in Israel, though few Israeli Arabs have themselves been involved in violence.
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked new anger in December by calling Israeli Arabs a worse “demographic problem” than the Palestinians, citing that their growing numbers could transform Israel from a Jewish to a binational state.
“Soon they will start spraying us with spermicide,” to keep down the birth rate, Israeli Arab legislator Ahmed Tibi said in response to Netanyahu’s remarks.
Few Jews and Arabs choose to live alongside one another in Israel, although there are some mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods in cities such as Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem and Nazareth, where integration predated the foundation of the state in 1948.
But few Arabs live with Jews in the towns and communal farms built since then, and virtually all their children attend separate school systems.
Integration is particularly anathema to places like Katzir, one of a string of communities built to boost the Jewish population in the north, where Arabs far outnumber Jews.
Katzir, a fenced-in hilltop community with a fortress-like aura, is surrounded by Israeli Arab villages. And while some local Arabs have moved into a lower-income section of Katzir, none has been welcomed in the upmarket area where Kadaan wants to live. “Some people here are paranoid, they are suspicious and afraid that (Arabs) would seek to take over the community,” said 35-year-old Asnat Riffkin of Katzir.
Riffkin, a mother of four, is involved in efforts to start an integrated Jewish-Arab school, yet she fears that by forcing the community to accept an Arab resident, the courts would stir only more resentment.
Kadaan sees few options for lifestyle improvement other than moving from Baka Al-Gharbiya, a neglected town of 20,000.
“We don’t have the most elementary of services here, no parks, not even a sidewalk,” Kadaan said. “I cannot rectify the discrimination all on my own and in the meantime the clock is ticking for me and my family. Why shouldn’t I have the right to live wherever I choose?”
