RAMALLAH, West Bank, 10 December 2007 — The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) yesterday said on the release of the organization’s annual report that prejudice against Arab-Palestinians is reaching new heights. According to the report, 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish population believes that Arabs do not deserve equal rights.
Seventy-five percent of Jewish Israelis polled said they would not live in a building with Arab neighbors, and 74 percent of youth polled said they believed Arabs were “not intelligent” and “not clean.”
Moreover, 2007 witnessed an overall rise of 100 percent in the number of expressions of anti-Arab sentiment by Jewish Israelis, the report said. “Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy,” author Sami Michael and ACRI’s president said.
“We are a society under supervision under a democratic regime whose institutions are being undermined and which confers a different status to residents in the center of the country and in the periphery,” Michael said.
Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel and 78 percent oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government.
The ACRI said that bills introduced in the Knesset (parliament) contribute to delegitimize the country’s Arab citizens, such as ones that would link the right to vote and receive state allowances to military or national service.
They also include bills that require ministers and Knesset members to swear allegiance to a Jewish state and those that set aside 13 percent of all state lands owned by the Jewish National Fund for Jews only. “Arab citizens are frequently subjected to ridicule at the airports,” the report states.
It says that Arab citizens “are subjected to ‘racial profiling’ that classifies them as a security threat. The government also threatens the freedom of expression of Arab journalists by brandishing the whip of economic boycott and ending the publication of government announcements in newspapers that criticize its policy.”
Arab member of Knesset of Hadash party Mohammad Barakeh said that the report “did not take us by surprise and neither should anyone be surprised by it. Its results are the natural consequence of a racist campaign led by political and military leaders, as well as the result of the anti-Arab racist policies implemented by consecutive governments for the past 60 years.” “Such racism,” added Barakeh, “can only be cured by changing the Israeli government’s racial mentality.”
Zahava Gal-On, chairwoman of Israeli party Meretz, said that “It has become clear that the Israeli government is violating the basic human rights of many sectors of society while revealing deep-seated racism. The government of Israel must wipe this racist mark of shame from its forehead.”
Israeli organizations working for the advancement of rights of Ethiopians in the Jewish state said last Friday that they have been receiving hundreds of complaints each year concerning discriminatory and racist attitudes in toward members of the minority ethnicity in Israel.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Minster of Foreign Affaires Riad Al-Malki yesterday expressed hope that the visit of US President George W. Bush to the Middle East next month “would push Israel to implement the roadmap plan.” Malki said he hoped Bush’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories “would contribute in urging Israel to commit itself to implementing the roadmap plan, mainly freezing settlements and removing checkpoints in the West Bank.”
At the US-backed conference on Mideast peace, held in Annapolis last month, both the Palestinian and Israeli sides had vowed to implement the US-backed Roadmap peace plan. The White House announced last week that President Bush will visit the Middle East in early January, trying to seek a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians by the end of 2008.
Malki said in a press statement that Bush’s visit “means that the United States decided to closely follow up what had been agreed upon in Annapolis,” expecting it to “create new political and economical horizons in the peace process.”
