SAKHNIN, Israel, 9 May 2008 — Salwa Abu Jaber believes her story shows Israel discriminating against its Arab citizens, 60 years after the state was established as a haven for Jews.
The 32-year-old mother of four from northern Israel said her five-year-old daughter has never seen her father, who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Separated from the man for five years, she says she has been forced to divorce him.
Thousands of families have been similarly split by a 2003 ban on Palestinians in the West Bank from reuniting with their families inside Israel, imposed citing security reasons after the Palestinian uprising or intifada began in 2000. “In practical terms, Israel forced the divorce on us,” Abu Jaber said. “We could not continue to live like this any longer. If this is not racism, then what is it?”
This week Israel’s Supreme Court has said it found merit in the position of numerous petitions filed by rights groups against the law that keeps families apart. But Israeli Arabs — those Palestinians who remained after hundreds of thousands fled or were expelled from their homes when Israel was created — say institutionalized racism and illegal killings of Arabs have increased since the intifada started.
After 1948, about 120,000 stayed and were granted Israeli citizenship. Now about one in five Israelis is Arab, and many prefer to be called Palestinians like their kin outside Israel. Israel denies it discriminates and touts its credentials as a multicultural democracy, arguing all citizens have the vote and are equal under the law. Arabic is an official language, alongside Hebrew.
Arabs say they struggle to get jobs, housing and land. “Arab citizens ... are related to more as enemies than as citizens with equal rights,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in its annual report. The group said “racist incidents” against Arab citizens rose 26 percent in 2006. Poverty rates are four times higher among Israeli Arabs in comparison to Israeli Jews, according to the Haifa-based advocacy group Mossawa.
Twelve Arab lawmakers including a Cabinet member hold seats in Israel’s 120-member Parliament, but less than eight percent of the country’s civil service work force is made up of Israeli Palestinians, according to a recent civil service report.
Affirmative Action
The Israeli government acknowledges the gap between Israeli Jews and Arabs and says it is taking affirmative action to boost the number of Arab civil servants to 10 percent by 2012, particularly in high-ranking posts.
“Israeli Arabs enjoy more freedom, more civil rights that any of their compatriots across the borders,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said.
But some rights groups, including ACRI, say Israel has also been using the law to cement the state’s Jewish character. Such draft bills, approved by Parliament in 2007, include banning Arabs from buying land controlled by the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental group that was founded before the state of Israel to buy and develop land in Palestine and later oversaw land distribution in the Jewish state.
Another bill makes eligibility for national insurance benefits dependent on completing military service. Few Arabs serve in the army: unlike for Jews, service is not compulsory.
License to Kill?
About 1.5 million Arabs reside in Israel with 5.5 million Jews, but 3.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The outbreak of the latest Palestinian intifada marked a turning point in the way Israel treats its Arab citizens, many say, especially after 13 unarmed Israeli Arabs were killed in October 2000 when police used live ammunition to disperse protests in support of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Rights groups say a January Israeli court decision not to indict the alleged killers due to “insufficient evidence” was tantamount to giving police a license to kill Arabs. Two rights groups documented the killing of 41 Arabs by Israeli police or in “racist attacks” by Jews and security guards since 2000. Of those, only one suspected killer has been indicted, said Jafar Farah, director of advocacy group Mossawa.
“The message of (this court’s) decision is the following: Israel is allowed to kill Arabs and to make mass arrests,” said Abeer Baker, a lawyer with advocacy group Adala in Israel, which represented the families of those killed in the 2000 protests.
Many Israeli Arabs say they have lost faith in Israeli justice, arguing police were more restrained while dispersing gatherings by Israeli Jews.
“How come in a country that claims democracy, policemen shoot and kill citizens but no chargesheet is made?” asked Mossawa’s Farah. “When it comes to Arab citizens, the law-abiding state does not exist.”
