One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades
of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against
its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout
of Israeli soul-searching.
Superland, a large amusement park
near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a booking from an Arab school on its
preferred date in late May. When a staff member called back
impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the booking immediately.
As the story went viral on social
media, the park’s managers hurriedly offered an excuse: they provided
separate days for Jewish and Arab children to keep them apart and
prevent friction.
Government ministers led an
outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, called the
incident a “symptom of a sick democracy”. Defence minister Moshe Yaalon
was “ashamed”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the
“racist” policy be halted immediately.
Such sensitivity appears to be a
reaction to an explosion of popular racism over the past few months
against the one in five Israelis who belong to the country’s Palesinian
Arab minority. Some Israeli Jews have started to find the endless parade
of bigotry disturbing.
Israeli TV recently revealed, for
example, that a group of children with cancer who had been offered a
free day at a swimming pool were refused entry once managers discovered
that they were Bedouin.
The settlers, whose violence was
once restricted to setting fire to the crops of Palestinians or
rampaging through their villages in the West Bank, are now as likely to
attack Arab communities inside Israel. Torched mosques, offensive
graffiti on churches and cars set ablaze in so-called “price-tag”
attacks have become commonplace.
Similarly, reports of vicious
attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly becoming a news staple. Recent
incidents have included the near-fatal beating of a street cleaner, and a
bus driver who held his gun to an Arab passenger’s head, threatening to
pull the trigger unless the man showed his ID.
Also going viral were troubling
mobile-phone photos of a young Arab woman surrounded by a mob of
respectable-looking commuters amd shoppers while she waited for a train.
As they hit her and pulled off her hijab, station guards looked on
impassively.
However welcome official denunciations of these events are, the government’s professed outrage does not wash.
While Netanyahu and his allies on
the far right were castigating Superland for its racism, they were busy
backing a grossly discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz
newspaper called “one of the most dangerous” measures ever to come
before the parliament.
The bill will give Israelis who
have served in the army a whole raft of extra rights in land and
housing, employment, salaries, and the provision of public and private
services. The catch is that almost all of the country’s 1.5 million
Palestinian citizens are excluded from military service. In practice,
the benefits will be reserved for Jews only.
Superland’s offence pales to
insignificance when compared to that, or to the decades of state-planned
and officially sanctoned discrimination against the country’s
Palestinian minority.
An editorial in Haaretz this
month observed that Israel was really “two separate states, one Arab
and one Jewish. … This is the gap between the Jewish state of Israel,
which is a developed Western nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which
is no more than a Third World country.”
Segregation is enforced in all
the main spheres of life: land allocation and housing, citizenship
rights, education, and employment.
None of this is accidental. It
was intended this way to guarantee Israel’s future as a Jewish state.
Legal groups have identified 57 laws that overtly discriminate between
Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the
statute books.
Less visible but just as damaging
is the covert discrimination Palestinian citizens face every day when
dealing with state institutions, whose administrative practices find
their rationale in the entrenchment of Jewish privilege.
This week a report indentified
precisely this kind of institutional racism when it found that students
from the country’s Palestinian minority were confronted by a series of
14 obstacles not faced by their Jewish compatriots that contributed to
denying them places in higher education.
The wave of popular prejudice and
racist violence is no accident either. Paradoxically, it has been
unleashed by the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of rightwing
politicians like Netanyahu, whose constant fearmongering casts
Palestinian citizens as disloyal, a fifth column and a demographic
threat to the state’s Jewishness.
To make sense of this, one has to
understand how desperately Israel has sought to distinguish itself from
apartheid South Africa.
Israel cultivates, as South
Africa once did, what scholars term “grand apartheid”. This is
segregation, largely covert and often often justified by security or
cultural differences, to ensure that control of resources remains
exclusively in the hands of the privileged community.
At the same time, Israel long
shied away from what some call South Africa’s model of “petty apartheid”
– the overt, symbolic, but far less significant segregation of park
benches, buses and toilets.
The avoidance of petty apartheid
has been the key to Israel’s success in obscuring from the world’s view
its grand apartheid, most obviously in the occupied territories but also
inside Israel itself.
This month South Africa’s
departing ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, warned that Israel was a
“replication of apartheid”. The idea that the world may soon wake up to
this comparison deeply unnerves Netanyahu and the right, all the more
so as they risk being identified as the party refusing to make
concessions towards peace.
The threat posed by what happened
at Superland is that such incidents of unofficial and improvised racism
may one day unmask the much more sinister and organised campaign of
“grand apartheid” that Israel’s leaders have overseen for decades.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and
the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle
East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments
in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.
No comments:
Post a Comment