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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Some 200 Palestinians clashed with Israeli troops guarding the settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday. The Palestinians have called on Israel to halt all settlement building pending the outcome of negotiations on a permanent peace accord which the two sides are to begin in the coming weeks
(photo: AFP)
Affirmative action, Israeli-style
By Graham Usher
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Focus Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters On 17 May, the vast majority of Palestinians who voted in the Israeli elections put their cross beside a candidate one of whose election ads had him pictured standing astride a dead PLO guerrilla. Such is one of the many contradictions of being a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Nor have the contradictions got any easier in the two months since Ehud Barak's "new dawn".
If anything, they have been highlighted as never before. Thus despite receiving 95 per cent of the Palestinian vote in the elections, Barak not only denied Israel's three main Arab lists the offer of a ministry in his cabinet, he quite deliberately excluded them from having any role in his "broad based" coalition. The feeling of betrayal, says Knesset member (MK) for the United Arab List, Hashem Mahamid, was palpable. "Now I know that when Barak talked about [creating] a state for everyone, he meant everyone minus [Israel's] 20 per cent Arab population," he told Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 12 July.
But "inclusion" can be equally problematic, as evidenced last week when Mahamid was appointed to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, the first time a Palestinian had been entrusted with such a "sensitive" role in the 51 year history of the Jewish state. The committee is empowered to monitor Israel's defence establishment, including its policies and actions in the Arab territories Israel currently occupies. For elements of the Israel's far right Mahamid's appointment was an "inclusion" too far.
Writing in Israel's Jerusalem Post on 15 July, Israeli commentator Uri Dan described the move as "incontrovertible evidence" of the "dangerous position" to which the Jews' "only country has sunk", warning that an Arab on the committee would now mean that Israel's military secrets would become available to "our enemies".
Nor was the mainstream opposition Likud Party happy about the appointment, though less because an Arab had been appointed (on 18 July Likud submitted the Druze MK, Ayoub Kara, as one of its representatives on the committee) than because this particular Arab had been appointed.
A former mayor of Umm Al-Fahim, Mahamid has often angered mainstream Israeli opinion through his advocacy of Palestinian rights both in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In December 1992, he famously urged Palestinians in Gaza to resist Israeli soldiers "not only with stones, but with all the means at our disposal". Given this track record, one Likud MK described Mahamid's appointment as "an obligation to commit suicide".
Members of the ruling One Israel bloc charged Likud's denunciations as "ugly racism" and generally paraded Mahamid's appointment as evidence that Israel was not only a Jewish state but also a democratic one. "This is an historic moment," pronounced Israel's Justice Minister, Yossi Beilin, "and another step towards turning Israeli Arabs into a legitimate component in the fabric of Israeli society".
Yet it wasn't only on the right that the appointment caused some soul searching. While defending his right to sit on the committee as an Israeli citizen and as an elected member of the Knesset, Mahamid admits there are certain of Israel's military policies that he would rather not be privy to. "If I see that there is a certain topic which my conscience will not allow me to make my peace with, then I will not participate in the session," he says. For example, south "Lebanon is occupied territory, and I will not set foot there".
Other Palestinian leaders -- such as Al-Balad MK Azmi Bishara -- warned that accepting a seat on the Defence Committee would leave Israel's Palestinians vulnerable to demands that they also serve in Israel's army, an exclusion that both sides (privately) are keen should stay in place.
Beyond this, Mahamid's appointment has raised the question as to what kind of "equal rights" Palestinians seek in Israel. For the Palestinian political analyst, Asad Ghneim, the promotion of Palestinians to prestigious Knesset committees like defence and foreign affairs is an example of "symbolic integration", where "an illusion of equality" is created but without challenging "the ethnic bases of the Jewish state". For Bishara, Mahamid's appointment -- and the generally positive response to it expressed by the Palestinian media in Israel -- is further proof of a process of Israelisation of Israel's Arab minority, where Palestinians are encouraged to "accept less than full equality in exchange for more political rights".
Both, however, agree that the indices of Palestinian equality in Israel cannot be measured in terms of how many Arabs sit on Knesset committees or even how many Arabs get elected to the Knesset. They are measured rather as to whether Palestinian citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jews in terms of national culture, municipal resources and, above all, land ownership. And here the inequality is as grave today as it was 51 years ago when Israel was founded as an exclusively Jewish state but not -- as Bishara would put it -- as "a state for all its citizens", Arab and Jew alike.
