13 - 19 September 2001
Issue No.551
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551 |
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Tonight it could be you
For more than fifty years Arab citizens of Israel have been grappling with Israel's own brand of religious, social and political apartheid. Jenny Jobbins looks into their plightThe neat, whitewashed village set under an azure sky near a sandy beach might have been anywhere on the Mediterranean coast. We sat, sipping tea, in a cool living room in a small, neat house. Around us, a pretty garden struggled to set down roots in the parched soil. The mood inside the house, however, belied the peace and warmth outside. As our host tried to remain calm, our hostess was becoming increasingly impassioned. "How can they make us leave our homes!" she cried finally. "We shall never, never let them take them from us!"
Houses laid waste: Yammit (topmost), photographed early in 1990, was bulldozed by Israelis before the handover to Egypt. In Israel itself, Arab citizens sift through the ruins of their homes in demolished "unrecognised villages;" many live in improvised tin shanty dwellings, while others join the queue for cheap housing in Tel Aviv or Haifa(photos: Yammit, Jenny Jobbins. Unrecognised villages: Association of Forty, www.assoc40.org)
A few years later I stood on the same shore. The waves still lapped lazily on the beach, and the date palms left standing round its rim stretched taller. Instead of the little town, though, there were flattened piles of rubble and ripped-up trees, and the remains of small gardens desiccated by the wind. I picked my way through the rubble, looking for signs, and I found, quite by chance, a patch of turquoise bathroom tiles, scrunched by the bulldozer that ran over them. A few shanty houses had been built out of the stones. This was El-Fayrouz, near the Egyptian-Gaza border in North Sinai, the place that had once been a little town called Yammit.
Yammit, a former Israeli settlement built in the 1970s, became a fervent symbol of idealised zealotry for Israelis in the run-up to the transfer of Sinai back to Egypt in 1981. That the Israeli government chose, at the last minute, to raze the town left a marked scar on the Israeli psyche. The image of flattened homes and villages is a recurrent one all over Israel and the occupied territories, before and since Yammit, and it has been internalised in the Israeli consciousness as a particular form of vindictiveness -- a punishment that is meted out in cases of injustice, even when, as with Yammit, it damages the self.
Most demolitions occur for reasons more sinister than destroying a small town to prevent its falling into the hands of someone else. The peculiarly cruel punishment the Israeli government consistently uses to punish "terrorists" -- bulldozing the family home of any Palestinian accused of an act against the state -- appears to serve another purpose: evicting Palestinians and effectively sequestrating the land, ultimately forcing them to join the ranks of homeless people waiting for low-quality housing, mostly in over-crowded areas of Tel-Aviv or Haifa.
If anyone needs immediate, assisted housing, it is these people. Yet the government seems to have other issues on its mind. The Knesset is currently faced with questions about Arab population growth in Israel and the occupied territories -- the former British mandated Palestine. Arab and Jewish populations here are currently running neck and neck at 4.9 million Jews to 4.8 million Arabs, but predictions indicate Arabs will outnumber Jews by 20 per cent by 2020. Within Israel's green line itself, indigenous Palestinians currently make up 19 per cent of the population.
The conditions of these Israeli Arabs are often overlooked, even by observers of the regional scene. Many assume indigenous Palestinians are assimilated into mainstream society; that, having passports and electoral rights, they have equal rights with their Jewish compatriots to education, housing and other benefits. The reality is very different. Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel live in the "Jewish state," but they do not benefit from "Jewish nationality"; they have never been recognised as entitled to full human rights in their own country.
Habitat International Coalition, a 25-year-old network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements concerned with housing as a human right, seeks solutions to housing rights problems by addressing their root causes. The network holds a consultative status with the United Nations, and, among its global activities, advocates for the right to housing in the face of forced evictions, discrimination and population transfers. In that field of human rights, the Middle East region engenders a special interest. And with last week's World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, underscoring the issue of institutional racism, the plight of non-Jewish Israeli citizens is particularly significant. In Habitat's view, the only word that can describe the policy regarding Arabs inside Israel is apartheid.
"There are some fundamentals people really need to know about Israeli law to understand the nature and intentions of the State of Israel," Joseph Schechla, regional coordinator of Habitat's Housing and Land Rights Committee, said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly. "It's not possible to attribute the mistreatment of Arabs in Israel merely to the spontaneous acts of prejudice by autonomous social forces. Formal discrimination against the indigenous Palestinian people and their property is organic to the legal system and institutions of the state."
Israel has no constitution: drawing one up would mean defining a border, and Israel does not define its borders. Instead, it is governed by a collection of laws. Of these, three are essential in deciding the position of the country's two cultural groups.
The first is the Law of Return, which grants Jews all over the world a right to assume "Jewish nationality" and live in loosely-defined Eretz Israel. The second is the Law of Citizenship -- not, as it is officially mistranslated, the "nationality" law -- which grants citizenship in Israel not conditioned upon religion or lineage. Citizenship, however, is an inferior status to nationality. The third pillar is the Basic Law: Status Law of 1952, which creates a legal link between the state of Israel and its major national institutions, the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), the Jewish Agency (JA), the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and their subsidiaries. All these institutions, according to their charters, are dedicated to serving "Jewish nationals" exclusively.
Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, these institutions assumed possession of land and dwellings, initially by purchase, from the indigenous Palestinians, but then by force. The sister institutions of the WZO and JA now control most of the country's resources, including water, forests and land. The WZO and JA generally divide labour between Israel and the occupied territories, but collaborate on Jewish settlement projects straddling the "green line" -- the armistice border with the occupied Palestinian territories. Both organisations share executive boards, and both serve their national interests abroad.
Apart from a brief period from 1968 to 1971 -- when a US court ruling forced them to register as foreign agents, the WZO and JA have long operated as tax-exempt charities in many countries while operating on behalf of the state of Israel. Apart from tax-free fund-raising, their mission includes recruiting settlers (whether from the former Soviet bloc countries, the US, Britain or Argentina) and tempting not-so- wealthy Jews with the allure of super-citizenship ("Jewish nationality"), which promises mortgage benefits, cheap land, housing subsidies and immigrant orientation programmes. New recruits are essential to consolidate the Jewish hold on the state, to man the settlements in the occupied territories, and to swell the population of Israeli Jews. For them, this remains a political necessity if the Zionist programme is to succeed.
While all Israeli citizens inside the green line -- Jews and Arabs -- have voting rights, the Basic Law: Knesset Law (amendment 7) of 1985 grants a mandate only to parties which uphold the principle of Israel as a Jewish state. This effectively disenfranchises any individual or party calling for the transformation of Israel into a state which grants equal rights to all its citizens. Such a concept violates the basic law.
Civil and political rights violations in Israel re- entered our consciousness with the October 2000 police actions against Arab citizens in the Galilee. These issues may blind us to other problems, warns Schechla. "Economic, social and cultural rights are often overlooked when we are seeing rights through a political lens," Schechla said. "Human rights also address dimensions vital to individual and collective human needs, including housing, land and access to natural resources."
Dispossessing Palestinians of their resources and property has not relented since the establishment of the state of Israel. "We notice the discrimination and isolation of human rights as a factor of occupation, beginning in 1967, but the mechanisms and historical continuum of land and property confiscation inside the green line reveals the actual nature of the state," Schechla says. "The current wave of Intifada, dispossessions and settlement building are a latter- day part of the same continuous story." And they are happening on both sides of the green line at once.
Inside the green line, legislation forms the basis for justifying government land grabs. After adapting British Mandate property laws to absorb the lands and properties already claimed as public, Israel's Knesset enacted its own laws. The first in a tactical series of Basic Laws, the Absentee Property Law authorised the state to confiscate any property if, on any given day between the end of November 1947 and 19 May 1948 -- the day Israel was founded -- the legal owner (or owners) were absent from the property for even one night. The law, passed in 1950, was retroactive and had a sweeping effect on the Arab population. If, for example, a house was owned by two brothers, and one happened to live elsewhere -- or was away from the house for as little as one night -- the remaining brother and both their families and extended families, were dispossessed. This created a basic premise for future confiscations. The ideology was already in place: that it was backed by the law made it guilt- free.
The best estimates of the number of Palestinians who crossed the border in 1948 are between 770,000 and 780,000. Their property constitutes at least 80 per cent of the lands Israel took and managed through the WZO/JA and the JNF. The indigenous population who remained was estimated at 156,000 -- roughly half of whom (71,000-80,000) were internally displaced "absentees." This number has grown to 200,000 today, and most are still living in extremely poor conditions. They are not, however, eligible for housing benefits under the programmes for new immigrants holding "Jewish nationality."
Another vehicle for legalised eviction is the purging of "unrecognised villages." These were the small villages, most with only a few hundred families, which Jewish authorities left off the official planning maps drawn up at the beginning of the Jewish state. Consequently, the areas showed up on the maps as agricultural areas. In 1965 it was declared illegal to build on agricultural land and this law was later invoked to purge the "unrecognised" villages of their inhabitants. As the villages were not officially marked as existing, they were not recognised by the state. Services were cut, and it was made illegal to connect or reconnect them. Only 123 Palestinian villages made it onto the original maps. So far, 530 of the rest have been depopulated or demolished. Hundreds -- 249 are known to Habitat -- still exist and have made it to some official maps today, but only as targets of demolition.
The inhabitants have been marked for transfer to the unfortunately-named "concentrations" (a translation of Hebrew rekuz. These are, effectively, work camps, not dissimilar from South African "townships" -- a name by which they are also called. The planners envision seven of these camps in the north (Galilee), and 16 in the south (Naqab). The inhabitants live in basic family units, but with no tenure of house or land. Surrounded by barbed wire, the camps have little to offer in comfort or dignity to those expelled from the homes which have been theirs for generations.
There has been little outside interest in the unrecognised villages and their inhabitants have had to struggle to be acknowledged. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has been unable to help or represent them, focusing instead on the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Over the years, official Palestinian delegations have even opposed public discussion of persistent land confiscations and house demolitions inside the green line. "This has contributed to our amnesia," Schechla explains, "leaving us to relearn the basics."
These basics, such as how the national institutions serve the state to mechanise the dispossession of Palestinian properties, explain the nature of the anti-Arab discrimination system which extends well beyond Israel's 1948 borders. "What's going on in the occupied territories can't be changed by mere training or disciplining security personnel, because the expression of this form of racism is grounded in the state ideology and law," Schechla says.
Israeli Arab citizens' rights were, however, high on the agenda in Durban. When the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Research and Studies hosted NGOs from the Arab world from 19 to 22 July in preparation for the global convention on racism, much of the meeting focused on institutional racism around the world. Institutionalised discrimination inside Israel and the occupied territories took special attention. It is ironic that the issue should finally be aired at the Durban conference, in view, Schechla noted, of the "unavoidable comparison between apartheid in South Africa and Israel."
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