Issue No.590
Opinion
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13 - 19 June 2002 Issue No.590 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
The enemy within
Right and Left are uniting to exclude Israeli Arabs from the political process, writes Azmi Bishara
The mounting scale of blatant and vehement racism in Israel is not simply the manifestation of a trait inherent in the state since its founding. Nor does it represent merely a quantitative increase in an established phenomenon. It is all these things; but it is also a completely new development, which must be understood and analysed as such. Recent events reveal a persistent trend within the Israeli Right to transform racism into an official ideology of the state. Since Netanyahu first came to power, this tendency has become increasingly systematic. The aim is simple: to keep the Right in power by pressing for the exclusion of Israeli Arabs from the political process. However, since October 2000, elements within the Israeli Labour Party, led by Ehud Barak, have begun to follow suit, seeking to circumvent the "Arab influence" on their fortunes and thus limit the effects of "the Arabs' incalculable and unpredictable political behaviour". As a result of the emerging rivalry over ownership of this nationalist stance, the Labour Party can no longer be sure of automatically cornering the Arab vote. At the same time, competition between the parties has served to fuel the already marked divergence between Israeli Arabs' domestic political concerns and those of the Labour Party.
Following the collapse of the Camp David talks, these elements within the Labour Party began pushing for a national unity government. They concentrated on one lesson they felt could be drawn from Rabin's experience, and from his ultimate assassination. Barak decided that in order to hold on to power, he needed a government which was supported by a strong Jewish majority. The Right's rejection of Barak's overtures led to early elections, out of which the national unity government led by the Likud emerged. Predictably, this obsession with "national unity" further alienated Israeli politics from the Arab vote, and sapped support for a settlement with the Palestinians. However, these facts are not enough to explain the current legitimisation of Israeli racist rhetoric and its transformation into both a popular and an official political culture.
If we look to the Knesset, we see that it is now promulgating laws that are blatantly discriminatory against the Arabs. It has voted, for example, to reduce national insurance benefits for the children of those who have not served in the Israeli army, after making it clear that ways would be found to compensate ultra-orthodox Jews affected by this measure. Other legislation has chipped away at Arab rights to political representation and other political rights by stipulating additional conditions that party lists must meet in order to qualify for parliamentary elections. Most recently, the Knesset rejected an ordinary motion to include on its agenda a proposal submitted by Binyamin Elon (Rehavan Ze'evi's successor as transport minister) under the title, "Transfer: the way to peace". What is most telling about this incident is that the speaker of the house agreed to entertain such a motion in the first place.
The intensely anti-Arab climate that prevails in Israeli society at present is such that an Israeli official can stand before the Knesset without having to address the discrimination implicit in such a bill of law. He can proceed directly to the arguments in favour of the bill, with no fear of recrimination. In short, anti- Arab discrimination no longer has to be denied, disguised or explained; it has become perfectly justifiable. This is the new situation facing Arab citizens in this country.
Such justification is rooted in anti- Arab ostracism. The media is awash with repeated references to the "fifth column", and tendentious claims are aired in the wake of every suicide operation, along the lines of: "Security forces suspect that the operation took place with the assistance of Arab citizens." In some instances, this new ideology converges neatly with the interests of Israeli security personnel. Keen to protect themselves from censure over their failure to prevent operations, they fall back on alluding to "accomplices on the inside". More insidiously, Israeli media figures have begun to take the initiative and voluntarily perform this service for security officials. Television and radio anchors, for instance, go out of their way to remind security officials, who are now regular guests on panel discussions, of the possibility that Israeli Arabs could have colluded in such-and-such a terrorist operation. In one recent commentary on the security fence being constructed between PA territories and Israel, the writers quote an anonymous security source as saying that this fence will have no effect, "so long as the suicide bombers come from the territories, while the explosives are assembled in villages inside the green line, as has been the case recently." Yet the journalists made no effort to verify the anonymous official's spurious contention, thus leaving the average Israeli reader of Yediot Ahronot (the newspaper in which the article appeared) with the impression that this claim was well-founded.
Such a rise in racism is typical of a country in a state of war. It is also characteristic of ethnic insularity and apartheid. Apartheid in the Zionist case does not draw the line between "citizens of Israel and the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza", but rather between Jews and Arabs. At least, this is the distinction the Israeli ultra-Right wishes to impose. Thus, Labour's innovation of demographic separation between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is now evolving into an ethnic separation between Jews and Arabs.
Efforts by organised political forces to capitalise on the prevailing climate are geared towards two aims. The first is to intimidate Arabs inside Israel into abandoning pro-Palestinian political positions and force a retreat of nationalist consciousness. The second is to chip away at Arabs' political and civil rights. Yet such civil attrition can hardly be justified on economic grounds. Reducing national security benefits for Israeli Arab children will not rescue the Israeli economy, as it staggers from the self-inflicted blows produced by Israel's belligerency. Rather -- for the Israeli Right, at least -- the attrition of Arab rights is intended to secure the Jewish character of the state by preempting future demographic developments. The ultimate objective of the Israeli Right at this juncture is thus to reaffirm the Jewish and Zionist character of the state, in the face of the "post- Zionist" culture espoused by certain intellectuals and by a segment of the new middle class in the wake of the Oslo agreements. That cultural trend was a nightmare for the Israeli Right -- not because it reflected a concrete change in the structure of Israeli society, but because it represented a way of excluding the Right from political power, and legitimised Arab political participation alongside the Israeli Left.
The Israeli Right has little interest in the Arabs' concern at the process of "Israelisation" and cultural disintegration that was generated by their partnership with the Left. Nor does it matter to the Right that the Arab national movement inside Israel took years to overcome the many deformations that characterised this political and cultural process. The sole preoccupations of the Israeli Right are how to stay in power (with the cooperation of the religious forces), how to preserve the Jewish character of the state without making any fundamental concessions on the Arab territories occupied since 1967, and how to minimise Arab political rights inside Israel.
The approach of the national unity government could be gauged by the Herzliya Conference, which was held in the wake of the outpouring of Israeli Arab support for the Intifada in September 2000. Its policy is one of deliberate and systematic confrontation with Israeli Arabs in terms of both demographic numbers and political means. At present, Israeli policies target issues of quantity, whenever quantity will serve political ends. For example, the aim at this juncture is not to undermine Arab political representation per se, but only in so far as such representation is pro-Palestinian in its tenor. The Arabs must prove that they accept that this is a Jewish state. Either they serve in its army, thus demonstrating an allegiance generated out of either necessity or self- interest, or they accept their status as second-class citizens. Hence the unprecedented emphasis on the "Jewishness" of the state as a justification for discrimination.
Faced with such a situation, we must formulate a strategy to confront it which recognises that this phenomenon is not just a passing mood in Israeli politics and society. For that mood has now blended with strategic planning, and is set to determine the relative weight and possible role of the Arab population in Israel. The last things the Arabs need at this juncture is to retreat, whether out of fear, on the one hand, or futile political bravado, on the other. And we must avoid resorting to rhetorical displays in the media, which in general only serve to conceal our compromises -- that is, if a position exists in the first place from which we can back down -- and to console us for our losses through raucous vociferation. Israel will doubtless be the first to recognise that display for what it is, and, even if it does not, will soon conclude that our outpourings are simply contrived to meet the traditional demands of one-upmanship which characterise Arab nationalist rhetoric.
Thus, any strategy we adopt must be comprehensive, and must reflect the will of the majority of the Arab minority in Israel. Above all, however, the Palestinian national movement must have a strategy. It would be highly dangerous for this movement to expect all political forces to adopt its positions right across the board. What is needed, therefore, is a minimum level of agreement between all the political forces that represent the Arabs in this country. Simultaneously, the national movement must develop ways of preventing the Israeli authorities from singling it out and trying to erode its achievements, which are also those of the Israeli Arab people.
The most pressing need at present is to help Arab citizens become aware of their political power. This power stems from two sources: the fact that the Arabs of Israel are its indigenous inhabitants, and the fact that they are citizens. The notion of citizenship should be emphatically asserted. In spite of the current clamour from the Israeli Right, the conflict between the concept of citizenship and Zionism can work to the advantage of Arab citizens and the national movement, and can be used to undermine Israel's attempts to justify its policies at home and abroad. That we should seek to wage our fight within the frameworks of citizenship and the law is also a source of strength -- which is why such a determined effort is now being made to expel the Palestinians from these very frameworks.
The national movement still has many means at its disposal. No concessions should be made when it comes to the principles of a just peace and the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation. Such concessions will not result in civil gains. Quite the opposite -- they will encourage further erosion of civil rights, as the case of the wealthier Arab citizens of Israel has shown.
It was through the growth of their nationalist consciousness that the Arabs in Israel succeeded in making inroads at the level of civil rights. By contrast, those who attacked national positions and appealed for assimilation have achieved nothing. Instead, they have, by definition, consecrated the practice of discrimination that links individual rights to political positions, and renders employment and economic survival subject to proper political affiliations and good relations with the ruling authorities.
It is imperative that we now define a strategic vision of the role Arab citizens are to play in Israel in the long term, and of how they are to preserve their Palestinian and Arab identity. Only then will we have the necessary tools with which to safeguard the Palestinian movement inside Israel. This will be particularly vital at times when elements within the Israeli establishment, including official representatives of the government, openly declare their intention to prevent forces advocating the transformation of Israel into a state for all its citizens -- that is, a truly democratic state -- from standing in parliamentary elections.
And we must remember that these forces will not stop at amending the terrorism law, so as to exclude any party or candidate who "implicitly or explicitly supports armed struggle by a state or organisation against Israel" from the democratic process. Indeed, they have already declared their intention to reactivate that old article of the Knesset's organic law, article 7, which bans from standing for election anyone who refuses to recognise the Jewish character of the state. If they succeed, they will be able to impose this ban on anyone who advocates that a democratic government must be a government for all of Israel's citizens. This is the struggle for which the Arabs in Israel must now prepare.
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