Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Israel....
Colonialism at its worst:
December 15, 2000
For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel
An Interview with Phyllis Bennis
By Max Elbaum, special to ColorLines
Phyllis Bennis, a longtime analyst and activist around Middle East issues, is now head of the Middle East Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of From Stones to Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising, a book about the Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s, and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's U.N. In this interview, Phyllis analyzes the racist character of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as well as its treatment of Palestinians who live within Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Max Elbaum [ME]: What do you see as the root cause of the current Palestinian uprising?
Phyllis Bennis [PB]: What's going on right now can be summed
up in one word: occupation. Contrary to the U.S. media's
portrayal, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is at the
root of what the media at best identify only as a
"disproportionate" use of violence by the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza.
Certainly the Israeli troops' use of helicopter gunships,
of machine guns mounted on tanks, and so on is profoundly
disproportionate when used against a Palestinian civilian
population armed only with stones and some old Kalashnikov
rifles.
But the real issue is the Israeli military occupation of Palestine -- not only that it is inherently violent and a violation of international law and contrary to United Nations resolutions. Even if Israel used only proportionate violence, it would still be absolutely illegal, because the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal.
[ME]: And why is there an occupation?
[PB]: From its origins in the 19th century, Zionism centered on the idea of creating a specifically Jewish state in which Jews would be protected and privileged over non-Jews. Zionist occupation of Palestine was at first meager, amounting to about 10 percent of the population by 1900. By 1947, Jews were still only about 30 percent of the population of Mandate Palestine and owned only six percent of the land, but the UN Partition Resolution that year still assigned 55 percent of the land to a new Jewish state. However, by means of the 1947-48 war, Israel took over even greater expanses of land and forcibly expelled about 750,000 Palestinians. This travesty was the basis for the official founding of the Israeli state in 1948.
[ME]: In this latest intifada, there have been numerous protests by Arabs living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. What are their numbers and their conditions of life?
[PB]: Inside what is called the "Green Line" -- the unofficial borders of Israel before the 1967 war -- there are still about one million Palestinians, just under 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Most Palestinians are Muslim, some are Christian.
From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians within Israel lived under explicit military rule. They were considered a military threat to the Israeli state, and they were ruled under a completely different set of laws than the Jewish
population.
After 1966, military rule was lifted, but it was replaced by a set of Jim Crow-like laws designed to discriminate against Arabs in Israel. According to Adalah, an Arab rights organization, today there are at least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined on the basis of religion. Israelis must carry a card which identifies them as either a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian. All non-Jews are second class citizens. The Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed virtually all cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens.
[ME]: Can you be more specific about how this discrimination
works and what it means?
[PB]: All Israeli citizens, including Palestinians, have the right to vote in elections for members of the Knesset (parliament) and for the prime minister. But not all rights are citizenship rights. Other rights are defined as nationality rights, and are reserved for Jews only. If you
are a Jew, you have exclusive use of land, privileged access
to private and public employment, special educational loans,
home mortgages, preferences for admission to universities,
and many other things. Many other special privileges are
reserved for those who have served in the Israeli military.
And military service is compulsory for all Jews (male and
female), except for the ultra-Orthodox who get the same
privileges as other Jews, but excludes Palestinians, who do not.
Over 80 percent of the land within Israel that was once
owned by Palestinians has been confiscated. All told, 93
percent of Israel's land can only be leased or owned by
Jews or Jewish agencies. Moreover, despite Israel's booming
economy, Palestinian unemployment is skyrocketing -- Adalah
says it is about 40 percent. In 1996 twice as many Arab
citizens (28.3 percent) as Jewish citizens (14.4 percent)
lived below the poverty line. Less than five percent of
government employees are Arab. And eighty percent of all
student drop-outs are Arab.
There are also vast disparities between Arab towns and
Jewish towns in government spending on schools, medical
systems, roads and electricity, clean water, and social
services.
Unlike any other country in the world, Israel does not
define itself as a state of its residents, or even a state
of its citizens, but as a state of all the Jews in the world.
Jews from anywhere in the world, like me, can travel to Israel,
declare citizenship, and be granted all the privileges of
being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have
lived in the area for hundreds of years.
[ME]: Are Palestinians within Israel participating in the
current uprising?
[PB]: The recent resistance has seen a whole new level of
involvement in demonstrations by Palestinians inside the
Green Line. They are protesting the discrimination they
face in Israel as well as the occupation itself and Israeli
brutality against Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza.
Such protests are not completely without historical precedent;
in 1976 there were a series of demonstrations on what became
known as Land Day which protested continuing Israeli seizures
of Palestinian land. Six Palestinian demonstrators, citizens
of Israel, were killed by Israeli forces.
But this time there is a vast increase in the participation
of Palestinians inside the Green Line. Their demonstrations
have been met with the same brutal military tactics used
against Palestinians in the West Bank. So, far 13 Israeli
Palestinians have been killed. These tactics are in sharp
contrast to the methods used by Israeli authorities in
response to demonstrations by Israeli Jews.
In 1982, for example, when there was an upsurge of Jewish
protests against the Israeli war in Lebanon, one Israeli
Jewish protester was killed and there was such an enormous
outcry that people remember his name to this day -- Emil
Grunzweig. But when a Palestinian is killed by Israeli
military occupation forces, that is not considered news. We
might hear a body count, but we never hear their names, who
their parents or children are, what they did for a living.
On the West Bank and Gaza, as well as inside the Green Line,
police randomly fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed
Arab demonstrators that were throwing stones. The racist
double standard is everywhere. A mob of Israeli Jews even
attacked the house of an Arab member of the Knesset, Azmi
Bishara. But the police would not act against the rioters.
Unfortunately, the years of occupation have created, or
have allowed to flourish, an incredibly racist vantage point
among the majority of Israeli Jews. The majority of Israeli
Jews are willing to accept the killing of Palestinians and
collective punishment of the Palestinian population as
justified state policy.
[ME]: Can you tell us more about Palestinian politics within
Israel?
[PB]: Not surprisingly, Palestinians inside Israel have
historically felt themselves excluded and disempowered
by the Israeli government. The Communist Party of Israel
was long a predominantly Arab party and received the vast
majority of Palestinian votes. The CP remains strong,
but a few Palestinian Knesset members have recently allied
themselves to the Labor Party and more and more Palestinians
have joined newer nationalist blocs. Azmi Bishara, who leads
the Tajamoah (National Democratic) Party, became the first
Arab citizen to run for prime minister last year. He and
others actually call for the "de-Zionization" of Israel --
for the transformation of Israel from a theocratic state
privileging the Jewish majority to a democratic, secular
state of all its citizens.
[ME]: You are painting a picture of an Israeli government,
with the support of a substantial part of its Jewish
population, which aims toward permanent subordination of
Palestinian Arabs within its borders, along with domination
over something that might be called a Palestinian state but
what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. Essentially
the same vision that motivated apartheid South Africa.
[PB]: Yes. And there are even more complexities. Within
Israel there are really four levels of citizenship, the
first three being various levels of Jewish participation in
Israeli society, which are thoroughly racialized. At the top
of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the white European Jews.
At the level of power the huge contingent of recent Russian
immigrants -- now about 20 percent of Israeli Jews -- are
being assimilated into the European-Ashkenazi sector, though
they are retaining a very distinct cultural identity.
The next level down, which is now probably the largest
component of the Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or
Sephardic Jews, who are from the Arab countries. At the
bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian Jews, who
are black. You can go into the poorest parts of Jewish
West Jerusalem and find that it's predominantly Ethiopian.
This social and economic stratification took shape
throughout the last 50 years as different groups of Jews
from different part of the world came, for very different
reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions reflected
national origins, they play out in a profoundly
racialized way.
The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary
discrimination. They were transported more or less
involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On arrival they were
held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were stolen
from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi
families. In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began
to try to reunite some of those shattered families.
Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian
citizens.
A rigid hierarchy, highly racialized both within and between
religious or national groups, orchestrates Israeli social
life. Much of it is legally enforced. The most significant
difference between this scenario and other similar ones is
in the world's perception of the Israeli reality. For the
overwhelming majority of the world's population, South
Africa was always considered a pariah state. But Israel is
not in that position. Israel is given a pass, if you will,
on the question of racism. Because Jews were victims of the
Nazi Holocaust, there's a way in which Israeli Jews are
assumed to be either incapable of such terrible racialized
policies, or that it's somehow understandable because of
what Jews went through.
But the new intifada has refocused attention on the nature
and extent of Israeli racism, among other things. You have
new reports from Amnesty International looking at the Israeli treatment of its own Palestinian citizens -- minors,
children, being arrested, beaten and held for days. Israel
treats Palestinians, inside or outside the Green Line, as
being less human than Jews. This is rooted in the very
definition and Basic Law of the Israeli state. And the new
intifada may give us a chance to challenge that apartheid
character.
--
Max Elbaum is the former editor of CrossRoads magazine and author of Revolution in the Air: From Malcolm and Martin to Lenin, Mao & Che, a book about the new communist movement
of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, forthcoming
from Verso.
Copyright (c) 2000 ColorLines Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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