Speaking of Isra'El:
Zuabi's Complaint
Uri Avnery
The Jerusalem Post
May 23, 2003
"My tragedy is that my State is at war with my people," complained the late Knesset member Abd-alAzizi al Zuabi, a
statement that has already become a classic.
Every fifth Israeli citizen is an Arab Palestinian. Indeed, the Arab citizens of Israel are, proportionally, one of the largest national minorities anywhere in the democratic world. Yet Israel has never come to grips with this elementary fact.
Israel officially defines itself as a "democratic Jewish state" How does the existence of such a large sector of the native Arabs affect this definition? Can a democratic state with so many non-Jewish citizens be "Jewish"? Can a Jewish state with so many non-Jewish citizens really be democratic?
Israel has solved this problem by not solving it, indeed, by never squarely facing up to it at all. In a form of denial, official documents frequently identify Arab citizens as "sons of minorities". On identity cards, under the heading "nation", they are mostly registered as "Muslims" , "Christians" or "Druse".
Colloquially, the most usual definition is "Arviyei Yisrael" literally "the Arabs of Israel", which in Hebrew makes them sound like State property. They are never called "Palestinian Israelis."
When Israel was founded, David Ben-Gurion rightly called "the architect of the state" made two fateful decisions which now seem like laws of nature, but which at the time were not self evident at all.
First: No Jew will be a citizen of Israel if he does not immigrate (in Hebrew: "ascend") to the state. Later, the Law of Return and the Law of Citizenship gave every Jew the automatic right to come to the state and become a citizen upon arrival. But citizenship is not conferred on those who remain in the Diaspora.
Ben_gurion had an abiding contempt for Zionists who do not come to Zion and he did not dream of giving them any rights in "his" state.
Second: The Arabs who stayed in Israel will be citizens (except for the small group of "present absentees", who remained in the state physically but not equally.) This was not an automatic decision. Indeed, influential voices at the time objected to it, saying that it negated the Jewishness of the state.
Why did Ben-Gurion make this decision?
First of all, in the vulnerable first months of the state, world public opinion was crucial. The U.N. resolution that partitioned Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state was still shaky and controversial. Denying citizenship to the Arabs would have given ammunition to the enemies of this resolution.
Also, it did not seem like a serious problem. In the territory allotted by the U.N. in 1947 to the Jewish State, more than 40% of the population was Arab. In the course of the 1948 war, Israel enlarged its territory by conquest from the 55% of Mandatory Palestine to 78% while reducing the Arab population to less than 20%. Half the Arab population was driven out by the war and
later by the deliberate policy of expulsion. Their property, as well as a high proportion of the land belonging to those who stayed on, were expropriated for Jewish settlements.
Ben-Gurion, who expected large waves of Jewish immigrants, might have considered that the small Arab sector would
become insignificant and not constitute a problem for the "Jewish" state. He would have been amazed to learn that 56 years and millions of Jewish immigrants later, the "Israeli-Arabs" still constituted 20% of the population.
Cynics might bring up another factor. The Arabs left behind in the new state were subjected to a rigorous regime of "military government" and deprived of practically of practically any shred of civil liberties. Military governors-like all officials at the time-were part of Ben-Gurion's political machine. They saw to it that almost all Arabs voted for the Labor Party (Mapai) and its Arab satellites. Without them, Ben-Gurion would have found it very difficult to construct a majority in the Knesset.
Be that as it may, from that time until the present nobody devoted any serious thought to the basic question: What is the status of the large Arab community in a "democratic Jewish state" or rather, what is the true character of the state that declares itself "Jewish" but has so many Arab citizens?
In theory, there are two possible answers to this basic question.
Option One: Israel becomes a US-style democracy.
The US is a unique, modern type of society. The American nation is neither ethnic nor religious, but civil: one becomes a part of the American nation by becoming a citizen of the USA. The US is not a "democratic Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Catholic,Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist; white, black, brown, yellow or red- once one has sworn allegiance t the American Constitution,
one's official status is equal to that of a Mayflower descendant.
Here this would mean that our state becomes an Israeli, rather than a Jewish, state. One would belong to the Israeli nation by being an Israeli citizen and swearing allegiance to the Israeli (non existent at present) Constitution. Religion and ethnic origin
would become private matters, not to be mentioned in any official document. In Israeli parlance, this option is called "a state of all its citizens".
Option Two: Israel would remain in a nation-state in the old fashioned European sense. The Jewish majority would retain its national frameworks, but allow the Arab minority to set up its own national institutions and enjoy broad autonomy in matters of culture, education, religion, and local self-government. The state would be above the national frameworks. The Jewish communities throughout the world, the Arab minority would keep its relations with neighboring Palestine and the Arab at large.
Option Three: A combination of these two models, in one form or another.
By adopting none of these models, Israel has put itself and its Arab citizens in an impossible situation. The ongoing and ever more brutal war between Israel and the rest of the Palestinian people makes this an even more dangerous problem.
No Arab can possibly feel a full citizen of Israel. At every moment of his life he is conscious that Jews don't really accept him as an equal and that the state does not really consider him a full citizen.
In almost any field of endeavor, Arab citizens are discriminated against- they cannot benefit from any development or housing scheme, they receive no land from the Government, their towns do not receive equal government subsidies, their education facilities are vastly inferior. Many laws and regulations give privileges to people who are "eligible under the Law of Return"- a way of saying "Jews" without mentioning the word explicitly.
By mutual consent, Arabs do not serve in the army, the very heart of Israel's national ethos and political power. The army does not want to put weapons into the hands of youngsters whose loyalties it doubts, the Arabs do not want to serve in an army that is totally committed to fighting other Arabs.
There are practically no social relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs. A "normal" Israeli Jew never sees, never speaks with an Arab. Before the intifada, he could see Palestinians in kitchens of restaurants, at building and in the fields, but did not notice them. Many Jews, perhaps the majority, consider Arabs a Fifth Column or Trojan horse.
In the heart of the Arab community in Israel, and perhaps in the heart of every single citizen- are two different tendencies struggling for supremacy.: Israelization and Palestinization.
Israelization means the longing to belong to Israeli society. Many Palestinians, both inside and outside, admire Israeli society even if they hate it- its dynamism, its democracy (at least for Jews), ists initial victory against formidable odds. They compare it favorably to all the Arab societies in the region. They would like to play their part in it.
Immediately after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, waves of "Arabs of within" came to meet their relatives. they were surprised by the differences created by 19 years of separation. Many "occupied" Palestinians resented what they felt was an overbearing attitude of their "Israeli" cousins. "Among the Palestinians, I feel like an Israeli, one of those told me, "and amongst the Israelis, I feel like a Palestinian."
Parallel to that the wish to belong to Israeli society, there is a deepening feeling of belonging to the Palestinian people. The intifada and its many manifestation of heroism and self-sacrifice have filled the Palestinians- including those who are Israeli citizens- with a new-found pride. This, as well as compassion for the suffering of their bretheren, has created a powerful attraction. The verbal radicalization of Arab leaders in Israel is a symptom of this. So was the stormy demonstration of
October 2000, in which the Police open fire on Israeli citizens. So are the actions of the few who give active support to suicide bombers. The effort of the Knesset majority to evict some Arab members and the recent all-out attack on the Islamic Movement are bound to reinforce this trend.
These two tendencies exist side by side. Which of them is the stronger? Well, there is a simple indication: recently, some right-wing Israelis suggested that, in return for the West Bank settlements, which they want to annex, Israel should give up the "little triangle"- the string of Arab villages and towns from Um-al-Fahem to Kafr-Kassem, along the Green line, which were annexed to Israel in the armistice agreement of 1949.
If anyone expected the inhabitants to jump for joy at the prospect of joining the future State of Palestine, they were
disappointed. This kind offer was unanimously rejected. They definitely want their villages and towns to remain in Israel.
When asked about this, they were visibly uncomfortable, if not embarrassed. Their attachment to Israel is obviously much stronger than they themselves would like to admit. And it is not only a matter of the standard of living.
In Zuabi's time, it is said that the Arab citizens could constitute a bridge between Israel and the Arab world. Which caused one of them to remark: " a bridge is something everybody walks over." |
