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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (220303)	2/23/2007 3:46:28 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Middle East gulfnews.com Published: 23/02/2007 12:00 AM (UAE) Arabs in Israel reject 'Jewish' state and demand power By Richard Boudreaux, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service Nazareth, Israel: A broadly representative elite of Israel's Arab minority has rejected the idea of Israel as a Jewish state and demanded a partnership in governing the country to ensure that Arab citizens get equal treatment and more control over their communities. In a manifesto that is stirring anger and soul-searching among Jews, Arab leaders have declared that Israel's 1.4 million Arab citizens are an indigenous group with collective rights, not just individual rights. The document argues that Arabs are entitled to share power in a binational state and block policies that discriminate against them. Arab citizens make up about one-fifth of Israel's population. They have long protested the disproportionate Jewish share of budget resources, public services and land. Until now, though, only small groups of Arab intellectuals had dared to advocate collective equality or the abolition of Jewish national symbols. "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel" is the first such sweeping demand by Israel's Arab mainstream. The manifesto was drafted by 40 academics and activists under the sponsorship of the Committee of Arab Mayors in Israel and has been endorsed by an unprecedented range of Arab community leaders. As such, it has set off alarms. As Jewish leaders learned of the document, which was issued in December but circulated widely last month, they seized on it as evidence of a growing militancy by a minority that, by and large, openly sympathised with Hezbollah fighting Israel in last summer's war in Lebanon. Manifesto denounced The document does not address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But critics argue that adoption of its proposal to redefine Israel as a binational state would undermine Jewish support for a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a solution to which Israel's government is formally committed. Commentators on the right have denounced the manifesto as the work of an internal enemy that threatens Israel's identity as a haven for Jewish self-determination. On the left, Jews who have advocated equal treatment of Arabs within a Jewish state say they feel disheartened. "Is this the beginning of a new demand for the establishment of a state within a state?" Hagai Meirom, treasurer of the Jewish Agency for Israel, asked at a public forum last month. "Is it still possible to mend the Arab minority's feelings of belonging?" The document's sponsors say most of the criticism misses the point. Shawki Khatib, head of the 64-member Arab mayors group, said the manifesto was not an ultimatum but an effort to catalogue Jewish discrimination against Arabs and provoke debate over how Israel's two largest communities should live together.