-Caveat Lector-
Week of September 5 - 11, 2001
Deepening Rifts Between Jews and Palestinians Inside Israel
October's Legacy
Israeli Palestinians Fight Official Discrimination
by Alisa Solomon
NAZARETH-The red tablecloths are pressed perfectly, the dishes set just so, the hummus
and kibbeh and eggplant
salad are cooked to perfection. At Al Jenina restaurant-the biggest and most famous in
Nazareth-the staff
stand poised with towels over their forearms, waiting for the lunch crowd. Well,
hoping for them anyway, says
Muhammad, a waiter here for 20 years, as he turns in orders from the three tables that
have diners on this
late-August day. The staff has stopped expecting the throngs that once packed the
200-seat restaurant on a
daily basis-and that lined up down the block on Saturdays.
"A few customers are just beginning to come back now," Muhammad says, counting the
long months since October,
when Jewish Israelis stopped visiting Palestinian towns in Israel in the wake of local
demonstrations against
Israel's crackdown in the occupied territories. "We didn't see a Jewish face before
January," he says, noting
that napkin suppliers and other distributors key to running the business failed to
make deliveries for months.
"These were our friends," he adds with a rueful shake of the head. "They felt free and
comfortable here. But
something is broken now, and we can never go back."
The "October events," as they have come to be known, during which Israeli police
killed 13 Palestinian
citizens of Israel and wounded hundreds more, shattered the facade of easy coexistence
between Israel's
majority Jewish population and the nearly one-fifth of the citizenry that is
Palestinian. Nearly a year after
the breach, the Palestinians inside Israel (a designation they prefer to the
old-school label "Israeli Arab")
have not recovered. If anything, the situation has gotten worse.
"The October events proved to a lot of Palestinians who wanted to assimilate fully
into Israeli society that
they cannot do so," says Falasteen Ismail, 29, an activist with I'lam, the Media
Center for Palestinian
Society in Israel, who says her communist father's hopes for equality and unity around
a shared social dream
are no longer imaginable. "We will always be treated as different, inferior, and
threatening," she says.
Israeli leaders regard such sentiments as exaggerated, given that Palestinians in
Israel attend universities
and are elected to the Knesset. Even so, in every election cycle candidates for prime
minister solicit the
votes of Palestinians in Israel by acknowledging-and promising to rectify-inequities
in spending for their
communities. But in the last election, faced with the choice of Ehud Barak, who was in
charge when police
opened fire on demonstrators in October, and Ariel Sharon,who has long openly
expressed his mistrust of Arabs,
Palestinian citizens boycotted.
Only 18 percent voted, compared with 76 percent in the previous election. For many
Jewish Israelis such
numbers-along with remarks like Falasteen Ismail's-reflect a rapid erosion of
Palestinian Israeli attachment
to the state. Jews tend to view the new generation as increasingly radical and
identified with Palestinians in
the occupied territories.
For Ismail, however, it's the state's refusal to grant full equality-and the culture's
rising attitude of
distrust-that breeds dissent. Her voice rises with indignation when she describes how
she gets suspicious and
hostile stares nowadays simply for speaking Arabic on a bus. "It has always been the
case that if you spoke
Arabic on line for a disco, for sure you wouldn't get in," she explains. "Now it's as
though we can't speak
Arabic in public at all."
The climate, in fact, is more baldly antagonistic than ever, as Israelis on the right
express their fears in
blatant anti-Arab slogans. Banners strung from apartment windows in Jerusalem assert,
"No Arabs, No
Terrorism," and people calling in to radio shows go unchallenged when they speak in
favor of unleashing
chemical or nuclear weapons to "wipe them out." Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara came
under indictment by the
attorney general this summer of charges of "aiding the enemy" and "publishing
seditious material" because he
expressed sympathy for the Palestinian resistance in the territories. And op-ed pages
are filled with articles
callingPalestinian Israelis an "internal enemy."
At the same time, Palestinians in Israel are hardly immune from the militant
resistance from the territories
that has declared everyone in Israel a target. One of the people injured in the
suicide bombing at the pizza
parlor in Jerusalem on August 9 was a Palestinian Israeli worker.
"People went to the streets in October not only out of outrage at the killing of
Palestinians in the
territories, but also out of their own frustration," says Jafer Farah, director of the
Haifa-based
organization Mossawa ("Equality"), the Advocacy Center for Arab/Palestinian Citizens
in Israel. "Now the
frustration is much bigger-and more dangerous."
That frustration is born of 53 years as second-class citizens of a state whose very
flag and national anthem
exclude its non-Jewish populace. "Imagine how it feels," says Farah, "if you ask a
Palestinian whose family
has lived in Haifa for a hundred years where he lives, and he has to answer, 'Zionism
Street,' knowing full
well that his grandparents had called it 'Mountain Street' and that it had been there
long before any Zionists
came."
Such symbols sting all the more sharply, of course, because of the material
ramifications of policies that
favor Jews: Though Palestinians make up more than 19 percent of the population, they
receive only 4 percent of
the national development budget. That translates into only 3.6 percent of the budget
for housing, 3.1 percent
for education, and 2.7 percent for infrastructure. The 10 communities in Israel with
the highest unemployment
rate are Palestinian, and 40 percent of Arab families in Israel live below the poverty
line.
Grasping the reasons Palestinian Israelis had taken to the streets, then prime
minister Ehud Barak last
October announced a four-year plan for their communities, earmarking $4 billion for
investments in roads,
sewage, schools, housing, and job development.
But 11 months later, none of the money has been allocated. "We have to play the game
again," says an
exasperated Jamil Dakwar, staff attorney for the civil rights group Adalah ("Justice"
in Arabic). "We go to
court to demand the state make good on its promise, and by the time the courts rule in
our favor, they tell
us, 'Too bad, the budget has already been spent, so there's no money to give you. Try
again next year.' "
In the meantime, the heads of the Arab councils, which represent Palestinian towns and
villages, have called
for various protest actions. On August 9, nearly 60 of the towns observed a 24-hour
strike to object to the
government's failure to honor its agreement-but to little effect. "These alerts do not
find open ears," says
Dakwar. "There was hardly anything in the papers. That in itself shows how
marginalized we are. Imagine the
impact and attention if 60 Jewish municipalities went on strike. The only way we get
attention is when we get
into confrontations-and then we're regarded as troublemakers who don't 'deserve' our
rights."
Indeed, the prevailing Jewish view of the October demonstrations-some of which turned
violent-is that they
represented a terrifying betrayal, an expression of loyalty to Palestinians across the
green line that
superceded allegiance to the state. For Palestinians in Israel, however, the betrayal
was all Israel's-not
only those Jewish Israelis who rampaged through Palestinian neighborhoods in attacks
victims likened to
pogroms, but the state itself. "What kind of democracy is it when people go out to
exercise their right to
protest and get shot?" asks Farah.
It's the sort of question Farah often raises as he and other community organizers seek
to improve conditions
by appealing to Israel's stated democratic ideals through its democratic institutions.
Some 100 civil suits
charging the state with violation of citizens' rights during the October events are
currently in the works,
for example. And in a groundbreaking discrimination case decided last year, Israel's
Supreme Court challenged
the land-distribution policy on which the country was founded, ruling that the
government could no longer
allocate land to its citizens based on their religion or ethnicity. More and more,
activist organizations are
trying to shine a light on-and at least symbolically redress-the huge discrepancies in
spending and
development in Palestinian areas.
One such group is Ta'ayush ("Cooperation"), a new coalition of Jewish and Palestinian
Israelis who carry out
direct actions both in the occupied territories and within Israel. It is one of only a
few joint Jewish-Arab
efforts that are flourishing now. In mid August, Ta'ayush organized a three-day work
camp in Dar el Hanun, a
Palestinian village just northeast of Tel Aviv that is unrecognized by the state-which
means that, though it
has been there for at least a century, it does not officially exist and thus is not
eligible for water pipes,
electricity, a sewage system, and other state-supplied infrastructure.
Some five dozen Ta'ayushniks-teenagers to seniors-pitched in over the long weekend,
working alongside
villagers to pave a road and build a playground with donated supplies and equipment,
and taking long breaks
during the mid-day heat to eat and talk and mingle. Police tried to prevent the work,
first asserting that it
was too noisy, then demanding to see documents proving that the road was on private
land and not state
property. They also asserted that a makeshift wooden platform to be used as a stage
for a concert at the end
of one workday violated laws against building houses without a permit and would have
to come down. Lawyers on
hand-not to mention newspaper reporters looking over their shoulders-persuaded the
police to relent, and the
project went forward, a three-day utopia in the midst of nightmarish times.
"We are Jews and Arabs working together in equality," says Ronen Wolf, 33, who has
been active with Ta'ayush
since it began in October. "We offer a practice. That is all." These days, that's a
lot, Falasteen Ismail
admits. Still, she feels little hope. "The terrible situation in the West Bank and
Gaza will eventually find
its solution. There will be a Palestinian state," she says. "Our fight is much more
difficult."
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