Right. Just got back from a press briefing in London with MK Taleb el-Sana, of the United Arab List, and MKs Jamal Zahalka and Haneen Zoabi of the Balad party. They’re giving a talk in the House of Commons on Wednesday, so I might write a proper piece later in the week. For now, a summary of this morning’s discussion.
El-Sana spoke first, via a translator (Daud Abdullah of the MCB). He stressed that Palestinian citizens of Israel see themselves as an "extension of the Palestinian people" as a whole. This point was echoed by both of the representatives from Balad – Zoabi, for instance, argued that "part of the Zionist project was to create the ‘Israeli-Arab’", as distinct from the ‘Palestinian’, while Zahalka argued that Israel’s treatment of its own Palestinian minority is an excellent marker of how serious it is about making peace with its Palestinian and Arab neighbours. El-Sana rejected the oft-heard claim that Israel is the "only democracy in the Middle East", arguing that "the real test of democracy is participation in decision-making", not simply the holding of elections. This is an important distinction because in Israel, where all governments are coalitions, there is an unspoken agreement not to cooperate with any of the Arab parties. El-Sana is from the Negev, where tens of thousands of Arab citizens live in "unrecognized" villages, without running water, healthcare, and other government services. El-Sana summarised his demands, or rather the demands of his constituents, simply as: "complete, absolute equality", an end to the occupation and a "just" solution to the refugee question. The real enemy of the Israeli state, he concluded, is not some Palestinian militant group but the occupation: Israel will only enjoy security "to the extent that" Palestinians are free and independent.
Zahalka, the head of Balad, was up next. He outlined the discrimination suffered by Palestinian citizens of Israel "in all areas of life" – education, housing, infrastructure, citizenship, and so on. In every area, "without exception", Palestinians are systematically discriminated against, such that in Israel there are effectively two categories of citizen: "citizen plus" (Jews) and "citizen minus" (Arabs). He emphasised that the problem was not a "policy" of discrimination, pursued by this or that government, but "a system of discrimination" "built-in" to the foundations of the state and derived from the basic notion of Israel as a ‘State of the Jewish people’ as opposed to a state of all its citizens.
He gave a few examples. Palestinians make up 18% of Israel’s population, but only occupy 6% of government jobs. The education budget allocates to each Jewish pupil four times as much money as to each Palestinian pupil.The ‘Law of Return’ grants automatic Israeli citizenship to Jews around the world, even those with no connection whatsoever to Israel. At the same time, the Knesset recently passed a law banning family unification – that is, prohibiting a citizen of Israel from bringing over his/her wife and children from the West Bank (i.e. refusing to grant not even citizenship but mere residency permits for relatives of Palestinian citizens of Israel). The argument used to justify this law (which was effectively upheld by the Supreme Court) is the potential threat posed by family unification to Israel’s "demographic balance". As Zahalka joked, in the fevered Israeli imagination, "Palestinian romance" involves two Palestinians getting together and plotting to undermine the country’s "demography" (see also here). MK Zoabi further mentioned the education law, which contains provisions about the need to ‘reinforce Jewish values’ and so on without even mentioning Palestinians. Zoabi cited an Israeli study that found that Palestinians feature in just 2% of Israeli media coverage, 85% of which casts them in a negative light, despite the fact that they constitute 18% of the population and – she joked – 50% of the problem. In these and other ways, Zoabi continued, the Zionist myth of the "empty land" still dominates, with Palestinians confined to the margins of Israeli consciousness and not existing at all as indigenous people. This problem is "system[ic]", she stressed, not confined to the right-wing.
Israeli columnist Gideon Levy recently warned of a "dangerous, murky wave of nationalism and intolerance ... washing over Israeli society, while Uri Avnery, visiting the Knesset, reported that "Kahanism – the Israeli version of fascism – has moved from the margin to center stage". Zahalka confirmed this diagnosis, pointing to a "new wave" of racist laws passed by this Knesset, with dozens more in store. "Racism is not hidden anymore", he explained. On the contrary, "there is a competition now" between politicians" over who will be the most anti-Arab. With a "racist majority in the Knesset" and a weak Supreme Court, Israel is being governed by a "tyranny of the majority", not according to traditional democratic principles. Current trends, he concluded, point inexorably "towards official apartheid".
Last to speak was Haneen Zoabi, who is just totally badass. No really, see for yourself:
Amazing. Quite apart from her obvious intelligence and courage, she’s a great speaker. What I liked most about her was her indignant refusal to concede even an inch to the idea that Palestinians are asking for anything other than their basic human and civil rights. During the Q&As, for example, someone in the audience referred in passing to her earlier request for European states to help put pressure on Israel, and she immediately pulled him up on it. ‘I didn’t say we needed "help",’ she pointed out (paraphrasing), "I said Europe has a responsibility." Exactly right.
Legalising Politics
Zoabi summarised the basic dilemma facing Palestinian citizens of Israel as follows: "how to reconcile our citizenship with our identity?" That is to say, how to reconcile being an Israeli citizen with being Palestinian. The Israeli state’s answer is clear: you reconcile the conflict by "giving up your [Palestinian] identity". That’s why Israel created the "Israeli–Arab", and tried to "blackmail" them with the promise of a few civil rights – bestowed as a gift, not recognised as an entitlement – if they renounced their political identity. What’s worse, Zoabi continued, is that even when Israeli-Arabs give up their Palestinian identity (or, at any rate, political expressions of it), they still aren’t granted full citizenship, because they aren’t Jews and they aren’t Zionists. In the early days of the state, when Israel’s Palestinian minority still lived under military rule, Israeli-Palestinians used to be "afraid just to express our identity", and the "name of the game was just to survive". This is the kind of Israeli-Arab the Israeli state liked.
But after the Second Intifada, according to Zoabi, Israel realised that its project to groom the Israeli-Arab as a docile, apolitical subject had "failed". Hence, recent years have seen growing repression by the state designed to "criminalise ... [Palestinian] political activity" (for instance Olmert’s threat, in the form of a letter to the editor of a Balad publication, that the Shin Bet would "thwart" any group opposed to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, regardless of whether they violated any laws). Zoabi called this "the end of politics", likening moves by the Knesset to criminalise Palestinian and leftist political activity (for instance, the proposed law, backed by the government, to criminalise Israelis who call for a boycott against Israel) to religious decrees: just as in religious belief systems you have "halal" and "haram" – no debating – so in Israel politicians are increasingly "legalising politics", circumscribing debate by outlawing alternative ideologies in advance as forbidden, "haram".
Zoabi’s answer to the question of how to reconcile citizenship with Palestinian identity is different: the new discourse demands "full citizenship and full identity". "We want to use democratic tools" to demand a "liberal and democratic citizenship", she explained, outlining a "democratic vision" for everyone, Jews and Palestinians. For European and American audiences, this isn’t exactly a radical proposal – the idea of a state for all its citizens, not for one privileged ethnic group, is something most of us take for granted. And yet in Israel it’s a deeply troubling prospect. The Israeli state has long tried to "monopolise democratic discourse", and attempts by the Palestinian minority to demand that it live up to what that entails, framing its demands in the language of "universal values of justice, equality and freedom", presents a real threat. It forces the state, and Israeli society, to finally choose between maintaining Jewish supremacy and its supposed commitment to liberal values – between ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’.
International responsibility
Israel, at the moment, is quite happy to sacrifice its liberalism in order to maintain superiority over its Palestinian minority. According to Zoabi, the current discourse in the Knesset is: ‘who cares if the world thinks we’re a democracy?’ This is hubris, born of decades of impunity. As Zoabi emphasised, Israel is "particularly sensitive" to international pressure. It "needs the support of Western states in order ... to continue its policies ... without paying a cost", which means that those Western states, which have thus far provided said support in spades, have a "direct responsibility" to pressure Israel to end repression. Zoabi was particularly outraged at the decision to accept Israel into the OECD, no conditions attached, while Zahalka criticised the welcome by Britain and other European states of Israeli Foreign Minister and Kahanist Avigdor Lieberman, when those same states refused to deal with his Austrian equivalent, Jörg Haider (and, we might add, refuse to officially negotiate with Hamas). El-Sana slammed the "hypocrisy" of the international community’s reaction to the 2006 Palestinian elections, and called for states to apply international law as the basis for dealing with Israel. Zoabi concluded by arguing that internal forces alone are not strong enough to change Israeli policies. "This is not an internal debate", since decisive international support for Israel makes it an international issue. "We need Western pressure".
At the end of the discussion I hung around to try and put some of my carefully crafted questions to the trio, but all the "proper" news organisations with their fancy "cameras" and la-di-dah "microphones" were given priority. I managed to sneak in a quick "I LOVE YOU SWOO MUCH" to MK Zoabi, and snapped a couple of shots with my phone (note to self: fire NLP tech team):
Originally posted at New Left Project