Israel: Second class citizen, second class human being

There are not many things upon which Jews and Arabs agree. One thing they do agree upon however is that Abraham is the father of both nations. For those of you who do not know the story, I'll give a short synopsis that will probably have some inaccuracies, as it has been a long time since I read the Bible, but the main elements are there. Abraham and his wife Sarah could not have children, so he took one of his concubines Hagar and had a child by her. The boy was named Ishmael and he is regarded as the father of the Arab nation. Later on God said to Abraham when he was very old and his wife had passed child-bearing age, that he would have a son. Abraham laughed and because of this the child was called Yitzhak (Isaac in English) from the route of the Hebrew word for laughter. But God also said "Woe betide anyone who harms one hair of the head of the descendants of Ishmael." I would like to know how long it would take to count all the hairs on the heads of Ishmael's descendants that were killed in the recent blood bath by the cousins of Ishmael at Raffia.

In Israel Arab citizens are by law supposed to be equal to their fellow Jewish citizens. But as we know what exists in law, and what exists in practice are two different things.

There is though one place in Israel where Arabs are more or less equal - that is the city of Haifa. Haifa differs a lot from Israel. It has always elected a Labour Mayor, busses run on the Sabbath, and on the whole you can't tell a young Jew from a young Arab, as they both wear modern western dress. This point will make the rest of this article sadder than it already is.

On June 2, 2004 a report was published by The Musawa Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. The report paints a grim picture, documenting numerous cases of racism against Israeli Arabs in the past four years. Among other examples, the report cites 16 incidents where Arabs have been killed since the October 2000 riots, where 12 Israeli Arabs died.

In addition, the report documents cases of violence directed at Arabs by Jewish citizens and law enforcement agents and laments what it calls the failure to address racism and "racist Jewish organizations", such as the Haifa terror cell, which on nine separate occasions attempted to target Arabs.

The report's authors claim that no concrete steps were taken to uncover the cell before it targeted a Jewish citizen, at which point the police went into high gear and eventually arrested the terror suspects.

The report also addresses incitement against Arabs by rightwing MKs and other Jewish leaders and expresses concern over findings indicating that about 70% of Jews believe Israeli Arabs pose a danger to national security. Moreover, according to the findings 20% of the Jewish population would be willing to vote for far-right movements endorsing the transfer of Arabs.

To me this report comes as no surprise. I remember many years ago, when the younger Arabs in the territories who had had enough of all the injustice that their parents had put up with started to fight back. So Israelis were urged to go and buy guns to defend themselves. So we saw ordinary citizens packing pistols just like in the days of the "Wild West". The people who one usually saw with a gun were the religious, just like in the "Wild West" - a Bible in one hand and a six-gun in the other. One incident has always stuck in my mind - it was of a Jewish settler who shot and killed an Arab at point blank range while he was in his car for no other reason than that he was an Arab. He stated that under Jewish biblical law the Arab represented a threat to the settler's life so he murdered him. He was given a sentence of less than a year. He appealed to the President and was released early!

Among the many incidents stated in the report here is one example: A pleasant barbecue at the Olga beach in Hadera in 2002 took a turn for the worse when more than a dozen twenty-somethings strolled up to the Shbitas and their friends and asked: "Are you Arabs?"

They replied that they were, following their response with, "Why are you asking?" Arabs aren't welcome, the group was told; the families were told to leave. And then, to emphasize the point, the group attacked the Arab families, leaving several of them with injuries, some serious.

It took Taghrid's husband a month to recover from a deep knife wound to his side, she related at a press conference two years later, held in conjunction with Tuesday's release of the report highlighting racism against Arab-Israelis. She herself has never been the same.

"I had never thought it was dangerous to be in a public park, but now I know that it can be," said the 47-year-old Hebrew-Arabic translator who has spent her life in Atira. These kinds of attacks have "come to be normal, because it happens all the time." She said that the police were slow in responding despite her frantic call in which she warned them of her fear that "there will be a murder" and didn't arrest the perpetrators, even though they were known by the community.

This intolerance of minorities does not only apply to Arabs - Jews too suffer from it. Judaism is the Bible of the normal, the respectable! So if you are not normal you suffer. Everyone is expected to marry and have kids, strive to possess a nice home, a car and that one's children should be successful.

I once worked with a person who had become religious. As we know converts are always far more fanatical than those born into a particular faith, or ideology. This guy was the worst, he boasted to me that on Friday night, which is the Sabbath eve, the holiest time for Jews, he and his hooligan religious friends would go down to the Tel-Aviv beach front to a place called London Square where he knew homosexuals gathered, and beat them up. The police who obviously knew about this weekly "Religious Ceremony" did nothing. I hated the bastard, and at the first chance I got I had him sacked!

But can you really blame him when about ten years ago a gay person tried to run for the Knesset, and a member of one of the ultra-rightwing religious parties got up on the podium of the Israeli parliament and quoted from the Bible that the punishment for being - being not practicing - homosexuality was death! I've heard Yeshiva students (the Yeshiva is a religious college for boys only) talking on the radio about how they are afraid of being killed should their homosexuality be discovered. And the paedophilia that we hear about so much in the Christian churches also happens here. But it is only now coming out into the open and the perpetrators are being sent to jail.

So in Israel if you conform, are a good upstanding citizen, you will be alright, and enjoy the rights of a good citizen.

The day before the report on the discrimination against Arabs emerged, the TV news reported that Israel has twice the amount of violence in schools of any western country; to me this is not a surprise, we are surrounded by violence all the time. Kids of 13 demand money of their fellow pupils to the tune of tens of thousands of Shekels, or they will beat them up. Is this any wonder when all anybody talks about here apart from the so-called "war against terror", is money. People come into your house, see something new and ask, "How much did it cost?" If it cost a lot a sign of approval emerges from their face, if it was cheap, a frown. One of yesterday's headlines in the newspapers read "Banks make 14 million Shekels profit every day". Yet the government does nothing about any of these terrible things. Sharon seems to think that the fate of Israel lies with a few thousand settlers. Mr. Sharon, Rome is burning and you are playing your fiddle. Put it down take a real look at where Israel's fate lies!

The saddest thing in all this is the apathy of the people. They have the power to change it yet they do nothing. I don't blame them - brainwashed by generations of Zionist lies. It's hard for them, but there are stirrings here and there, so maybe all is not lost, I hope so for the children's sake, Arab and Jewish alike.

June, 2004