SubscribeThe idea of a single, bi-national state is not new. Its appeal lies in its attempt to provide an equitable and inclusive solution to the struggle of two peoples for the same piece of land. It was first suggested in the 1920s by Zionist leftwing intellectuals led by philosopher Martin Buber, Judah Magnes... and Haïm Kalvarisky... Underlying their Zionism was a quest for a Jewish renaissance, both cultural and spiritual, with a determination to avoid injustice in its achievement. It was essential to found a new nation, although not necessarily a separate Jewish state and certainly not at the expense of the existing population.Time for a bi-national state
According to historian Tony Judt, this is where Israel reaches its limits. No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion; not after the crimes of the last century (7).Tony Judt, like so many others, ignores the fact that nearly a quarter of the population of Israel is Arab. They are citizens. They vote. They have a political party and hold seats in the Knesset. They serve in the IDF. Most of them are Muslim. They've been living peacefully with the Jews in Israel for 60 years.
...Indeed, Israeli Jewish public opinion turned sharply anti-Arab during the war and in its aftermath. And since it ended, the head of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, Avigdor Lieberman -- who has repeatedly questioned Israeli Arabs' loyalty and called for the possible revocation of their citizenships -- has been brought into the Olmert government and given an important security position in the cabinet.Israel's Arab problem hits home
The sad fact is that Lieberman might not be entirely wrong about their loyalty. It is not unreasonable to believe that, despite their citizenship, many Israeli Arabs don't feel much of an allegiance to Israel these days. Many of them have relatives among the Palestinians in the occupied territories, or at least identify with their plight, and although they themselves do in theory have full rights in Israel, they still face a great deal of discrimination from their Israeli Jewish neighbors, and frequently unofficial bias from various arms of the government.
They are expected to be loyal citizens of a country whose flag and national anthem, steeped in Jewish imagery, explicitly exclude them. A country in which a recent poll found that 68 percent of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. A country in which Israeli-Arab villages are often refused official permits by the government -- and then sometimes even demolished because they are deemed "unrecognized." In December, for example, a small riot ensued in the Bedouin Arab village of Al-Twayil in Israel's south, when Israeli Arabs protested a government decision to demolish some of the buildings in their village -- buildings they had just repaired after a demolition a few weeks earlier.
Perhaps as a result of the disenfranchisement that inevitably results from all this, there has been an increasing number of Israeli Arabs linked to Palestinian terrorism in Israel over the past few years. Israeli intelligence recently reported that 14 percent of all suicide bombings perpetrated in Israel have been the work of terrorists who gained citizenship through marriage with Israeli Arabs, or "family reunification." As a result, the Shin Bet -- Israel's internal intelligence service -- has repeatedly petitioned for an extension on a law that bans such "reunification."
There is no clear law protecting equal rights for the Israeli Arabs. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, which is Israel's mini bill of rights, does not mention the Arabs' right of equality. However, this law stresses the ethnicity of the state as Jewish. Furthermore, the Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed all cases dealing with discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. The Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, but discriminatory laws limit these two rights. Such law is the Basic Law: The Knesset and the Law of Political Parties section 7(A) amended in 1985. This law mentioned above states that, first, a political party will be disqualified at election time if it calls for the State of Israel to give its Arab citizens full and equal rights as its Jewish citizens. Second, a political party, to be qualified to run for elections, must not challenge the Jewish character of the State of Israel. The law states, "a list of candidates shall not participate in the elections for the Knesset if its aims or actions, expressively or implicitly, point to the denial of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people." Tawfik Toubi, an Israeli Arab, who is a member of the Knesset, finds problems with this law. He opposed the law by saying: "to say today in the law that the State of Israel is the State of the Jewish people, means saying to 16% of the citizens of the State of Israel that they have no state and they are stateless, that the state of Israel is the state only of its Jewish inhabitants, and that Arab citizens who live in it reside and live in it on sufferance and without rights equal to those of the Jewish citizens.... Don't the people who drew up this version realize that by this definition, they tarnish the State of Israel as an apartheid state, a racist state?"Arab Political Mobilization And Israeli Responses
An Israeli human rights group today proposed a new national constitution that gives more rights to the country's Arab minority and says Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state but as a "democratic, bilingual and multicultural state".Israeli Group Calls for Increased Rights for Arabs
Although the paper - from Adalah, a legal organisation working for Arab rights - is unlikely ever to become law, it is part of a fresh effort by the Arab minority in Israel to argue for a stronger role in society.
Most striking was the proposal to scrap Israel's law of return, which gives automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The paper argues that citizenship of Israel should be for those born in Israel with a parent also born there; those with a parent who is a citizen; those married to a citizen; or those arriving for humanitarian reasons, including political persecution...
The term "Israeli Arabs", as used above by the New York Times, is widespread inside and outside Israel, both in the media and in scholarly articles. The emphasis is on the second word -- "Arabs" rather than on the qualifier "Israeli". The alternative term "Palestinian Israelis" would come as a rude shock to many Israelis, even secular nationalists, conditioned as they are to think of the Palestinians amongst them (20 percent of the population) as a people who had no hand in the agrarian or industrial building of the Zionist State. These people are tolerated at best, so long as they submit themselves to the Zionist ideal. Arab Israelis, for example, must acknowledge "the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people" before they can even participate in the political process (1992 Basic Law).Israeli Arabs: 'Who are we and what do we want?'
In one way, the subtext for this usage emphasizes the Zionist narrative: Jews (the majority of whom come from outside Israel) have a God given right to live in historic Palestine, but the indigenous Palestinian is a generic Arab with only a tenuous sense of belonging to a specific geographic area. The term "Israeli Arabs" includes Muslim and Christian Arabs, the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped the ethnic cleansing of 1948, now numbering 1.3 million strong. Significantly, it does not include Jewish Arabs, who are referred to, instead, as "oriental Jews". Nor does it include the dispossessed Bedouins (about 100,000), who are denied legal recognition and herded in the arid northeastern part of the Negev (the western and fertile part having been reserved for Jewish settlers).
Within this regional context, the Israeli-American opposition to Hamas's government suffers from a double flaw: it is incongruous in terms of democratic principle, and it is counterproductive in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it strips all moderate voices within Hamas of credibility. The failure of Hamas's government, now the focal point of the Israeli-American strategy towards the movement, would have the effect of pushing Hamas back to the militarised approach of the pre-election period.Hamas's path to reinvention
Rather than a strategy of containment designed to bring Hamas further into the arc of politics and its compromises, Tel Aviv and Washington seem content to drive Hamas back towards its previous radicalism, in which the tactic of suicide-attacks played a central role. Such an attempt to besiege Hamas in the hope of breaking its will to make greater concessions is a stance full of risks, not least that it will only make a desperate Hamas even more ready to accept Iran's offers of much-needed support...
A deep irony of this situation is that the most peaceful and calm period that Israeli cities enjoyed over almost the past two years was the period in which Hamas was preparing for the elections and after the movement took power in Palestine (until, of course, the invasion of Lebanon on 12 July and the Hizbollah missile-attacks that ensued). Hamas refuses to make verbal concessions on the issue of clear-cut recognition of the right of Israel to exist. It says that it acknowledges Israel as an existing fact on the ground, no more. Yet, in power, it has stopped attacking Israel as it used to do when it was part of the opposition to Palestine's governing authority.
This again highlights the rhetoric-practice dichotomy. Hamas needs to keep its rhetoric high and loud, refraining from any blunt offer of recognition of Israel, in order to compensate for the slow, daily "undoing" of its military struggle. If Hamas gives in on both rhetorical and practical fronts, it will lose out greatly in the eyes of its supporters.
For the time being, then, the choice for Israel, the United States and other concerned states seems to be: do you prefer a rhetorical Hamas in power (observing a practical truce), or a rhetorical and military Hamas in opposition, where the resumption of suicide-bombings is only one step away?
I thought that the whole Trans-Jordan (now just Jordan) thing WAS the partitioning of the land into two different states....It turns out that in 1948 the Jordanians didn't want to take in 1-2 million refugees. So they're imprisoned in Gaza and the West Bank. The ones who didn't flee the Zionists are now either semi-enfranchised "Israeli Arabs" or destitute Bedouins.
I'm confused.... since when do you get to get half, then half of what's left?
posted by dwivian at 8:07 AM PST on March 13 [+] [!]
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 left some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs refugees, but another 160,000 stayed put and became Israeli citizens. Today, Israel's Arab community numbers 1.2 million, constituting nearly a fifth of the country's population. By all material measures -- income, education level, unemployment -- they lag far behind the Jewish population, but they are also denied certain privileges guaranteed by law to the Jews. The Law of Return, for example, gives Jews from anywhere in the world, or their descendants or spouses, the right to show up and claim Israeli citizenship...The other Israelis
"Future Vision" describes Israel as a state with two classes of citizens, and the remedy it envisions would reconstitute the country as a "consensual democracy" that would serve as a "joint homeland" for both Jews and Palestinians.
If enacted, the proposals of the "Future Vision" document would end the Law of Return -- or extend a similar right to Palestinians. If land in Israel has been distributed unevenly -- the paper points to the fact that only 3.5 percent is in the hands of the 20 percent of its "indigenous" population -- "Future Vision" calls for the return of property that has been appropriated from Arabs by the state, or failing that, compensation, and for Arab involvement in all future planning decisions.
68.4 percent of Israeli Jews fear a civil uprising on behalf of Israeli Arabs and 63.3 percent say they won't enter Arab towns in Israel, according to the results of the 2006 index of Jewish-Arab relations released on Monday.New poll shows 68.4% of Israeli Jews fear Israeli Arab uprising
The poll also showed that 62 percent of the Arab population in Israel fears that the "triangle" area will be ceded to a future Palestinian state and 60 percent say they fear a mass expulsion from Israel.
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posted by bhouston at 11:24 PM on March 12, 2007