How
Israeli Apartheid is Coming Unstuck
By Jonathan Cook
One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching.
By Jonathan Cook
One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching.
Superland,
a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a
booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May.
When a staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland
approved the booking immediately.
As the
story went viral on social media, the park’s managers hurriedly
offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and
Arab children to keep them apart and prevent friction.
Government
ministers led an outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the
justice minister, called the incident a “symptom of a sick
democracy”. Defence minister Moshe Yaalon was “ashamed”. Prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the “racist” policy be
halted immediately.
Such
sensitivity appears to be a reaction to an explosion of popular
racism over the past few months against the one in five Israelis
who belong to the country’s Palesinian Arab minority. Some
Israeli Jews have started to find the endless parade of bigotry
disturbing.
Israeli TV
recently revealed, for example, that a group of children with
cancer who had been offered a free day at a swimming pool were
refused entry once managers discovered that they were Bedouin.
According
to another TV investigation, Israel’s banks have a secret policy
of rejecting Arab customers who try to transfer their accounts
to a branch in a Jewish community, even though this violates
banking regulations.
The
settlers, whose violence was once restricted to setting fire to
the crops of Palestinians or rampaging through their villages in
the West Bank, are now as likely to attack Arab communities
inside Israel. Torched mosques, offensive graffiti on churches
and cars set ablaze in so-called “price-tag” attacks have become
commonplace.
Similarly,
reports of vicious attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly becoming
a news staple. Recent incidents have included the near-fatal
beating of a street cleaner, and a bus driver who held his gun
to an Arab passenger’s head, threatening to pull the trigger
unless the man showed his ID.
Also going
viral were troubling mobile-phone photos of a young Arab woman
surrounded by a mob of respectable-looking commuters and
shoppers while she waited for a train. As they hit her and
pulled off her hijab, station guards looked on impassively.
However
welcome official denunciations of these events are, the
government’s professed outrage does not wash.
While
Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating
Superland for its racism, they were busy backing a grossly
discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz newspaper called
“one of the most dangerous” measures ever to come before the
parliament.
The bill
will give Israelis who have served in the army a whole raft of
extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and the
provision of public and private services. The catch is that
almost all of the country’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens are
excluded from military service. In practice, the benefits will
be reserved for Jews only.
Superland’s offence pales to insignificance when compared to
that, or to the decades of state-planned and officially
sanctoned discrimination against the country’s Palestinian
minority.
An
editorial in Haaretz this month observed that Israel was really
“two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. … This is the gap
between the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western
nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a
Third World country.”
Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land
allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and
employment.
None of
this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee
Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified
57 laws that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian
citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the statute books.
Less
visible but just as damaging is the covert discrimination
Palestinian citizens face every day when dealing with state
institutions, whose administrative practices find their
rationale in the entrenchment of Jewish privilege.
This week
a report indentified precisely this kind of institutional racism
when it found that students from the country’s Palestinian
minority were confronted by a series of 14 obstacles not faced
by their Jewish compatriots that contributed to denying them
places in higher education.
The wave
of popular prejudice and racist violence is no accident either.
Paradoxically, it has been unleashed by the increasingly
inflammatory rhetoric of rightwing politicians like Netanyahu,
whose constant fearmongering casts Palestinian citizens as
disloyal, a fifth column and a demographic threat to the state’s
Jewishness.
So why if
the state is so committed to subjugating and excluding
Palestinian citizens, and Netanyahu and his ministers so
determined to increase the weight of discriminatory legislation,
are they decrying the racism of Superland?
To make
sense of this, one has to understand how desperately Israel has
sought to distinguish itself from apartheid South Africa.
Israel
cultivates, as South Africa once did, what scholars term “grand
apartheid”. This is segregation, largely covert and often often
justified by security or cultural differences, to ensure that
control of resources remains exclusively in the hands of the
privileged community.
At the
same time, Israel long shied away from what some call South
Africa’s model of “petty apartheid” – the overt, symbolic, but
far less significant segregation of park benches, buses and
toilets.
The
avoidance of petty apartheid has been the key to Israel’s
success in obscuring from the world’s view its grand apartheid,
most obviously in the occupied territories but also inside
Israel itself.
This month
South Africa’s departing ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia,
warned that Israel was a “replication of apartheid”. The idea
that the world may soon wake up to this comparison deeply
unnerves Netanyahu and the right, all the more so as they risk
being identified as the party refusing to make concessions
towards peace.
The threat
posed by what happened at Superland is that such incidents of
unofficial and improvised racism may one day unmask the much
more sinister and organised campaign of “grand apartheid” that
Israel’s leaders have overseen for decades.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle
East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is
www.jonathan-cook.net.
A
version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu
Dhab
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