Why Have Jewish-Arab Relations Deteriorated in Israel? The View of Sikkuy's Ron Gerlitz, by Phyllis Bernstein

What follows is a summary of remarks delivered by Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy: The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, at an Inter-Agency Task Force for Israeli Arab Issues meeting on November 6, 2014 in New York. 

"To hate Arabs isn't racism, it's having moral values! #Israeldemandsrevenge

By Phyllis Bernstein

This summer, and since the war in Gaza, we have witnessed a serious deterioration in relations between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel.  Unlike the events which took place in 2000 between the police and Arab citizens, since the summer of 2014 we’ve seen civil clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens.

In most cases, Jews have attacked Arabs verbally or physically.  What’s new is the frequency and intensity of these incidents. This is something we’ve never seen before in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel.   A few examples:  shouting “death to Arabs” on the street, demonstrations demanding the firing of all Arab employees in some shopping malls, organized pressure on employers to fire Arab employees, death threats against people who expressed sympathy for Arabs, including former Defense Minister Amir Peretz, physical and verbal attacks against Arab citizens, racist incitement in social media, dismissal of Arab employees by mainstream Jewish employers, and incitement by politicians such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who called on Jews to boycott Arab businesses.

The results:  Arabs have simply become afraid to go out in the street, speak Arabic in public, and go to work. The level of hate has increased significantly on both sides.   Extreme right-wing organizations have also incited hatred against Israeli Arabs through well-organized demonstrations and marches.

Some believe this has happened because of the war in Gaza.   But there have been three other wars in Gaza in recent years and these things did not happen before.    If we simply see these developments as an “unexplained outburst of racism" in Jewish society, we will be unable to find solutions.   What we are seeing is a backlash by the very extreme right to the strengthening of Arab society and its ever-increasing integration in the economy and society in Israel.

Arab society in Israel has gotten stronger – economically, socially and also in terms of political representation.  Many factors have driven this process, some due to Arab society itself, some to government efforts, and some to NGO’s working for equality. 

While growing up near Tira in the seventies, Ron saw Arabs working only as school janitors or as farmers. Today you can see Arabs working in pharmacies and in hospitals as doctors and nurses.  The symbol of success is the Arab Supreme Court judge who sent former President Katzav to jail.  Arab citizens of Israel have not only become better off, but they are also more visible and this has changed how the extreme Jewish right sees them.

The backlash began in the Knesset with a wave of legislation against Arab citizens.  But the politicians failed, and Arab society has continued to flourish.   This summer, people took to the streets to try to do what the politicians couldn’t do. 

The extreme right wing wanted to stop integration in employment, and the “Chuligans” in the street (similar to the KKK, but with different hats) descended on pharmacies to demand the dismissal of Arab employees. They cannot tolerate the strength and visibility of Arabs in public in Israel. They want to put them in the only place they’re willing to see them – back down at the bottom. 

During the summer, the assault against Arab citizens took place in the Knesset, within the government, on social networks, in the media and, of course, on the street.  This makes the situation much worse because it is harder to control.  And we have come very close to the point where things could spin out of control. 

What does all this mean for Israeli society?   In a word, it’s dangerous.    There is a real possibility that the largely non-violent relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel will deteriorate into serious violence. 

We must develop solutions for this new situation, because things have changed dramatically.   A few important lessons emerge.    First, we didn't expect the backlash from the right wing to the success of efforts to strengthen Arab society and especially to the strides made in integrating Arabs into the Israeli work place.  The process of economic development, integration and narrowing of gaps between Arabs and Jews is not linear.  There are people on the other side who want to stop it and we need to take this into account.  An example:  While Israeli and American Jewish philanthropists are giving microfinance to small Arab businesses, the foreign minister called on Jews not to buy from those very same businesses!   Philanthropic efforts must take this into account.  Otherwise, their efforts are at risk of failing.

There are more and more shared spaces in which Jews and Arabs mix on an equal basis, especially in work places and in the new mixed cities like Nazareth Illit.  And it is exactly in those places that we saw clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens.

If the Arab woman from Sakhnin hadn’t graduated university and worked as a pharmacist in Haifa, no one would have cared what she thought about the IDF during the Gaza war.   But she is a graduate of an Israeli college and she works in a pharmacy.   So right-wing hooligans demanded her dismissal because of what she wrote on Facebook during the war.   "Death to the Arabs" marches were not held in Baqa al-Gharbiya but in Nazareth Illit and Haifa.  The Arab doctor was fired and not the Arab hospital cleaner.

While we have worked hard and had success in narrowing gaps, for example through increased economic development in the Arab sector and creating more shared places, no one considered that those places could become focal points for tension between Jews and Arabs in times of war.   It is exactly in those places where the right wing will react. 

Perhaps the most important lesson is that economic development by itself simply isn’t enough.  The difference in narratives between Jews and Arabs dramatically affects the ability of these societies to live together.  NGOs and philanthropists cannot create a common narrative for both sides.   The Zionist and Palestinian narratives are very far apart.   That chasm will not be bridged in the next two generations.   But we must find ways to live together despite these different narratives.

We must be ready for the next escalation.   Every newly shared space could become the arena for the next escalation between Jews and Arabs.  It is important to develop and promote ideas that will enable those shared places:  for example, the workplace must become tolerant of the different narratives.  As an example, an Arab doctor should not be fired for Facebook posts in sympathy with the Palestinian children killed in Gaza.   

We should not stop pushing economic development forward, and we should continue to build a shared society.  But now we must also prepare for the reactions of those who find these unwelcome.   In addition to our investment in economic progress, we will also have to invest in preparing our response to the likely counterattack.   We will have to find ways that those shared spaces, especially places of employment, can accommodate the two differing and sometimes conflicting narratives of Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Phyllis Bernstein adds:   Israeli Arabs, and the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, all view themselves as part of the same “Palestinian people.”   Arab citizens want to remain in Israel as citizens, but in times of war they are unable to express dissenting views against the government’s policies or the IDF’s actions.   Israeli civil society really needs to start addressing the question of how to deal with the “Palestinian peoplehood narrative” of Israel’s Arab citizens.   In short, Israel needs to work much more on its democracy issues.

Phyllis Bernstein is co-chair of the Israeli Arab Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Metrowest New Jersey and serves on the executive board of Partners for Progressive Israel.  Her views are her own and not those of any organization with which she is affiliated. 

Here are links to three Op-eds by Ron Gerlitz with further analysis of the deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations in Israel this summer: 

1. Why Palestinian citizens of Israel are no longer safe, Ron Gerlitz | +972 Magazine  

2.  A short version of that op-ed appeared in Ha’aretz:   The backlash against Arab integration

 

3.  And a new op-ed about the firing of Arab employees during the war:   Dismissal for Narrative Reasons | Ron Gerlitz | The Times of Israel

Bedouin Oppose Israeli Plans to Relocate Communities, by Yolande Knell, in BBC News

Bedouin in the occupied West Bank and in Israel's Negev desert say they fear for their future as new reports circulate that the Israeli authorities plan to relocate them. International aid and Bedouin groups say tens of thousands of people could ultimately be affected.

Bedouin to the east of Jerusalem expect attempts will soon be made to move them against their will. They live in an area that is controlled by Israel's Civil Administration, part of the Defence Ministry that governs the West Bank.

"Nobody can stop them. This is their project and they will implement it no matter what," says Ghadara Jahalin, who squats on a rug surrounded by her grandchildren in a camp made up of tents and metal shacks.

"They will push us to somewhere where we won't be able to survive".

The small community already endures harsh conditions in the desert. They have no running water or access to the electrical grid.

On the other side of the busy road leading to Jericho, Israel's largest settlement, Maale Adumim, fills the horizon.

The family moved here after they were forced away from Tel Arad in the northern Negev, more than 60 years ago, soon after the creation of Israel.

Now there are plans to relocate them to allow for expansion of the nearby settlement bloc. The Israeli authorities say this will also give them better access to resources and services.

Recently the Civil Administration declared its intention to move some 20 Bedouin communities, a total of about 2,300 people, most of them refugees.

Reports said the Bedouin would be taken to a new permanent location by al-Azariya, close to a rubbish dump. Dozens of members of the Jahalin tribe were relocated there in the 1990s due to early construction at Maale Adumim but complain of lack of access to grazing land and health problems.

The local UN agency, OCHA, says such a move would contravene international humanitarian law and "further endanger the Bedouin's way of life".

However the Civil Administration spokesman suggested the plans were not final. He said work had gone on for months "to find a solution for the relocation dilemma of the Jahalin tribe who are illegally located without the required permit".

"Talks are being conducted with the heads of the Jahalin tribe to find a solution that would suit them," he added.

Demolitions and harassment

The Israeli authorities ban most new construction by Bedouin in the West Bank zone they control.

Since the beginning of this year there have been increased demolitions of homes. UN data shows more than a hundred Bedouin structures have been demolished. Settler harassment is also a growing problem.

In Khan al-Ahmar, many homes are under demolition order, as is the primary school, set up with the help of an Italian charity two years ago. It was built out of rubber tyres covered in mud and concrete. Dozens of children attend classes there.

"All basic international laws support education. Today you must have it. It's as important as water and oxygen," says Eid Jahalin, the father of two pupils.

"The status of the school is like an intensive care patient: we don't know if it will make it or not," he goes on. "We are facing many lawsuits."

It is estimated that about 27,000 Bedouin living in the West Bank.

They mostly live in areas that Israel declared as state land or on private land leased from Palestinians. Some have deeds showing they bought territory when Jordan was in control of the area between 1948 and 1967.

Many of the nomadic communities settled there after leaving their ancestral land in the Negev desert. The Bedouin that remained became Israeli citizens but still have a tense relationship with the state.

'Unrecognised' villages

In September, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan that would see over 30,000 Bedouins moved from Negev villages which it views as "unrecognised", to land adjacent to existing urban centres. These are villages that often predate the State of Israel, are not officially recognised and therefore denied state support or services.

"A decision must be made for the country and for the development of the Negev and its residents, Jews and Bedouin alike," said the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Legislation is soon expected to go before parliament after a three-month consultation period.

Arab advocacy groups argue this reverses the usual planning process and that Negev Bedouin will never agree to relocate two-thirds of their population in "cramped towns" where they cannot pursue their traditional agricultural lifestyles.

They say they seek rights to land that amounts to just 2% of the Negev.

"We think the Prawer plan [named after Ehud Prawer, an Israeli official who led a team to resolve the issue of unrecognised villages] is bad for the Bedouin and Jews because it will upset Arab-Jewish relations," says Thabet Abu Ras of Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel.

He sees it is an act of discrimination against the Arab-Israeli community who he says are looked at as "a demographic and security threat".

"They think they can push Arabs from the border, reduce the population and make room to establish more Jewish communities," he says.

"Jewish citizens who live in the Naqab [Negev] are free to live in cities, a kibbutz, even their own farm. Why is this not the right of all citizens?"

Large protests have already taken place and more are planned.

Read More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15024958

Bedouin Citizens of Israel Are Campaigning for Their Rights, in The Economist

THE Bedouin of Israel are not a happy lot. Once nomadic lords, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government plans to pen tens of thousands of them into cities. This may be Israel’s biggest removal of Arabs from the land since the 1948 war.In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, soldiers knock down their shacks with abandon. Plans are afoot to transfer some 2,000 to the edge of a rubbish dump to make way for more Jewish settlers east of Jerusalem. To cap it all, religious Jews recently torched a mosque in Tuba, a Bedouin town in the north-east of Israel.

Traditionally split into often feuding clans, the nomads have been easy for Israel to divide, conquer, shift and, at least in the Israeli state’s early days, expel. Whole tribes of Bedouin once roamed from Libya to Iraq. But concrete walls and a regime of permits have splintered them, reducing contact, commerce and marriage between Israel’s 200,000 Bedouin, the West Bank’s 40,000 and millions beyond, in Gaza, Jordan, Sinai and the Arabian peninsular.

Forced first into narrow enclaves and then into towns, they have generally downsized from camels to goats. Many have abandoned their herds entirely. The West Bank’s last surviving herders are hemmed in by Israeli military bases, by-pass roads and Jewish settlements. Israeli soldiers confiscate flocks that stray. The settlers see them as trespassers and bar access to springs.

Life in Israel proper is little better. Nearly half the Negev’s Bedouin live in villages often predating the state but officially unrecognised and so denied state support. There are no paved roads, public transport, electricity or water. Alongside Wadi Naam, a dusty Bedouin camp of 4,000 people, a toxic waste plant puffs away.

The Bedouin once hoped to integrate. Unlike most Israeli Arabs, bar the Druze, some volunteered to serve in Israel’s army. But the latest plan for mass resettlement is changing the mood. Mr Netanyahu’s advisers say they are simply rehousing squatters. Even the Palestinian Authority, the proto-government on the West Bank, seems to hold its nose.

Israeli officials say the masterplan for mass resettlement will entail an unprecedented transfer of government land to Israeli Arabs. Bedouin who can prove entitlement will receive half their land, or compensation. “By law the government owns the land,” says Ehud Prawer, the official who devised the plan. “But as long as the dispute continues, the Bedouin can’t cultivate it and we can’t develop it. We need a compromise.” “Concentrated” in new towns, he adds, the Bedouin will get all the services they are now denied.

The Bedouin are refusing to budge. “When a Jewish Israeli wants to go and live in the Negev, it is called the development of the south,” says Rawia Abu Rabia, a Bedou lawyer. “But when Bedouin already living there want to go on living in the same place, it is considered an effort to take over state lands.” Some people say it could be a dry run for transferring Arabs in northern Israel to the West Bank.

The Negev’s Bedouin are forming a Council of Bedouin Tribes. Less genially, Tuba’s youths protested against the torching of their mosque by vandalising the town council building. The sole Bedou in Israel’s parliament, Taleb al-Sana, warns of a Bedouin intifada if the planners persist.

In neighbouring countries, the Bedouin are also on the move. In Jordan, where they once were top dogs, they have staged protests against a monied, urbanised Palestinian elite. In Egyptian Sinai they have risen up against the remnants of the ousted Hosni Mubarak’s security regime.

Might a pan-Bedouin identity yet arise, linking the Bedouin under Israeli rule with the million or so scattered across the region? Many of Sinai’s angry Bedouin carry Israeli mobile telephones, renewing contact across borders after decades of separation. The lucrative tunnels linking Gaza to Sinai are reviving commercial ties. A high birth-rate adds confidence in numbers. A newly educated elite is fashioning a political identity. “We’re all victims of the same policy to dispossess us,” says Muhammad Korshan, a West Bank Bedou activist.

This year he went to New York to ask the UN’s Forum on Indigenous Peoples to recognise the Bedouin as an ethnic-minority people with rights to tribal lands. They have a long way to go. Unlike Berbers and Kurds, they have no flags or leaders. But a belated bid for recognition has begun.

Read More: http://www.economist.com/node/21536645

Israel and the Polarization of American Jews, by Gidon D. Remba, Jerusalem Report

In “Israel and the Polarization of American Jews,” (The Jerusalem Report, June 20, 2011), I suggest that the controversy over Tony Kushner’s views on Israel highlight the ways in which the gap between liberal and conservative Jews regarding Israel is becoming an unbridgeable chasm. At the same time, I question the value of defining who is “inside the Jewish communal tent” and who is “outside,” as leaders in the organized Jewish community have suggested, on the basis of whether a person or organization “recognizes Israel as a democratic Jewish state.”

Today, many human rights activists and groups which are not avowedly Zionist work closely with pro-Israel groups like ours that are fighting for justice and equality in Israel. Our Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice (a project of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change), for example, has brought together American Jewish and Israeli Arab groups across the ideological spectrum, including some in Israel and the U.S. who would be defined as “outside the tent” by the conventional definition. Acting in concert has enabled us all to be more effective in our efforts to stop the demolition of homes in unrecognized Negev Bedouin villages and the violent expulsion of Bedouin Israeli men, women and children by the Israeli government.

By working together to advance equal citizenship for both Arab and Jewish Israelis, aren’t non-Zionist human rights activists doing more to secure Israel’s future as a democratic Jewish state than some Zionists who pass the conventional test of “kashrut” for membership in the “communal tent”? The misbegotten controversy in Israel’s Knesset and at the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council over whether J Street is “pro-Israel” enough to be included in Jewish communal institutions is another case in point.

Perhaps the time has come to do away with the impulse to excommunicate Jewish groups engaged in activism for peace, human rights and justice in Israel if they take unorthodox political stands or do not speak in ways that representatives of the mainstream community deem politically correct.

Click here to read “Israel and the Polarization of American Jews.”

The Vengeance of the Occupation, by Gershom Gorenberg, American Prospect

There's a limit to how long a fragile democracy like Israel can maintain an undemocratic regime next door, in occupied territory, before democracy at home is corrupted.

I know that the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch didn't intend his classic play, God of Vengeance, as an allegory about Israel and the impact of the occupation. The play was first staged 60 years before Israel conquered the West Bank. All the same, what's happening in the Jewish state keeps tempting me to read Asch's drama as an allegory.

In "God of Vengeance," a character named Yankel Chapchovich in an unnamed Eastern European town runs a brothel in his basement while trying to bring up his daughter as a chaste Jewish girl on the floor above. To protect her purity, he installs a Torah scroll in his home. His plan naturally fails: There's a limit to how much tribute vice can pay to virtue before the line between them vanishes.

Likewise, there's a limit to how long a fragile democracy can maintain an undemocratic regime next door, in occupied territory, before democracy at home is corrupted. A border, especially one not even shown on maps, cannot seal off the rot.

Take, for example, the Admission Committees of Community Settlements bill, presently before the Knesset. A "community settlement" is a kind of membership-only exurb invented by West Bank settlers. The community is managed by an association responsible for "preserving the character of the settlement," in the words of a late 1970s report from the Gush Emunim settler movement. New residents have to be approved by an admissions committee, to ensure a shared "ideological-social background," the report states. Residents enjoy "single-family homes, quiet streets, fresh air" in a community limited to a few hundred families -- an "island" of a "selected population."

The design made it possible to enforce ideological conformity and social snobbery at the same time. It was assiduously implemented in settlements across the West Bank, then imported to sovereign Israel. In particular, the government has used the community-settlement model in efforts to "Judaize the Galilee" -- to draw Jews to northern Israel, which has a large Arab population. The policy applies the concept of the West Bank settlement enterprise to part of Israel: The land is treated as an arena where two ethnic groups struggle for control, acre by acre; the Arabs are seen as a hostile population rather than as citizens.

The challenge to that approach came from Adel and Iman Kaden, a couple from the Israeli Arab town of Baqa al-Gharbiyah. In 1995, they tried to buy a lot in the community settlement of Katzir. As young professionals eager to live in a place with good schools so their daughters could get into the right universities, they fit the Katzir profile. As Arabs, they were rejected. As citizens of a democracy, they turned to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which filed suit before the Israeli Supreme Court. In its judgment five years later, citing sources ranging from Genesis to Brown v. Board of Education, the court ruled that "equality is one of the foundational principles of the State of Israel" and rejected housing discrimination. To evade that decision, Katzir's admissions committee claimed that the Ka'adans were "unsuited" to "fit in socially" and again denied their application. It took another round before the Supreme Court until the couple could start building their house in Katzir. More recently, a set of human-rights organizations has asked the Supreme Court to ban the entire admissions-committee procedure.

The Admission Committees bill is a bid to preempt the court. It will protect committees' authority to reject candidates who "do not match the social-cultural fabric" of the community. The lead sponsor is David Rotem, a West Bank settler and a member of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's far-right Israel Is Our Home Party. The bill is likely to pass.

The positive side of this story is that Israel's flourishing civil society is rich in human-rights organizations. The country's legal system allows them to apply directly to the Supreme Court, which is often sympathetic. Groups such as B'Tselem, Yesh Din, and Breaking the Silence also monitor and publicize what's happening in occupied territories. This has not escaped the Israeli right, which has been mounting an ever more vicious campaign to silence criticism.

The latest move: Last week, the Knesset approved a proposal for a parliamentary inquiry commission to investigate the funding of organizations purportedly engaged in delegitimizing the Israeli army. The sponsor was Israel Is Our Home legislator Faina Kirshenbaum, who railed that "these groups provide material to the Goldstone Commission."

After the vote, Likud Knesset member Danny Danon suggested that Peace Now secretary-general Yariv Oppenheimer "and the heads of other fifth-column organizations in Israel start fixing up their CVs because they'll be out of work soon." This week Danon started pressing for legislation that will require organizations filing suit before the Supreme Court to list their sources of funding in their suits. Since nonprofits must already file annual reports of their funding, the Knesset moves are pure propaganda. The aim is to convince the public that anyone criticizing government activities in the occupied territories or discrimination within Israel is an enemy of the state.

There is some funding that does deserve more attention, though: the money from the government itself that supports organizations of the anti-democratic right. One glaring example is the Od Yosef Hai yeshivah in the settlement of Yitzhar. The cash flow from the Education Ministry continued even after the yeshivah self-published a 2009 book, The Law of the King, that purports to elucidate religious law on when it is permitted for a Jew to kill a gentile. It took a letter from a lawyer at the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), a civil-rights wing of Reform Judaism, before anyone in the ministry questioned the yeshivah's budget. Yet the ministry insists that it's only reviewing the funding because the yeshivah might have misreported how many students it has. Officials appear frightened to admit that they might check the legality of funding a blatantly racist institution.

A couple of weeks ago, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg surprised readers with a blog post titled "What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?" I'm glad he's confronting the issue. But the scenarios he raises -- starting with Lieberman as prime minister -- are too obvious. Democracy doesn't necessarily end with a bang; it can fade out, bit by bit. Rather than wait for the end of the process, Israel's friends in America should be expressing their concern right now, publicly and in every conversation with an Israeli official.

Back to Sholem Asch for a moment: When God of Vengeance was first staged in English, in New York in 1923, the entire cast and the producer were arrested and convicted of giving an immoral performance. The judge, identified in a March 24, 1923, New York Times article only as "McIntyre," decried the play's "desecration of the sacred scrolls of the Torah." One of the leaders of the campaign against the play was Rabbi Joseph Silverman of the ultra-establishment Temple Emanu-El in New York. "This play libels the Jewish religion," he said. Neither Silverman nor McIntyre understood that Asch was defending Judaism against desecration. The rabbi and judge have been forgotten. Asch's literary reputation has not suffered.

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Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem. Reposted from the American Prospect