Israeli apartheid given a firm legal foundation

Knesset passes segregation law

Roi Maor, 22 March 2011

See also: Ben White, Land, citizenship and exclusion in Israel, 30 March 2011

The Knesset passed a segregation bill today. Palestinian Israelis are not allowed to live in Jewish localities built on land confiscated from them. Government policy also makes sure they cannot build on the little private land that was left in their ownership. How long can Jewish Israelis continue pretending that Palestinians do not exist?

In a session lasting well after midnight, the Knesset passed (Hebrew) a new law, which allows communities of up to 400 members, in the Negev and Galilee (the south and north of Israel, respectively) to form “acceptance committees” that will screen candidates who wish to live in their locality, on the basis of various parameters, including vague wording relating to social and cultural compatibility. The law nominially forbids discrimination on the basis of race, gender or religion, but its effect and intent to segregate Palestinian Israelis are clear. I highly recommend reading the excellent post by Nimrod Lutz which outlines the background and implications of the bill. But there is an even broader context that should be remembered when this legislation is discussed.

On the one hand, acceptance committees are by no means exclusively intended to prevent Palestinian Israelis from living in Jewish localities. Other “unsuitable” people are excluded as well. For example, a case pending before the High Court of Justice pertains to a Jewish family denied residence because they viewed the move as a means to better their lives. Yes, you read that right – the acceptance committee decided they only want people whose lives are already perfect.

On the other hand, the shocking nature of this exclusion should not obscure the main intention of the bill, which is racial discrimination. It would be upsetting enough if the only element of discrimination was the principle of segregation which it enshrines. But as bad as that is, there is much worse discrimination at work here.

In the first decades of Israel’s existence, through a variety of legal and pseudo-legal means, vast amounts of land were confiscated by the state, almost all of it Arab-owned private land. Much of this land was transferred to the Jewish National Fund, which has a charter forbidding it to allocate land for the use of non-Jews (don’t worry – the rabbinate is not involved, it is simply enough to be “not Arab” in order to qualify).

Although this specific arrangement was shot down by the High Court of Justice, it is really superfluous, because even lands owned directly by the state have been allocated almost exclusively to Jews. But it actually gets worse.

Despite the massive confiscations, Israeli Palestinians have retained some ownership over private lands, mainly the lands on which they lived when Israel was founded or adjacent areas. Because of lack of adequate planning by the state, however, Palestinians often find it hard to obtain building permits for residential construction on land which they privately own. Sometimes, even buildings which existed when the country was founded are deemed illegal by the state. If Palestinians build illegally, their homes are either demolished or under threat of demolition, and cannot be connected to utilities.

Investment in infrastructure or public services in Palestinian localities is severely deficient in absolute terms, and terrible in comparison to nearby Jewish localities. Palestinian municipalities have been starved of funds by designating their jurisdiction area to exclude any facilities which might generate significant municipal tax income. Even private economic development has been hampered by the same inadequate planning which stands in the way of legal residential construction.

All of these problems have been significantly aggravated by the growth of the Palestinian Israeli population, from less than 200,000 in 1948 to over 1.3 million today. The shortage in housing, infrastructure, services and employment areas in Palestinian localities is acute. State budgets allocated for improving this situation are relatively small, and are easily overshadowed by the massive effect of continuing discriminatory policies.

In this context, it may not be surprising that some Israeli Palestinians wish to move to predominantly Jewish localities. This option is not available to many of them. Because Jewish areas are almost invariably richer, the cost of living there is higher. Because their own localities are so underdeveloped, the value of their property is low, so selling it to buy a home in a Jewish locality is usually out of the question.

Many Jews are unwilling to let their apartment to Arabs, and those that do are sometimes the target of intimidation, including through campaigns led by state employees. Finally, those who manage to overcome all these difficulties, often meet a hostile and disparaging treatment, as this sad story illustrates. Sometimes, the town pretends they do not exist and refuses to grant any recognition to their culture, up to and including a ban on Christmas.

Under these circumstances, it is no wonder some Palestinians are particularly drawn to the smaller Jewish localities in Israel’s periphery in the North and South. Since these are also the areas where most Israeli Palestinians live, they can be close to their families. Land prices are lower than in the central region. Building is usually in individual homes, which most Palestinians prefer to apartment buildings.

It is precisely from those places that the new law intends to shut them out. Unlike other groups which the law will help to unjustly exclude, the alternatives for Palestinians are much poorer and quickly disappearing. The Israeli government is terrified (Hebrew) of the prospect that they will form contiguous blocks inside the country which may secede. At the same time, it is unwilling to let them join Jewish localities (in large part, built on confiscated Palestinian private land), and egregiously neglects the places where they currently leave. Even some long-time mixed towns, such as Acre, have started to fray around the edges in recent years.

This policy is grossly unjust. It is unsustainable and foolish. Israel has been trying to pretend for over sixty years that is has no Palestinian population, and to treat a group of over a million people as some inanimate obstacle one has to build around, an attitude which is both criminal and wasteful. We live here together, whether we like it or not, so we might as well like it. The first, tiny and obvious step would be to abolish this heinous law.

Land, citizenship and exclusion in Israel

Ben White, 30 March 2011

Ben White is an author and journalist specialising in Middle Eastern affairs

A new law that “formalizes the establishment of admission committees to review potential residents of Negev and Galilee communities that have fewer than 400 families” seems set to entrench Arab exclusion and challenges the meaning of citizenship and the basis of democracy

This 30 March, the Palestinian minority inside Israel will mark ‘Land Day’, 35 years after Israeli security forces killed six Arab citizens protesting against the expropriation of land by the state. Land Day has become a global day of commemoration and protest for Palestinians, but its significance is that its origins are in the struggle of the Palestinians in Israel.
This year there is an added resonance, as the Israeli parliament has only recently passed discriminatory new legislation targeting the Palestinian minority (around 20 per cent of the population). In fact, in recent years, Israeli Members of Knesset have been proposing and passing a whole raft of disturbing proposals, a trend that did not begin with, but was boosted by, the current Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition (see summaries by Adalah and ACRI).
Just last week, however, two new laws were passed on the same day. One, dubbed the ‘Nakba Law’, enables “the withholding of funds to public institutions deemed to be involved in publicly challenging the founding of Israel as a Jewish state or any activity ‘denying the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’. A law, in the words of an editorial in Ha’aretz, “designed to shut people up”.

But it is the other new law that is worthier of discussion on Land Day, a bill that “formalizes the establishment of admission committees to review potential residents of Negev and Galilee communities that have fewer than 400 families”. Potential residents’ applications are considered by a committee (including representatives of the community and the Jewish Agency or World Zionist Organization) who can reject candidates “if they do not meet certain criteria” such as not suiting the community’s “social and cultural character”.

According to Adalah, the law will apply to around 42% of towns in Israel. Palestinian citizens thus face yet another means of exclusion and institutionalised ethno-religious privilege. One of the bill’s supporters, MK Israel Hasson (from the ‘centrist’ Kadima party), said that the new law is intended to “preserve the ability to realize the Zionist dream in practice”. Another MK, David Rotem (from FM Lieberman’s party Yisrael Beiteinu), said that he was “not ashamed” in wanting “to maintain this country as a Jewish and democratic state”. He continued:

You are worried about democracy, but in your way there would be no state. Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens.

During an earlier stage of the bill’s passage, Rotem – as chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee – commented that in his opinion, “every Jewish town needs at least one Arab. What would happen if my refrigerator stopped working on a Saturday?”

It is important to note that in practical terms, this law does not represent a significant shift – selection committees are not new, and, as The Jerusalem Post observed, “have been rejecting applications by Israeli Arabs for several years”. Human Rights Watch has also reported how selection committees “have notoriously been used to exclude Arabs from living in rural Jewish communities.” This new law is therefore a formalisation of their role, as well as an attempt to thwart legal appeals against the long-standing de facto discrimination.

But there is more. Not only have these communities long excluded Palestinian citizens, but many of them were explicitly established in the 1970s and ‘80s “by Zionist organizations” – in cooperation with the Israeli state of course – “for the purpose of ‘Judaizing’ areas like the Negev and the Galilee”. In other words, for decades the Israeli state has pursued policies based on the premise that there are too many of the ‘wrong kind’ of citizen in certain areas. As Dr. Haim Yacobi of Ben Gurion University has put it, “the Judaization project is driven by the Zionist premise that Israel is a territory and a state that ‘belongs’ to, and only to, the Jewish people.”

This is the context in which this new bill on selection committees was said by the Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin to consolidate “priorities that we have lived by for the past 100 years”, specifying, according to Ha’aretz, the “national mission” of populating the Galilee and Negev. This is the context in which Israel’s Housing Minister can declare it a “national duty” to “prevent the spread” of Palestinian citizens in the Galilee, and the chair of the Knesset’s ‘Lobby for Housing Solutions for Young Couples’ can say that ““it is a national interest to encourage Jews to move to” places where “the Arab population is on the rise.”

Israel’s treatment of those Palestinians with citizenship raises serious questions about its democratic credentials.