[WCUSP] Israeli Palestinians we didn't disappear

[yvonne simmons]

> 
> We didn't disappear
> 
> 
> Arabs in Israel call for a "state of all its
> citizens" to replace
> Jewish-only policies, writes Jonathan Cook in
> Nazareth 
> 
>   _____  
> 
> The official political leadership of Israel's more
> than one million
> Palestinian citizens issued a manifesto in Nazareth
> last week demanding a
> raft of changes to end the systematic discrimination
> exercised against
> non-Jews by the state since its creation nearly six
> decades ago. 
> 
> Included in the manifesto -- the first ever produced
> by the community's
> supreme political body, known as the High Follow-Up
> Committee -- are calls
> for Israel to be reformed from a Jewish state that
> privileges its Jewish
> majority into "a state of all its citizens" and for
> sweeping changes to a
> national system of land control designed to exclude
> Palestinian citizens
> from influence.
> 
> The document is likely to further increase tensions
> between the Israeli
> government and the country's Palestinian minority,
> and has already been
> roundly condemned in the Hebrew media. 
> 
> Although individual Arab political parties have made
> similar criticisms of
> the state before, it is the first time in its
> history that the High
> Follow-Up Committee -- a cautious and conservative
> body, mainly comprising
> the heads of Arab local authorities -- has dared to
> speak out. The committee
> is seen as setting the consensus for Israel's one in
> five citizens who are
> Palestinian. 
> 
> The most contentious issue raised in the document,
> called "The Future Vision
> of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel", is Israel's
> status as a Jewish state.
> The authors -- leading academics and community
> activists -- argue that
> Israel is not a democracy but an "ethnocracy"
> similar to Turkey, Sri Lanka
> and the Baltic states. 
> 
> Instead, says the manifesto, Israel must become a
> "consensual democracy"
> enabling Palestinian citizens "to be fully active in
> the decision-making
> process and guarantee our individual and collective
> civil, historic and
> national rights."
> 
> An editorial in Israel's liberal Haaretz newspaper
> denounced the document as
> "undermining the Jewish character of the state" and
> argued that it was
> likely its publication would "actually weaken the
> standing of Arabs in
> Israel instead of strengthening it".
> 
> The campaign among Israel's Arab parties for a state
> of all its citizens
> began in the mid-1990s after it was widely
> understood that under the terms
> of the Oslo Accords Israel's Palestinian population
> would remain citizens of
> the State of Israel. Until then the minority had
> kept largely out of the
> debate about its future, fearing that expressing a
> view would prejudice
> negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian
> leadership.
> 
> The demand for a state of all its citizens has wide
> backing among the
> Palestinian minority: a recent survey by the Mada
> Al-Carmel Centre revealed
> that 90 per cent believed a Jewish state could not
> guarantee them equality,
> and 61 per cent objected to Israel's
> self-definition. 
> 
> However, Israeli prime ministers, including Ehud
> Barak and Ariel Sharon,
> have always characterised the call for a state of
> all its citizens as
> tantamount to sedition. In a speech last week,
> Avigdor Lieberman, the new
> minister of strategic threats, repeated a similar
> line, telling
> policy-makers in Washington: "he who is not ready to
> recognise Israel as a
> Jewish and Zionist state cannot be a citizen in the
> country."
> 
> As well as highlighting the various spheres of life
> in which Palestinian
> citizens are discriminated against, the manifesto
> makes several key demands
> that are certain to fall on stony ground. 
> 
> The High Follow-Up Committee argues that the
> Palestinian minority must be
> given "institutional self-rule in the field of
> education, culture and
> religion". Israeli officials have always refused to
> countenance such forms
> of autonomy. Instead, the separate and grossly
> under-funded Arab education
> system is overseen by Jewish officials; the status
> of the Arabic language is
> at an all-time low; and the government regularly
> interferes in the
> appointment of Muslim and Christian clerics, as well
> as controlling the
> running of their places of worship and providing
> almost no budget for
> non-Jewish religious services. 
> 
> The manifesto also demands that Israel "acknowledge
> responsibility for the
> Palestinian Nakba " -- the catastrophic
> dispossession of the Palestinian
> people during Israel's establishment in 1948 -- and
> "consider paying
> compensation for its Palestinian citizens". 
> 
> As many as one in four Palestinian citizens are
> internal refugees from the
> war, and referred to as "present absentees" by the
> Israeli authorities. They
> were stripped of their homes, possessions and bank
> accounts inside Israel,
> even though they remained citizens. Most homes were
> either later destroyed
> by the army or reallocated to Jewish citizens. 
> 
> An internal government memorandum leaked several
> years ago showed that most
> of the internal refugees' money, supposedly held in
> trust by a state
> official known as the Custodian of Absentee
> Property, had disappeared and
> could no longer be traced. 
> 
> Another controversial demand is for a radical
> overhaul of the system of land
> policy and planning in Israel, described in the
> manifesto as "the most
> sensitive issue" between Palestinian citizens and
> their state. Israel has
> nationalised 93 per cent of the territory inside its
> vague borders, holding
> it in trust not for its citizens but for the Jewish
> people worldwide. The
> land can be leased, but usually only to Jews.
> 
> Israel's Palestinian citizens, on the other hand,
> are restricted to about
> three per cent of the land, although they do not
> control much of the area
> nominally in their possession. Gerrymandering of
> municipal boundaries means
> that Arab local authorities have been stripped of
> jurisdiction over half of
> their areas, which have been effectively handed over
> to Jewish regional
> councils.
> 
> The manifesto calls for an end to other
> discriminatory land practices: the
> exclusion of Palestinian citizens from planning
> committees; the refusal of
> such committees to issue house- building permits to
> Palestinian citizens;
> the enforcement of house demolitions only against
> Palestinian citizens; and
> the continuing harmful interference by international
> Zionist organisations,
> particularly the Jewish Agency and the Jewish
> National Fund, in Israel's
> land and planning system.
> 
> The chairman of the High Follow-Up Committee, Shawki
> Khatib, said: "We've
> already seen the reality of which the Arab public
> says to the Jewish public,
> 'I want to live together, and I really mean it', but
> the Jewish public has
> still not reached the same conclusion. This document
> is a preliminary spark.
> Its importance is not in its publishing, but in what
> happens after it."
> 
> The High Follow-Up Committee was established in
> 1982, in the wake of Land
> Day in 1976 when six unarmed Palestinian citizens
> were shot dead by Israeli
> security forces during demonstrations against a wave
> of land confiscations
> by the state to advance its official goal of
> "Judaising" the Galilee. 
> 
> The Follow-Up Committee has lost much of its status
> over the past decade,
> widely seen as too unwieldy a body to represent the
> Palestinian minority's
> needs effectively. Members, drawn from the heads of
> local authorities and
> major Israeli Arab organisations and parties, do not
> have to submit to
> direct election and reach their decisions through
> consensus, which has often
> paralysed the committee into inaction. The manifesto
> is viewed as an attempt
> to reassert the committee's authority.
> 
> In recent years Arab political factions have called
> for direct elections to
> the Follow-Up Committee, but the Israeli government
> has intimated that it
> would consider an Arab "parliament" as an attempt at
> secession and react
> harshly. 
> 
> In a related development, the Mossawa advocacy
> centre presented a position
> paper at a conference in Nazareth this month,
> arguing that internal refugees
> should be allowed to return to villages that existed
> before 1948. "The move
> by refugees of 1948 to their villages will not
> change the demographic
> balance or endanger the Jews," said Jafar Farah,
> head of Mossawa. "Unlike
> the [Palestinian] refugees in Arab states, we are
> [already] here."
> 
>  
> 
> 


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