[WCUSP] Guardian: Bishara, Wanted for Crimes Against the State

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

Wanted, for crimes  against the state  
_http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2133184,00.html_ 
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2133184,00.html)  
For many years, Azmi  Bishara has been one of the most prominent voices 
representing the 1.5 million  Arabs living in Israel. But now he is a fugitive, 
facing some of the most  serious allegations ever made against an Israeli MP. 
What happened? In a rare  interview, he talks to Rory McCarthy  
Tuesday July 24,  2007 
_The  Guardian_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)   
When war broke out in  Lebanon last summer there were few dissenting voices 
in Israel. Opinion polls  showed unprecedented public support for the conflict. 
Politicians and pundits  crowded television studios to argue that Israel was 
fighting for its survival in  its battle to wipe out Hizbullah.  
But one Israeli MP saw  it differently. Hizbullah, he wrote, was a resistance 
movement, fighting a war  brought on by an Israeli government led by 
"mediocrities, cowards and  opportunists" who were responsible for "barbaric vandalism 
and the deliberate  targeting of civilians".  
After a decade as a  member of parliament in the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, 
politician, author and  academic, had long established a reputation as the most 
outspoken political  figure to emerge from Israel's Arab minority. Soon after the 
war was over,  Bishara and a handful of MPs from his Balad party travelled to 
Syria and  Lebanon, both "enemy states", where he continued to denounce his 
government. He  did not have to wait long for a reaction: in September the 
Israeli attorney  general ordered police to begin a criminal investigation.   
It wasn't the first  inquiry into Bishara's activities, and so he was not 
surprised when six months  later he was called in to Petah Tikva police station, 
near Tel Aviv, for  questioning. He twice met two police officers and then 
left for what he insists  was a prearranged speaking tour to Jordan.  
It was only while he was  away that investigators leaked details of the case 
to the Israeli press.  Although Bishara has not been charged, it has now 
emerged that he is under  investigation for money laundering, contact with a 
foreign agent, delivery of  information to the enemy and, most seriously, assistance 
to the enemy during war  - a charge that can carry the death penalty.  
These are some of the  most serious allegations ever levelled against an 
Israeli MP and effectively  mean that Bishara must either remain in exile abroad, 
or return to face the  prospect of a lengthy jail sentence, or worse. But 
Bishara is also the most  prominent advocate of Arab political rights within 
Israel, and the investigation  has exposed a widening rift in Israeli society 
between the Jewish majority and  the 20% Palestinian minority.  
Bishara has not returned  home. In April he handed in his resignation from 
the Knesset at the Israeli  embassy in Cairo. For now he is living with his wife 
and two young children in a  friend's empty flat in an apartment block in 
Amman, Jordan.   
"The symbolic action of  bringing me to trial and condemning me - they want 
it. I know they want it," he  says, in a rare interview with the Guardian. "I'm 
not going to let them succeed;  I'm always two steps ahead." He sits back on 
the sofa, dressed in a polo shirt  and chinos, with his mobile phones laid out 
on the coffee table. On a desk  behind him is a laptop and on it the draft of 
a new book he is writing about  democracy in the Arab world.  
Bishara denies the  accusations brought against him, and argues that the real 
reason for the  investigation is not his actions during the Lebanon war but 
his long-held and  widely published call for a fundamental change to the nature 
of the Israeli  state: his belief that the country should no longer be a 
Jewish state but must  protect Arab rights and become a "state for all its 
citizens".   
"They want to condemn  the whole political ideology and put it as if it's a 
cover for another kind of  activity, which is not true," he says.  
In March, the Israeli  mass-market Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper published a 
story reporting that  wire-tappings conducted by the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic 
intelligence service,  had recorded Bishara's conversations during the war. It 
said he spoke to  "Hizbullah contacts" and directed them to "optimal targets 
for their rockets".  It also reported that he had obtained "hundreds of 
thousands of dollars in cash"  through money-changers in east Jerusalem, using such 
codewords as "book", which  the newspaper said meant $50,000, "English", which 
it said meant dollars, and  "Hebrew", which it said meant shekels.  
"Investigators said they  knew Bishara was using codewords because he 
suspected he was being wire-tapped;  they said they burst into fits of laughter when 
Bishara placed an order for  'Half a book, in English,' meaning $25,000," the 
newspaper reported.   
Bishara insists the  allegations are untrue. He says he did not speak to 
anyone from Hizbullah during  the war. "Is it true I have been on the phone? Yes, 
and people were listening.  But was I speaking to Hizbullah? The answer is 
no." He did speak to politicians  and journalists in Syria and Lebanon, but said 
he had no secret information to  pass on. "We don't have that kind of 
information to pass to anybody," he says.  "What could I say that's not in the media? 
It's unbelievable. It's not serious  at all."  
The allegations of money  laundering, he says, are "nonsense", and when he 
used the word "book" in his  phone conversations with a money-changer he says he 
was talking only about books  they had lent each other. "It was about books, 
really about books. He kept  taking books from me and giving me books. He's a 
real book collector. He reads.  But that's all," he says. "It's a whole case 
of turning political, ideological,  intellectual activity into a security 
suspicion."  
Bishara is a Roman  Catholic and a leftist, born into a lower-middle-class 
family in Nazareth. His  father was a health inspector, trade unionist and 
one-time communist, his mother  a teacher. During the 1948 war, when hundreds of 
thousands of Palestinians fled  or were forced from their homes, Bishara's 
family stayed on in the country that  became Israel. Bishara studied at Haifa and 
Hebrew universities, and his  Communist party connections offered him the 
chance to take a doctorate in  philosophy at Humboldt University in East Berlin in 
the 1980s. Like most Arabs  in Israel, he rejects establishment definitions 
and describes his nationality as  simply Arab Palestinian.  

Born in an Israeli city  eight years after the creation of the state of 
Israel, he holds Israeli  citizenship, which makes him part of the country's 20% 
Arab minority and  entitles him to vote and to stand for election to parliament. 
He can trace his  family back hundreds of years to a village north of 
Nazareth, in what is today  northern Israel.  
Before his resignation,  his Balad party held only four seats in the Knesset 
in a country where many Arab  Israelis still tend to vote for the mainstream 
political parties, particularly  Labour - now part of the ruling coalition. 
Even Bishara admits there is not  widespread public support for his ideas among 
his own community. One opinion  poll earlier this year found that 
three-quarters of Arab Israelis would support  a constitution describing Israel as a Jewish 
and democratic state.   
However, in recent  months, that has begun to change. For a start, racism 
against Arabs in Israel is  rising, according to at least one recent poll. In a 
survey for the Centre  Against Racism, a poll of Jewish Israelis found that 
more than half believed it  was treason for a Jewish woman to marry an Arab man; 
40% said Arabs should no  longer have the right to vote in parliamentary 
elections; and 75% opposed  apartment blocks being shared by Jews and Arabs.  
At the same time, more  and more prominent Arab Israelis are adopting ideas 
similar to Bishara's and  proposing a fundamental challenge to the Jewish 
nature of the state. Four  separate documents have emerged since December, each 
making a similar case.  Adalah, a human rights group, issued a draft constitution 
that said Israel  should be defined not as a Jewish state but as a 
"democratic, bilingual and  multicultural state". It called for an end to the Law of 
Return, which gives  automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish 
grandparent, and it  called on Israel to "recognise its responsibility for past 
injustices suffered  by the Palestinian people".  
Then, earlier this  month, in a remarkable interview with the Ha'aretz 
newspaper, Avraham Burg, a  Jewish former speaker of the Knesset and former chair of 
the Jewish Agency,  delivered his own denunciation of Israel's structure. "It 
can't work any more,"  he said. "To define the state of Israel as a Jewish 
state is the key to its end.  A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite." Burg 
too called for a change to the  Law of Return and was highly critical of what 
he called Israel's  "confrontational Zionism".  
For Bishara, such  comments only reinforce his long-held opinions. 
"Everything is said as if there  is an elephant in the room that nobody wants to speak 
about, which is called a  state of all its citizens," he says. "But the idea 
won. This idea now is the  real rival of the Zionist state. This is the first 
time you have a real  challenge."  
The Law of Return, he  argues, is a fundamental problem, as is the idea of a 
state both Jewish and  democratic. "The problem with this state is that it 
cannot grant equality. It  cannot separate religion and state, and it will always 
have an ideological  mission that will keep it from integrating in the region 
or serving its  citizens." He describes Israel as a "colonial democracy".   
"The basic relationship  between a state and its citizens should be 
citizenship, not ethnic or religious  affiliation," he says. "Who is a citi-zen of 
Israel? Is my cousin in Lebanon who  left the country in 1948 allowed to come back 
or not? This is basic. But  somebody who can prove that his mother is Jewish, 
from Brooklyn - he can come."   
However, the reality is  that there is little chance that any of these ideas 
will become law in the near  future. Israel does not have a constitution and, 
though there are frequently  talks about how a draft might look, there remain 
wide differences on other  issues beyond Jewish-Arab relations, particularly 
the fraught question of the  relationship between secular and religious Jews.  
There has been a harsh  reaction to this ideological challenge. Yuval Diskin, 
head of the Shin Bet, was  reported earlier this year as warning that a 
radicalisation of Israel's Arab  minority was a "strategic threat to the state's 
existence". In March, a  rightwing MP introduced a bill in the Knesset that 
would in future require all  MPs to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish 
state and to its national  anthem and flag.  
"We have to do  everything to keep Israel as a Jewish state," said Arnon 
Soffer, head of  Geostrategy at Haifa University and a leading advocate of the 
argument that Arab  Israelis and Palestinians constitute a "demographic threat" 
to the Jews. "It is  clear for me that to be a minority in this region is the 
end of the Jewish  people, of the Jewish dream, of the Jewish state," he said. 
"They use words like  'democracy', but if they are in power, it is the end of 
democracy. We have to  stop being naive."  
Bishara is dismissive of  those who argue that Arabs already have sufficient 
rights within Israel -  notably citizenship, the right to vote and the right 
to speak out. These are no  more than concessions, he says. "You took the land 
and gave me freedom of  speech," he says. "Who's winning here? Let's revise 
the deal. Take your freedom  of speech and give me back Palestine. How about 
that?"   
The longer the conflict  between Israelis and Palestinians continues, he 
says, Arab Israelis and  Palestinians in the occupied territories will draw closer 
and the argument for a  single, binational state will grow stronger, an 
argument that he openly favours.   
"If it continues like  this, in the end the issue of the Arabs in Israel and 
the Palestinians in the  West Bank and Gaza will meet," he says. "Binational 
means that the Arabs also  should recognise that the Jews are a nationality. It 
doesn't mean the  destruction of the state. It means two political entities 
will have to live  together. It's a huge compromise." 






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