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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1088490.html
Every year since Israel's
independence, cinema newsreels, and later television news, have
reported to the public on "the heads of Muslim, Christian and Druze
communities congratulating the president in honor of Independence
Day." It was the age of patriotic innocence, coupled with national
blindness.
Over those years, Independence Day has been
foisted in various ways on the Palestinians who remained in their
land.
Military governors would
allow their subjects to leave their enclaves for picnics on the
remnants of their villages, if those were not already inhabited by
new Jewish immigrants.
That which was prohibited all year was allowed for
one day, so they could be allowed to celebrates on their own ruins.
Behind the blindness always lurked cynicism: We
will discriminate against them in every possible field - education,
health, water, infrastructure, employment - and they in turn will
kiss the national flag across their 200 villages and towns.
If they protest against discrimination, we'll cry
"disorder."
With the state's founding, three percent of its
land was allocated to Arabs, of which only two percent was slated
for housing, and only after the major expropriations of the 1950s
and a series of convoluted land and property laws essentially
prohibiting Arabs from acquiring land.
"Natural growth" was never used as justification
for expanding their villages outside their borders, drawn up when
their total population numbered 150,000, and erecting new
settlements was, of course, out of the question.
Today, a million people have become locked in
villages and towns described by their young generation as ghettos.
Only one not familiar with the Arab minority's
hardships - growing poverty, growing racism around them, quotas in
mixed cities, and municipally-encouraged religious and yuppie Jewish
settlement in Jaffa despite the protestations of the Arab poor - can
fail to understand that such "patriotic" proposals as a bill banning
Nakba Day commemorations, even if not enforced, is a pretext for
more incitement towards Arabs and interference in their political
and cultural lives.
The 1952 Nationality Law not only granted
conditions to new immigrants far more favorable than to the
remaining Arab inhabitants, but also hastily (perhaps too hastily)
granted electoral rights to an enormous proportion of the population
- without requiring residence (as required in every country in which
electoral privileges are universal), or even checking the background
of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.
The state was consumed with settling a single
score: what was "ours," and what was not - namely, a demographic
majority and land.
Avigdor Lieberman - the strong man cut down to his
natural size the moment the Israeli agenda changed from electoral
propaganda to the Egypt-Israel and U.S.-Israel diplomatic tracks -
is again looking for his way, and may even be planning his
resignation from the government, in order to serve as a fighting
opposition through resorting to the well-worn tactic of "The
homeland is in danger, beat the Arabs."
But Lieberman is not alone, and his Russian
immigrant electorate will not be enough to reach power. He speaks to
the fundamental Israeli racism, according to which "we are the
landlords, and you are short-term guests."
This abomination is important to Israeli
democracy, but whoever deludes himself that it will be possible to
cover up the reality of Arabs in Israel through prolonged silence is
doing the groundwork for a thug to come and "restore order."
For that, of course, we will need draconian
legislation and "disorder." |
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