[News] Israel's "No Renting to Arabs" Policy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook03232010.html
March 23, 2010


Jewish Couple Loses Court Battle to Help Bedouin Friends


Israel's "No Renting to Arabs" Policy

By JONATHAN COOK

Nevatim.

The Zakai and Tarabin families should be a 
picture of happy coexistence across the ethnic 
divide, a model for others to emulate in Israel.

But Natalie and Weisman Zakai say the past three 
years -- since the Jewish couple offered to rent 
their home to Bedouin friends, Ahmed and Khalas 
Tarabin -- have been a living hell.

“I have always loved Israel,” said Mrs Zakai, 43. 
“But to see the depth of the racism of our 
neighbours has made me question why we live in this country.”

Three of the couple’s six dogs have been 
mysteriously poisoned; Mrs Zakai’s car has been 
sprayed with the words ”Arab lover” and the 
windows smashed; her three children in school are 
regularly taunted and bullied by other pupils; 
and a collection of vintage cars in the family’s 
yard has been set on fire in what police say was an arson attack.

To add to these indignities, the Zakais have 
spent three years and thousands of dollars 
battling through the courts against the elected 
officials of their community of Nevatim, in 
Israel’s southern Negev desert, who have said 
they are determined to keep the Tarabins from moving in.

Last week the Zakais’ legal struggle looked like 
it had run out of steam. The 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga>
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supreme court told the two families the Tarabins 
should submit to a vetting committee of local 
officials to assess their suitability – a 
requirement that has never been made before by 
the Negev community in the case of a family seeking to rent a home.

“The decision of the committee is a foregone conclusion,” Mr Tarabin said.

Chances for Jews and Arabs to live together -- 
outside of a handful of cities -- are all but 
impossible because Israel’s rural communities are 
strictly segregated, said Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer representing the Zakais.

Israel has nationalised 93 per cent of the 
country’s territory, confining most of its 1.3 
million Arab citizens, one-fifth of the 
population, to 120 or so communities that existed 
at the time of the state’s creation in 1948.

Meanwhile, more than 700 rural communities, 
including Nevatim, have remained exclusively 
Jewish by requiring that anyone who wants to buy 
a home applies to local vetting committees, which 
have been used to weed out Arab applicants.

But Mr Mahajneh, from the Adalah legal centre for 
the Arab minority, noted that legal sanction for 
such segregation was supposed to have ended a 
decade ago, when the supreme court backed an Arab 
couple, the Kaadans, who had been barred by a 
committee from the community of Katzir in northern Israel.

Although the Kaadans were eventually allowed to 
move into Katzir, the case has had little wider effect.

In fact, Mr Mahajneh said, the decision in the 
Zakais’ case suggests “we’re going backwards”. 
The Kaadans won the right to buy a home in a 
Jewish community, whereas the Tarabin family were 
seeking only a short-term rental of the Zakais’ home.

The Zakais said they had been told by the 
officials of Nevatim, a community of 650 Jews a 
few kilometres from the city of Beersheva, that 
it would not be a problem to rent out their home.

Mrs Zakai brought the Tarabins’ ID cards to the 
community’s offices for routine paperwork. “When 
I handed in the IDs, the staff looked at the card 
and said, ‘But they’re Muslims’.” Later, 
according to Mrs Zakai, the council head, Avraham 
Orr, rang to say he Arabs would be accepted in Nevatim “over my dead body”.

Several weeks later, Mrs Zakai said, two 
threatening men came to their door and warned 
them off renting to Arabs. Soon afterwards 36 
cars belonging to Mr Zakai, who has a used car business, were set on fire.

Then behind the Zakais’ back, Nevatim went to a 
local magistrate’s court to get an order 
preventing them from renting their home. The 
couple have been battling the decision ever since.

Mr Mahajneh said the Tarabins had accommodated a 
series of “extraordinary conditions” imposed by 
Nevatim on the rental agreement, including 
certificates of good conduct from the police, a 
commitment to leave after a year, and limited 
access to the house’s extensive grounds.

But still Nevatim officials were dissatisfied, 
insisting in addition that the Tarabins submit to 
questioning by a vetting committee to assess 
their suitability. Although 40 other homes in 
Nevatim are rented, Mr Mahajneh said testimonies 
from past members of the vetting committee showed 
that this was the first time such a demand had been made.

“It is true that anyone buying a property in 
Nevatim is supposed to be vetted by the 
committee, but there is no reference in the 
community’s bylaws to this condition for renters,” Mr Mahajneh said.

In 2008, a district court judge in Beersheva 
overruled Nevatim’s new condition, arguing that 
the vetting requirement would be “unreasonable 
and not objective”. The supreme court judges, 
however, sided with Nevatim in their concluding statements on March 10.

Mrs Zakai said they had offered to rent their 
home to the Tarabins after the Bedouin couple’s 
home burnt down in their village in early 2007, 
killing one of their 10 children. The Tarabins 
have been living with relatives ever since, 
unable to afford a new home and keen to move away from the site of the tragedy.

Mr Tarabin, 54, said: “I want Khalas to rest and 
heal and this place would have been perfect for 
her. The house has large grounds and we could 
have kept to ourselves. No one in Nevatim needs 
to have anything to do with us if they don’t want.”

A Nevatim resident who spoke anonymously to the 
Haaretz newspaper last week suggested reasons for 
the community’s opposition: “If tomorrow the 
entire Tarabin tribe wants to live here and we 
don’t agree, what will people say? The problem 
will start after the first one comes because then 
dozens more families will want to move here.”

The close friendship forged between the Zakais 
and Tarabins is rare in Israel. The privileged 
status of Jews legally and economically, communal 
segregation and the hostility provoked by a 
larger national conflict between Israel and the 
Palestinians ensure that Jewish and Arab citizens 
usually remain at arm’s length.

But Mr Zakai, 53, whose parents emigrated from 
Iraq and who speaks fluent Arabic, befriended Mr 
Tarabin in the late 1960s when they were 
teenagers in Beersheva. Later they served 
together in the Israeli army as mechanical engineers.

Mrs Zakai said: “If Jews were being denied the 
right to live somewhere, it would be a scandal, 
but because our friends are Arabs no one cares.”

Avraham Orr, the Nevatim council head, denied 
that he was opposing the Tarabins’ admission 
because they are Arab. “There are rules,” he 
said. “Every family that wants to buy or rent a 
property must first go through the committee.”

Fearful of the implications of the Kaadan ruling, 
Jewish communities in the Galilee unveiled a new 
approach to barring Arab applicants last year. 
They introduced bylaws amounting to loyalty oaths 
that require applicants to pledge to support 
“Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land”.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in 
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and 
the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) 
and 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/counterpunchmaga>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” 
(Zed Books). His website is <http://www.jkcook.net>www.jkcook.net.




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