[News] How Israeli Apartheid is Coming Unstuck

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition June 21-23, 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/how-israeli-apartheid-is-coming-unstuck/



Big Racists vs Little Racists


  How Israeli Apartheid is Coming Unstuck

by JONATHAN COOK

One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of 
massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against 
its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of 
Israeli soul-searching.

Superland, a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a 
booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May. When a 
staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the 
booking immediately.

As the story went viral on social media, the park's managers hurriedly 
offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and Arab 
children to keep them apart and prevent friction.

Government ministers led an outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the 
justice minister, called the incident a "symptom of a sick democracy". 
Defence minister Moshe Yaalon was "ashamed". Prime minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu demanded that the "racist" policy be halted immediately.

Such sensitivity appears to be a reaction to an explosion of popular 
racism over the past few months against the one in five Israelis who 
belong to the country's Palesinian Arab minority. Some Israeli Jews have 
started to find the endless parade of bigotry disturbing.

Israeli TV recently revealed, for example, that a group of children with 
cancer who had been offered a free day at a swimming pool were refused 
entry once managers discovered that they were Bedouin.

According to another TV investigation, Israel's banks have a secret 
policy of rejecting Arab customers who try to transfer their accounts to 
a branch in a Jewish community, even though this violates banking 
regulations.

The settlers, whose violence was once restricted to setting fire to the 
crops of Palestinians or rampaging through their villages in the West 
Bank, are now as likely to attack Arab communities inside Israel. 
Torched mosques, offensive graffiti on churches and cars set ablaze in 
so-called "price-tag" attacks have become commonplace.

Similarly, reports of vicious attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly 
becoming a news staple. Recent incidents have included the near-fatal 
beating of a street cleaner, and a bus driver who held his gun to an 
Arab passenger's head, threatening to pull the trigger unless the man 
showed his ID.

Also going viral were troubling mobile-phone photos of a young Arab 
woman surrounded by a mob of respectable-looking commuters amd shoppers 
while she waited for a train. As they hit her and pulled off her hijab, 
station guards looked on impassively.

However welcome official denunciations of these events are, the 
government's professed outrage does not wash.

While Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating 
Superland for its racism, they were busy backing a grossly 
discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz newspaper called "one of 
the most dangerous" measures ever to come before the parliament.

The bill will give Israelis who have served in the army a whole raft of 
extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and the 
provision of public and private services. The catch is that almost all 
of the country's 1.5 million Palestinian citizens are excluded from 
military service. In practice, the benefits will be reserved for Jews only.

Superland's offence pales to insignificance when compared to that, or to 
the decades of state-planned and officially sanctoned discrimination 
against the country's Palestinian minority.

An editorial in Haaretz this month observed  that Israel was really "two 
separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. ... This is the gap between 
the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western nation, and the 
Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a Third World country."

Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land allocation 
and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment.

None of this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee 
Israel's future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified 57 laws 
that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with 
a dozen more heading towards the statute books.

Less visible but just as damaging is the covert discrimination 
Palestinian citizens face every day when dealing with state 
institutions, whose administrative practices find their rationale in the 
entrenchment of Jewish privilege.

This week a report indentified precisely this kind of institutional 
racism when it found that students from the country's Palestinian 
minority were confronted by a series of 14 obstacles not faced by their 
Jewish compatriots that contributed to denying them places in higher 
education.

The wave of popular prejudice and racist violence is no accident either. 
Paradoxically, it has been unleashed by the increasingly inflammatory 
rhetoric of rightwing politicians like Netanyahu, whose constant 
fearmongering casts Palestinian citizens as disloyal, a fifth column and 
a demographic threat to the state's Jewishness.

So why if the state is so committed to subjugating and excluding 
Palestinian citizens, and Netanyahu and his ministers so determined to 
increase the weight of discriminatory legislation, are they decrying the 
racism of Superland?

To make sense of this, one has to understand how desperately Israel has 
sought to distinguish itself from apartheid South Africa.

Israel cultivates, as South Africa once did, what scholars term "grand 
apartheid". This is segregation, largely covert and often often 
justified by security or cultural differences, to ensure that control of 
resources remains exclusively in the hands of the privileged community.

At the same time, Israel long shied away from what some call South 
Africa's model of "petty apartheid" -- the overt, symbolic, but far less 
significant segregation of park benches, buses and toilets.

The avoidance of petty apartheid has been the key to Israel's success in 
obscuring from the world's view its grand apartheid, most obviously in 
the occupied territories but also inside Israel itself.

This month South Africa's departing ambassador to Israel, Ismail 
Coovadia, warned that Israel was a "replication of apartheid". The idea 
that the world may soon wake up to this comparison deeply unnerves 
Netanyahu and the right, all the more so as they risk being identified 
as the party refusing to make concessions towards peace.

The threat posed by what happened at Superland is that such incidents of 
unofficial and improvised racism may one day unmask the much more 
sinister and organised campaign of "grand apartheid" that Israel's 
leaders have overseen for decades.

////*Jonathan Cook* won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for 
Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: 
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga> (Pluto 
Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human 
Despair 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/counterpunchmaga>" 
(Zed Books). ///His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net 
<http://www.jonathan-cook.net/>.///

/A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi./

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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