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<div class="entry-date">Weekend Edition June 21-23, 2013<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/how-israeli-apartheid-is-coming-unstuck/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/how-israeli-apartheid-is-coming-unstuck/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle">Big Racists vs Little Racists</div>
<h1 class="article-title">How Israeli Apartheid is Coming Unstuck</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JONATHAN COOK</div>
<div class="main-text"><big> </big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>However welcome official denunciations of these events
are, the government’s professed outrage does not wash.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.”</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life:
land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and
employment.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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?</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>To make sense of this, one has to understand how
desperately Israel has sought to distinguish itself from apartheid
South Africa.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>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.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><i><em><em><em><strong>Jonathan Cook</strong> won the
Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Israel
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”</a> (Pluto Press) and “<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair</a>” (Zed Books). </em></em><em>His
new website is <a href="http://www.jonathan-cook.net/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.jonathan-cook.net']);">www.jonathan-cook.net</a>.</em></em></i></big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><i>A version of this article first appeared in The
National, Abu Dhabi.</i></big></big></p>
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