A demonstration commemorating the 38th Land Day, Jaffa, March 30, 2014. Land Day is held every year to mark the deaths of six Palestinians protesters at the hands of Israeli police and troops during mass demonstrations on March 30, 1976, against plans to confiscate Arab land in Galilee. (Keren Manor/ Activestills.org)
Israel can’t continue to use the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to justify its racist and malevolent policies against non-Jewish citizens of Israel
JAMAL KANJ
This article was written for Intifada Palestine
Palestinian civic organizations inside Israel have declared January 30, 2016 the Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Israeli citizens.Israel was established in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 native towns and villages and the forceful displacement of approximately 780,000 Palestinians. Only 153,000 Palestinians remained under what became Israel. Of which approximately 25 per cent became refugees in their own country when their homes were destroyed and their land was expropriated by the new state.
Palestinians who continued to live in what became Israel were governed until 1966 by martial laws under appointed Jewish military governor. Unlike Jews, Israeli citizen Palestinians couldn’t travel inside Israel without special military permit, lived under the threat of curfew, administrative detention and expulsions. Israel expropriated their land allegedly for military use before they were turned over for the exclusive civilian use of Jewish Israeli citizens.
No wonder in 1948 Palestinians owned 80 per cent of the land. Following the establishment of Israel their land had shrunk to less than 3.5 per cent. The same laws were used extensively in the West Bank to confiscate Palestinian land, which were later handed to Israeli settlers to build “Jewish only” colonies.
Israel has two systems: one for its Jewish citizens and another for Palestinian non-Jewish citizens.
In education, a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch described Israeli run Palestinian schools “a world apart from government-run Jewish schools.” A Committee on Arab Education inside Israel found in 2005 that Israel spent an average of $192 a year on Palestinian students compared to $1,100 for Jewish students.
These discriminatory policies translated to great economic disparity between Jews and non-Jews. As a result, they are under-represented in civil service, high technology and financial sectors while over-represented in meagerly paid low-skilled trades. For example, out of 150,000 employees in the high-tech sector, only 460 are Palestinian Israeli citizens.
Palestinians Israeli citizen represent 20% of the population, they however account to more than 50 percent of the impoverished families in Israel. In fact, out of the 40 Israel communities with the highest unemployment rates, 36 are Palestinian towns.
Discrimination in health care at an early age is equally striking. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in December 2014, infant mortality rate among Palestinian Israeli citizens is more than double the rate of Jewish babies —2.5 for Jewish babies and 6.3 for Palestinian.
On the housing front, discrimination is more blatant. Since 1948, Israel has established more than one thousand new Jewish cities and towns on the land expropriated from it original Palestinian owners. On the other hand, Israel did not build one single new (non-Jewish) Palestinian community despite the fact that their population grew ten folds.
Israel building policies choke Palestinian communities by restricting construction permits and demolishing homes of Palestinian Israeli citizens as in the case of December 15, 2015 in the town of Tamra. Currently there are active official orders to demolish 50,000 homes purportedly built without government permits.
Another salient case of Israeli discrimination against non-Jewish Israeli citizens is the Prawer-Begin plan to depopulate 35 unrecognized Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Negev desert. In one instance, Israel demolished and Palestinian Israeli citizens rebuilt the village of Al-Araqeeb 93 times in the last five years.
The Prawer-Begin plan is part of a larger racist strategy aimed to increase the sparse Jewish population in the Negev desert by building 22 new Jewish communities. This is while eradicating Palestinian villages that predated the establishment of the state Israel.
In the face of the unmitigated wave of additional formalized discrimination by the current ultra-rightwing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinians inside Israel are bringing their grievance to the attention of the international community. Israel can’t continue to use the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to justify its racist and malevolent policies against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.