Have you ever heard this term in the news and wondered what exactly an Israeli Arab is? I have, and I did. The first time I heard this term in high school, I naively assumed it was a person from the Arab World who had emmigrated to Isreal. Wrong. This is one of those misleading and colorless Orwellian euphemisms, like “collateral damage�, which, as I always like to remind my fellow Americans, really means dead non-white civilians bombed from the sky.
So what’s an Israeli Arab? An Israeli Arab is a Palestinian who lives inside the state of Israel, versus those who live outside of it in occupied Palestine, or those who fled and became refugees or exiles beyond occupied Palestine. More accurately, they should be called Israeli Palestinians. How did they end up inside of Israel? They didn’t. Israel ended up around them; and they make up 20% of Israel’s population. These are the Palestinians, and their descendants, whose existence on that land preceded the state of Israel before 1948. When the Zionists declared the state of Israel on the land the Palestinians had been living on for centuries, 84% fled as a result of coercion and intimidation. These remaining Palestinians were absorbed into this new political entity. These are today’s “Israeli Arabs�.
This term is problematic for a number of reasons. It doesn’t acknowledge their identity as Palestinians and thus overlooks that they existed there before 1948, a simple fact that cannot be denied no matter how lobbyists and PR slicksters finesse it. The Palestinians were present for centuries; and they identified themselves as such, Filistini (Palestinian), regardless of what British, French, Ottoman, Arab, or Roman administrators chose to call the area. By simply calling them “Arabs�, it conveniently decontextualizes their historical connection to The Land, el-Ard, the one, crucial and central issue! You never hear right-wing Israelis actually call them Palestinians. To do so would recognize their legitimate connection to The Land. So they simply call them the more general and indirect “Arabs�.
Clearly, as Palestinians living within Israel, their predicament is distinct from that of Palestinians in the occupied territories, in refugee camps in Lebanon, or in the exiled global diaspora. We’re always being reminded of how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Is that so? For the Jewish citizens of Israel, it’s a democracy, but not for 20% of its citizens. As a stalling tactic which allows the state of Israel to keep grabbing more land illegally, the Israeli Knesset has to this day never ratified a constitution and has never officially declared its country’s borders. In the meantime, settlements continue to be built and populated, and the defence barrier gets erected deep into Palestinian territory, far outside of Israel proper. There’s a name for this in Political Science: Imperialism. What kind of democracy is that? This would have been like saying apartheid South Africa was the only democracy in Africa. Sure, it was perfectly democratic… for the whites.
In Israel, under the Law of Return and the Nationality Law, a Jewish immigrant can move to Israel from such diverse places as Ethiopia, Poland, the Ukraine, the U.S. or anywhere else and receive full legal rights as a citizen instantly. He or she will automatically have more rights than an indigenous Palestinian. Is this healthy for a society? Is this ethical? Can we really call this democratic?
Israel’s Palestinians are legally barred from owning land, as non-Jews cannot own land in Israel. This affects both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. By the way, 20% of Israel’s Palestinian population is Christian (among the most prominent of them are Arafat’s widow, Suha, Edward Said, and Hanan Ashrawi, all associated with the cause of Palestinian nationalism. Keep that in mind next time you hear an American Evangelist unconditionally defending Israeli policy against the Palestinians. These “Christian Zionists�, as they call themselves, blindly support policies that are harmful to the direct present-day descendants of the early Christian Church. The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so damn tragic and morally repulsive. Christian Palestinians suffer the same fate as their Muslim brothers.
In Israel, many social benefits, such as employment opportunities, better mortgages, partial exemptions from course fees, and preferences for public housing are dependent on your having completed military service. 9o% of Israel’s Palestinian population does not serve in the military, either by law or by discretion. This is an indirect way in which “Israeli Arabs� are discriminated against and economically marginalized. In a democracy, a citizen’s rights are not dependent on his or her having completed compulsory military service. It doesn’t work that way. In a democracy, citizens have rights simply by being born in the society.
Another indirect way Palestinians in Israel are marginalized is through the policy of “unrecognized villages�, another sanitized euphemism, which are Palestinian towns not legally acknowledged by the state as organized municipalities. What this means on the ground is that they get no funding or services whatsoever and are subject to arbitrary demolition or confiscation. Considered non-existent, they don’t appear on official Israeli maps. Palestinian families within Israel are also routinely denied building permits and have their homes demolished or confiscated when they build new ones or add on to them without the permits. Can this be called democratic? It would take quite an unhinged imagination to do so. Whoever repeats the claim that Israel is a democracy, be they journalists, lobbyists, or politicians, is either knowingly perpetuating an agenda which cannot accommodate the facts on the ground or they’re ignorant and haven’t done the research. There is no democracy and there are no “Israeli Arabs�.
The next time you hear “Israeli Arabsâ€?, know that you’re being fed a term which is essentially a political weapon to deny a people their identity and history. It’s racist spin and it’s insulting to your common sense and intelligence. You need only consume Western mainstream media and you’ll hear it soon enough. It’s become legitimate because of its constant repetition by U.S. and Israeli government officials and public relations firms. It’s a tragic irony that the first master propagandist to use this tactic and prove its effectiveness was none other then Joseph Goebbels. Known as the Big Lie, or argumentum ad nauseam, the name given to a policy of repeating a lie until it is taken to be the truth. If you live in the U.S., this should sound familiar to you. So now, in this obese land of shortcuts and convenience, the media smugly and unconsciously perpetuate the terms “Israeli Arabs” and “Israeli democracy”. Sadly, like so many other terms, these have taken on mindless lives of their own. Analysis and accuracy have been sacrificed. We’re participants by our complicit acceptance. This stops when we stop listening. Two reasonable actions you can take right now: 1.) Stop consuming news from mainstream corporate media! 2.) Tell the others! You can’t peddle shitty hack journalism if there is no audience left to consume it.
So I got this Sony Bluetooth headset, and its a piece of crap. Its basically a really cool headset with the shittiest ear clip every designed (I kid you not its literally just a light weight plastic clip from one of their over the ear headphones).
There’s this restaurant between Drexel and UPenn called Mad 4 Mex. Its your basic mexican on a college campus type restaurant, and when I went to school, it was pretty decent.
July 11th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
why do i feel like i read this once a long time ago?
July 12th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
I had an equally frustrating experience every time I bought anything in Spain. Everyone wanted your change and you never had enough. Then they would treat you all dumb because of your bad spanish and try to count the change in your hand for you.
July 13th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
well, maybe this is just more evidence of the third(developing for the PC)-worldification of the US. In India no one would take your big bills. by big I mean a 20 rupee bill (then that was 40 cents)
July 13th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
maybe its annoying, but its certainly their prerogative. I’m sure they found that they run out of quarters frequently, so instead of giving you only dimes when they run out, they spread the quarters out over more people.
I doubt its a conspiracy to piss you off, although that seems to have worked too =)
July 13th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
at least you got the same amount.
Once in Ann Arbor, MI. my friend and I each bought a pair of shoes, because the salesperson said “if you buy two pairs, I’ll give you 20% off” and after all, she applied 10% off to each pair because she claimed that “10% off + 10% off = 20% off” I argued with her, and she thought that I was an hard-to-satisfy customer, because every of her other customers felt so great about her system.
July 15th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
no, it’s them being lazy. They don’t want to order enough quarters from their bank. It’s not hard. Double the amount you keep in quarters, you won’t run out.
it’s also all the change machines cause people are too dumb.
P.S. The article type is rant, so why are you arguing? It’s a RANT
July 16th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
that was just my underdog impersonation. where the hell is that guy?