Recently, Azmi Bishara, head of the Balad party, resigned from his post as a member of the Israeli Knesset. He announced that he would not return to Israel anytime soon because of serious charges leveled against him by the Israeli security establishment. The charges included assisting the enemy in a time of war, contacts with a foreign agent, and passing information to an enemy – the enemy in this case being Hezbullah. The Israeli police and Shin Bet claim that they have sufficient evidence to indict him, while he insists the accusation is trumped up. Whether or not the charges are true, the mere existence of such an indictment is likely to lead to an escalation in the already tense relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews inside Israel. If they are true, it may reflect that Arabs, who make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population, have little faith in the current Israeli political system, the possibility of integration, or the chance of exercising their full rights as normal citizens. If the accusations are not true, it may reflect a lack of will by the Israeli political elite to address Arab grievances while, instead, allowing the security establishment to silence Arab leaders and divert public attention away from issues of civil and political rights. The tensions between the Jews and Arabs in Israel have been shaped by many factors. Primary among these is the Jewish-Israeli obsession with the fear of annihilation while maintaining the Jewish character of their state. Contributing to the escalating tensions are the shift to the right in the political mood among Jews and toward political Islam and nationalism among Arabs, but also the failure of the Israeli political system to integrate Arabs as full citizens, and the lack of any political horizon to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
The continued discrimination against Arabs in Israel, in spite of the criticism leveled against Israeli behavior, committee hearings, and commission recommendations published over the years, has required Arabs to look toward the international community for support. That their struggle against discrimination is supported by international human rights law and is similar to other civil rights struggles around the world has given Arabs in Israel confidence. The Arab Israelis’ feeling of abandonment after the Oslo agreement encouraged them to boost their relations with the Arab world, including politically and culturally, and to find a place for themselves in Palestinian and Arab dynamics and in the political decision-making process. Recently, a wide variety of Palestinian intellectuals published a document entitled “The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel. It attempted to hold Israel to its responsibilities as a democratic state for all its citizens and called for Arabs in the state to enjoy cultural autonomy and a right to veto government decisions involving them. In this context, it is likely that the charges leveled against Bishara will be used by both sides to escalate tension, mobilize the public, and use the media to justify more discriminatory measures against Palestinians. The situation only underscores that it is Israel’s Jewish citizens who determine the country’s security doctrine and define who is an enemy and how to fight them. Several recent opinion polls have found that a majority of Jews in Israel look at Arab citizens of the country as a security threat and believe the government should encourage them to emigrate. During last summer’s war with Lebanon, many right-wing Israelis accused the Arabs of being allied with the enemy because they criticized the war and the indiscriminant bombing of Lebanon. The security establishment has also long considered Arabs to be a security threat and often refers to them as a “fifth column ; their treatment at Ben Gurion International Airport provides a daily example of this. Over the years, Israeli politicians have used the state’s Jewish nature as an excuse to undermine the basis of democracy and justify systematic discrimination against Arabs. The US State Department’s country report on human rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories has found that the Israeli government “did little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country’s Arab citizens. Israeli political rhetoric describes the Arabs as a “population time bomb, a “security threat, or a “demographic threat.
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, confrontations between Jews and the state’s Arab citizens have gone through several stages. In that year, 800,000 Arabs were forced out of their homes and were not allowed back by the Israeli government, which took their properties without providing compensation. More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Those Arabs who stayed behind lived under a system of martial law that instituted curfews, detention without trial, restrictions on movement, reclassification of Palestinian land as closed security zones, and other arbitrary measures, until 1956.
In 1976, the Israeli Army killed six Arab citizens of Israel during protests against the expropriation of Palestinian land. The event is now commemorated every year as Land Day. Again, in 2000 Israeli police killed 13 Arabs during violent protests against the army’s assault on Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The current level of ill feeling between Arabs and Jews in Israel might lead to a radical change in the rules of the political game and strengthen the divide inside Israeli society, moving the situation from one of mere tension to the boiling point. History has shown that such confrontations frequently escalate out of control and open the gates to new misery. As a symbol of Arab aspirations in Israel, Bishara will likely not remain outside the country for long. To do so would be to ignore a key component of Palestinian Arab consciousness inside Israel, which is never to leave home, whatever the price. Emad Omarspecializes in conflict resolution and media. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
