- Moderator
- #521
I thought the article interesting, though the paragraph at the end tainted it.But Israel has embedded a religion, thereby excluding a portion of its population. Segregation, apartheid.
Religion has always been "embedded", if one can call it that, in Israel's nationality law, and, rather than doing it now, it enshrines that principle in the "basic law", protects it against changes by the Supreme court, and makes the whole thing explicit. Here is what I found to be a good summary of the situation, which the basic law immunizes against court review:
The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law are two of nearly 70 Israeli laws â the number is growing â that explicitly discriminate based on whether a citizen is Jewish or Palestinian. A legal group, Adalah, representing Israelâs Palestinian citizens, has compiled a database of such measures.
State-sanctioned racism
But Netanyahuâs Basic Law threatens to expose the deeper significance of this bifurcated citizenship structure.
Israelâs 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, observed Zeidan, are discriminated against in a way that goes beyond that practiced against minorities in democratic states: that is, by the arbitrary, informal or unregulated decisions of officials and state bodies. In such democracies, officials are usually breaking the law when they discriminate against minority groups.
But in Israel, Zeidan pointed out, âofficials are often breaking the law if they do not discriminate. It is their job to discriminate.â
This state-sanctioned racism is achieved by establishing ânationalitiesâ separate from citizenship. The primary nationalities in Israel are âJewâ and âArabâ. The state has refused to recognise an âIsraeli nationalityâ, a position supported by the Israeli supreme court, precisely to sanction a hierarchy of rights.
Individual rights are enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of their citizenship, whether they are Jews or Palestinians. In this regard, Israel looks like a liberal democracy. But Israel also recognises ânational rightsâ, and reserves them almost exclusively for the Jewish population.
National rights are treated as superior to individual citizenship rights. So if there is a conflict between the two, the Jewish national right will invariably be given priority by officials and the courts.
National rights trump citizenship
How this hierarchy of rights works in practice is neatly illustrated by Israelâs citizenship structure. The Law of Return establishes a national right for all Jews to gain instant citizenship â as well as the many other rights that derive from citizenship.
The Citizenship Law, on the other hand, creates only an individual citizenship right for non-Jews. Israelâs Palestinian minority can pass their citizenship âdownwardsâ to offspring but cannot extend it âoutwardsâ, as a Jew can, to members of their extended family â in this case, the millions of Palestinians who were made refugees by Israel in 1948 and their descendants.
This privileging of Jewish national rights is equally clear in the way Israel treats its most precious material resources: land and water.
The commercial exploitation of these key resources is treated effectively as a national right, reserved for Jews only. In practice, noted Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, access to these resources is restricted to Jews through hundreds of rural communities across Israel, including the best-known â the kibbutz.
These rural communities are the places where Israel has made available vast swaths of land and offers subsidised water. As a result, almost all commercial agriculture and much industry is located in these communities.
Arabs âsocially unsuitableâ
But these resources can be exploited only by the Jewish population because each community is governed by an Admissions Committee, which blocks entry to Israelâs Palestinian citizens on the grounds that they are âsocially unsuitableâ.
âThe committees govern entry to 550 communities in Israel, ensuring that the resources they control are available only to their Jewish populations,â Zaher told MEE. âThese committees are one link in a chain of racist policies, segregation and exclusion by the state towards Palestinian citizens.â
The primary purpose of these rural communities is to enforce Israelâs ânationalisationâ of 93 percent of its territory. This land is ânationalisedâ not for Israeli citizens â as no Israeli nationality is recognised â but for a global Jewish nation.
Meanwhile, the fifth of the population who are Palestinian are confined to less than three percent of Israeli territory, after most of their lands were confiscated by the state and are now held in trust for Jews around the world.
No new Palestinian community has been built since Israelâs creation 70 years ago, while dozens of Palestinian villages have been âunrecognisedâ by a 1965 Planning and Building Law. The 120,000 inhabitants of these villages, criminalised by this planning law, cannot build a home legally and are denied public services.
âLandlordsâ of Israel
Observers say that Netanyahuâs Basic Law risks exploding a seven-decade-old myth about Israel: that it is a liberal democracy where Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians alike, enjoy equal rights.
The combination of the Law of Return, which entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship, and Israelâs land laws, which reserve ultimate ownership to Jews as a global nation, has emptied citizenship of its accepted meaning.
Instead, according to Israelâs existing legal structure, the state belongs to Jews collectively around the world rather than to the countryâs citizenry. The Jewish state is âownedâ by world Jewry, even if many individual Jews have failed to actualise their citizenship by coming to live in Israel.
As Israeli scholars have noted, Israel should be classified not as a liberal democracy but as a fundamentally non-democratic state called an ethnocracy.
It's easy enough to see, that sordid, racist state of apartheid needs a whole river of hasbara floating around to conceal the inner workings contributing to segregation, inequality, rampant legalized discrimination, with large sides of whataboutery and dozens if not hundreds of "Sqirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!" You may also have recognized a large dollop of invincible innocence working in exactly the same way as it does in the U.S.
This long post is nothing more than the usual diatribe against Israel with few actual facts and a lot of deliberate misinformation.
It conflates Arab Israelis with Palestinians, makes blanket statements about "laws" that have no basis in actual Israeli law and makes claims about racism and apartheid with no factual information.
There are absolutely no "rights" in Israel arising from being Jewish as opposed to being Arab. Both Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis are equal under the law.
Another useful idiot.
Is it that wrong regarding land rights?