Contemplate the below itemized civil disabilities identified by Ali Abunimah, who points out that in Israel civil rights are not based on citizenship, and citizenship confers no rights on Arabs. He describes Israel as the only country that does not recognize its own nationality. He points out that in Israel’s population registry, the ethnicity of all citizens (Jewish, Arab, Druze, etc.) is recorded. Some Jewish Israelis have since 1970 begun asking to have their denotation as “Jewish” replaced by a designation as “Israeli.” In September of 2013 the Israeli supreme court ruled that
"There is no such thing as an Israeli nationality separate from the Jewish people. To recognize such a thing would jeopardize the Jewish and democratic character of the state.”
In other words, if rights began to be conferred based on citizenship rather than membership in an ethnic group, either Israel’s Jewishness or its democracy would have to be abrogated.
Abunimah goes on to identify other serious restrictions on the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The first he mentions concerns land ownership. When Palestinians were dispossessed during and after 1948, much of the land taken went to the Jewish National Fund. The JNF charter stipulates that it can only lease or sell land to Jews. Palestinians are not allowed to buy land, much like the restrictive covenants of the pre-civil rights America that forbade whites to sell real estate to blacks. Rabbis who are state employees have publicly called on Jews not to rent to Arabs, and in the length of Israel’s history it has not built a single establishment of any kind for Palestinians inside Israel.
The second disability the Israeli legal system places on Arab citizens is that of marriage inequality in Israel. There is no civil marriage in Israel. All marriages must be contracted under Jewish establishment, or they are not recognized under Israeli law. In 2003 a law was passed making it illegal for an Israeli to marry a Palestinian (or by extension in 2012, any other Arab). This almost exactly parallels the anti-miscegenation laws of the pre-civil rights United States, and of apartheid South Africa. He quotes Israeli supreme court justice Asher Grunis:
and compares Grunis to David Millan of South Africa in 1953:
The two state solution Abunimah characterizes as an effort to conceal racism and legitimize it. Many supporters have been comfortable about ending the occupation but cannot accept Palestinian rights, including especially the right of return. Peter Beinart is an allegedly liberal Zionist and supporter of the two state solution.
I am not asking Israel to be utopian. I am not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced or or fled in 1948 to return to their homes. I am not even asking it to allow full equal citizenship to Arab Israeli since that would require Israel to no longer be a Jewish state. I am actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state.
Beinart embraces a Palestinian state not out of any concern for Palestinian rights or justice, but solely to legitimize the removal of Palestinians.
Ehud Barak, former prime minister famously said,
“us over here, them over there.”
This is apartheid. This is what South Africa tried in the 1970s and 1980s with the bantustans, which were nominally independent black puppet regimes. The idea was that when South Africa was criticized they could retort “What are you talking about? This is self-determination. This tribe has its own state, this other tribe has its own state, and the whites are just another tribe with their own state.’
Abunimah says the only way to end this grotesque state is by “de-colonialism.” The relationship between Palestinians and Jews is not two-sided. It is a colonial relationship in which Israeli Jews hold by design an almost total monopoly on power, resources, and control. In Gaza 1.7 million Palestinians are caged, all supplies must come through one crossing, and Israel controls it and can open and close it on a whim. There has been a calculated, systematic destruction of Gaza’s economy in order to reduce Gaza to total dependence on Israel and on international aid. And if they resistant in any way, bomb the heck out of them.
When the destruction of Israeli apartheid is proposed, some will respond “Israeli Jews will never accept …” Abunimah characterizes this attitude as bigotry, pointing out that whites accepted equality in South Africa, in the American South, and Protestants accepted equality in Northern Ireland. But it will require a fundamental shift in the balance of power. How will this be achieved …. Through dialogue?
While Israel builds settlements and steals land, and besieges Gaza and Passes ever more racist laws? Israel loves the peace process because in 20 years of negotiations Israel has almost tripled the numbers of settlers on Palestinian land, and the disparities in wealth and well being have only gotten wider.
The other alternative is to make Israel feel that there is a price to be paid for maintaining the status quo. This is the logic of the BDS campaign launched in 2005.
