Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy [Paperback]

"The description of Israel as 'the only democracy in the Middle East' has been received wisdom in the Wes for decades. The idea of Israel as 'one of us', a home for Western values in a region of religious extremism and political instability, is voiced and understood by politicians, journalists, analysts,and the general public... [T]he conception of Israel's status as regionally anomalous -- a liberal, parliamentary democracy -- remains unshaken. When President Barack Obama can call Israel a 'small nation' in a 'tough neighbourhood', remarkably little has chained since Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, wrote in 1896 that a jewish state in Palestine would be 'an outpost of civilization against barbarism' (from the Introduction).
Yet, as Ben White so ably demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth. From the beginning, when European Zionists first began to enter it, Palestine was considered an "empty" land. In 1902, Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organization, wrote that Zionists desired "to irrigate with their sweat and to till with their hands a country that is today a desert, until it again becomes the blooming garden it once was." Nothing could have been further from on the ground reality. Palestine was full of productive farms, busy cities and thriving trade. Seeing the land as "empty" "was not a matter of ignorance of the Arab population but a question of European chauvinism." "Palestine at the time of first Zionist settlement was not empty of people, but of people deemed worthy by Europeans of controlling their own country." This was not traditional European (and by extension, American) chauvinistic conquest: when you desire something, go in and take it, the natives be damned. With that in mind, literally anything is permissible.
This is not the narrative I grew up with, which depicted Israel as a brave nation surrounded by bitter enemies who wished to erase it from the earth, and the Israeli people and their leaders as heroic defenders of democracy and human rights. As Ben White ably shows, little could be further from the truth.

Citing Israel's own laws and policies, White shows that, from the beginning, Israel has treated Palestinians -- including its own Palestinian citizens -- as if they are invisible and, as invisible, have no rights. Citing chapter and verse from Israeli laws and policies, he shows how Palestinians are discriminated against in every way imaginable, and I am not exaggerating in saying that. In the Occupied Territories and Gaza, it is worse and is much more publicized. Within Israel itself, it really isn't any better. In the Galilee and the Negev, Palestinians are pushed aside, their homes demolished in Israel's push to "Judaize" the areas -- culturally "drown" the Negev and Galilee with Jewish residents; in the Occupied Territories they are called "settlers" -- in order to support Israel's as a Jewish state.

The problem with this is that it negates Israel's claim of being a democracy, as it is not a state of all its citizens. (Legally, non-Jews are second-class citizens.) Far from the paradise it is presented as being, reality shows Israel an aggressive, openly racist, and increasingly paranoid nation that defends itself by creating more oppressive laws and violent behavior toward Palestinians in Israel itself and in the Occupied Territories. Israel is, and has been, a contradiction of Herzl's contention that a Jewish nation in Palestine would be "an outpost of civilization against barbarism". What Israel has come to resemble is barbarism itself.
White's book has already garnered charges of "anti-Semitism" and White charged with being an "anti-Semite", a charge routinely made against all critics of Israel. Israeli journalist Yaniv Halili, for instance, claims the book "presents a blatant anti-Israel approach". It doesn't at all. What it does, and does thoroughly, is cite the sources, which are unimpeachable. Palestinians in Israel may not be a comfortable book to read, but it is an important one, a necessary antidote to all the propaganda and alarmist accusations of anti-Semitism. What Ben White has done, and done very well in this book is reveal the chauvinism and cruelty of the modern State of Israel in all its ugliness.
A final note: It seems to me that Israel's behavior towards the Palestinian people, which it justifies in terms of "security needs", is itself anti-Semitic for the simple reason that it ignores and denies the brutal behavior that is common knowledge everywhere. In justifying behavior that decent people regard as reprehensible, Israel paints a negative picture of what Jewish people and their culture are like. And that is offensive and wrong.

If Israel really wishes to rid the world of anti-Semitism and enjoy life as a respected member of the world community of nations, then it must change its behavior. Accusing people who point it out of anti-Semitism only makes the problem worse.

In "Palestinians in Israel", Ben White describes the situation confronting Palestinian citizens of Israel, and discusses whether a country that favors one ethnic group is a democracy. Since the United States' support for Israel is predicated on its status as a democracy, a book that disproves that generally unquestioned assumption would shatter the foundations of U.S. policy towards the Middle East, which is exactly what Ben White has achieved with this book.

Some sixty years into its existence, Israel has not been able to approve a constitution, even though the UN Partition Plan of 1947 required each state to "draft a democratic constitution...guaranteeing all persons equal and non-discriminatory rights." Instead, it has passed eleven Basic Laws, one of which establishes the values of the State of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," a perfect example of Orwellian doublethink, "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

Before reading the book, I assumed its subject was secondarily important, given Israel's horrific oppression of Christians and Muslims in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as exposed in White's first book, "Israeli Apartheid." While Palestinians in Israel are second class citizens, those in the OPT are living with a "boot stamping on a human face" (as I noted in my review of Anna Baltzer's excellent Witness in Palestine). By the time I finished White's latest book, its immense importance had slowly dawned on me. American politicians rarely mention Israel without describing it as "the only democracy in the Middle East," as if unconditional support for Israel is the way to support democracy itself. In 2011, the U.S. Congress enthusiastically applauded Israel's Prime Minister, Netanyahu, when he declared, "Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa,only Israel's Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights." (Of course, Congress may have been applauding Netanyahu's chutzpah rather than the content of what he said. As I.F. Stone noted, "Governments lie," and politicians can certainly appreciate the work of a master).

Dozens of Israeli laws discriminate in favor of the Jewish majority, and White explains the most important of them. The Law of Return provides that Jews anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel, yet most of the Palestinians within the state cannot live in the villages of their birth. Seventy percent of Israeli towns have admission committees, allowed by Israeli law, which determine who can live in the communities. My own brief visits to Israel confirm White's depiction of the systemic trampling of basic human rights by Israel. A Christian Palestinian minister, Naim Ateek, the director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, led my tour group through his hometown of Beisan, from which he was expelled in 1948, as an eleven-year-old. Ateek showed us his family's land, confiscated by the state for the benefit of its Jewish citizens, under the "Present Absentee" law (more doublethink), which allowed the state to confiscate the land of people who were "absent" from their property, after expulsion by the Zionist soldiers, but were "present" within Israel's boundaries.

Another Basic Law bars electoral candidates who "deny the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." Some years back, the Knesset voted to remove five of the seven Arab members of the parliament who were accused of making statements that questioned Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

White's style is concise; in about a hundred pages, he provides ample evidence for the reader to answer the critical question, "Is Israel a democracy?" The book should be required reading for anyone concerned with the United States' foreign policy in the Middle East.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to the outbreak of the so-called peace process between Israel and the occupied Palestinian people, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) abandoned its initial political goals (to realize the right of return of Palestinian refugees and to liberate Palestine from Zionist colonization) for some privileges and turned itself into an obedient servant of the colonizers. Whereas the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat tried to get back some territory from Israel to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Israel proper, although suffering under discrimination as second-class citizens, demand Israel to become finally "a state for all its citizens" instead of staying a "Jewish State". Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the non-Jewish inhabitants have been subject to a second-class status in most walks of life.

Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer specializing in the subject of Palestine/Israel. In his previous book "Israeli Apartheid" he showed that Israel established its special kind of "Israeli apartheid" that differs in its sophistication from the petty apartheid in South Africa under the white racist regime. His current book deals with the Palestinians living in Israel proper and their plight. It was overdue, that someone as competent as White would shed some light on Israel's discriminatory treatment of some 20 per cent of its citizens. In comparison to their fellow countrymen in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), who live a life in extreme oppression; Israeli Palestinians might be designated as "Palestinians de luxe".

The well-known Israeli Palestinian Knesset member Haneen Zoabi contributed a fine foreword in which she demanded full citizenship rights and added; "These taken for granted demands, for the indigenous people and for 'full citizenship`, are suffice to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of the entire Zionist project, and to relegate it to the status of a racist, colonialist venture." For making such demands, MK Zoabi and also the author came under attack by Zionist propagandists in Israel and Great Britain. Yaniv Halili wielded in "ynet" the worn Zionist "argument", accusing both of "anti-Semitism". Zionist defenders of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights, contempt for international law and the United Nations, can only "justify" the morally bankrupt policies of the "only democracy in the Middle East" by slandering people who merely describe the horrible reality.

Ben White brings the discrimination of the forgotten minority of Israel's colonization project in Palestine, to light. The author pursues two aims: First, he wants to show how Israel relates to its Palestinian citizens, and second, he attempts to demonstrate that "denying democracy has been part of the Zionist colonization of Palestine from the very beginning". For White, Israel's definition as "Jewish and democratic" is the central contradiction and the heart of the conflict.

In seven chapters White describes the manifold discriminations against what some Israelis call "Israel's fifth column". To preserve their status of second-class citizens, Israel developed a sophisticated set of laws that apply to Jews only. This Palestinian minority is seen by Israel's power elite as a "demographic threat" to "Jewish majority rule". The rest of the book deals with the implementation of Israel's institutional discrimination. One of these discriminatory laws is the "Absentee Property Law" passed in 1950. This law regulates the exclusion of Palestinians from land acquisition and the "mechanism of expropriation" to realize the permanent alienation of (Palestinian absentees) land in favor of the Jewish state". (24) According to White, there are numerous other laws to be used to confiscate land, such as the "Emergency Land Requisition of 1949", or article 125 of the Emergency Regulations of 1948. Systemic discrimination is described by White in areas such as education, budgetary allocations to Palestinian communities in the Galilee and petty discrimination at all levels of society. Just being an Arab disqualifies a person of serving in the Israeli military, except for members of the Druze minority. With these disqualifications goes the loss of privileges granted to Jewish soldiers and veterans.

Summing up his findings, the author tries to remain objective by writing that there might be some "logic" to the Israeli argument in "justifying" its racist policies towards the Palestinians in the OPT by pretending that the occupied territories might be "disputed" or that there might be "security concerns". The fallacy of these arguments is revealed when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians in Israel proper. Israeli politicians and their friends in the U. S. and Western Europe often point out as evidence for Israeli democracy the presence of Israeli Arabs in the Knesset. However, they ignore the fact that these Arab MKs are subjected to regular slander and threats by their right-wing Jewish "colleagues" to have their parliamentarian immunity lifted or their citizenship withdrawn.

For democrats, who are interested in the reality and the functioning of the "Jewish and democratic" State, this book can be an eye-opener.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal lives as a journalist in Bonn, Germany.