This article was a web exclusive published by ColorLines Magazine in December 2000.

http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story_web00_04.html

For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel
An Interview with Phyllis Bennis

by Max Elbaum, special to ColorLines

Phyllis Bennis, a longtime analyst and activist around Middle East
issues, is now head of the Middle East Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of From Stones to
Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising, a book about the Palestinian
intifada of the late 1980s, and Calling the Shots: How Washington
Dominates Today's U.N. In this interview, Phyllis analyzes the racist
character of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as well as
its treatment of Palestinians who live within Israel's pre-1967 borders.

Max Elbaum: What do you see as the root cause of the current Palestinian uprising?

Phyllis Bennis: What's going on right now can be summed up in one word:

occupation. Contrary to the U.S. media's portrayal, the Israeli occupation of
Palestine is at the root of what the media at best identify only as a
"disproportionate" use of violence by the Israelis on the West Bank and
Gaza.

Certainly the Israeli troops' use of helicopter gunships, of machine
guns mounted on tanks, and so on is profoundly disproportionate when
used against a Palestinian civilian population armed only with stones
and some old Kalashnikov rifles.

But the real issue is the Israeli military occupation of Palestine--not
only that it is inherently violent and a violation of international law
and contrary to United Nations resolutions. Even if Israel used only
proportionate violence, it would still be absolutely illegal, because
the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal.

And why is there an occupation?

From its origins in the 19th century, Zionism centered on the idea of
creating a specifically Jewish state in which Jews would be protected
and privileged over non-Jews. Zionist occupation of Palestine was at
first meager, amounting to about 10 percent of the population by 1900.
By 1947, Jews were still only about 30 percent of the population of
Mandate Palestine and owned only six percent of the land, but the UN
Partition Resolution that year still assigned 55 percent of the land to
a new Jewish state. However, by means of the 1947-48 war, Israel took
over even greater expanses of land and forcibly expelled about 750,000
Palestinians. This travesty was the basis for the official founding of
the Israeli state in 1948.

In this latest intifada, there have been numerous protests by Arabs
living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. What are their numbers and
their conditions of life?

Inside what is called the "Green Line"--the unofficial borders of Israel
before the 1967 war--there are still about one million Palestinians,
just under 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Most Palestinians
are Muslim, some are Christian.

From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians within Israel lived under explicit
military rule. They were considered a military threat to the Israeli
state, and they were ruled under a completely different set of laws than
the Jewish population.

After 1966, military rule was lifted, but it was replaced by a set of
Jim Crow-like laws designed to discriminate against Arabs in Israel.
According to Adalah, an Arab rights organization, today there are at
least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations
based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined
on the basis of religion. Israelis must carry a card which identifies
them as either a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian. All non-Jews are second
class citizens. The Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed virtually all
cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens.

Can you be more specific about how this discrimination works and what it
means?

All Israeli citizens, including Palestinians, have the right to vote in
elections for members of the Knesset (parliament) and for the prime
minister. But not all rights are citizenship rights. Other rights are
defined as nationality rights, and are reserved for Jews only. If you
are a Jew, you have exclusive use of land, privileged access to private
and public employment, special educational loans, home mortgages,
preferences for admission to universities, and many other things. Many
other special privileges are reserved for those who have served in the
Israeli military. And military service is compulsory for all Jews (male
and female), except for the ultra-Orthodox who get the same privileges
as other Jews, but excludes Palestinians, who do not.

Over 80 percent of the land within Israel that was once owned by
Palestinians has been confiscated. All told, 93 percent of Israel's land
can only be leased or owned by Jews or Jewish agencies. Moreover,
despite Israel's booming economy, Palestinian unemployment is
skyrocketing--Adalah says it is about 40 percent. In 1996 twice as many
Arab citizens (28.3 percent) as Jewish citizens (14.4 percent) lived
below the poverty line. Less than five percent of government employees
are Arab. And eighty percent of all student drop-outs are Arab.

There are also vast disparities between Arab towns and Jewish towns in
government spending on schools, medical systems, roads and electricity,
clean water, and social services.

Unlike any other country in the world, Israel does not define itself as
a state of its residents, or even a state of its citizens, but as a
state of all the Jews in the world. Jews from anywhere in the world,
like me, can travel to Israel, declare citizenship, and be granted all
the privileges of being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have
lived in the area for hundreds of years.

Are Palestinians within Israel participating in the current uprising?

The recent resistance has seen a whole new level of involvement in
demonstrations by Palestinians inside the Green Line. They are
protesting the discrimination they face in Israel as well as the
occupation itself and Israeli brutality against Palestinians on the West
Bank and Gaza. Such protests are not completely without historical
precedent; in 1976 there were a series of demonstrations on what became
known as Land Day which protested continuing Israeli seizures of
Palestinian land. Six Palestinian demonstrators, citizens of Israel,
were killed by Israeli forces.

But this time there is a vast increase in the participation of
Palestinians inside the Green Line. Their demonstrations have been met
with the same brutal military tactics used against Palestinians in the
West Bank. So, far 13 Israeli Palestinians have been killed. These
tactics are in sharp contrast to the methods used by Israeli authorities
in response to demonstrations by Israeli Jews.

In 1982, for example, when there was an upsurge of Jewish protests
against the Israeli war in Lebanon, one Israeli Jewish protester was
killed and there was such an enormous outcry that people remember his
name to this day--Emil Grunzweig. But when a Palestinian is killed by
Israeli military occupation forces, that is not considered news. We
might hear a body count, but we never hear their names, who their
parents or children are, what they did for a living.

On the West Bank and Gaza, as well as inside the Green Line, police
randomly fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Arab demonstrators
that were throwing stones. The racist double standard is everywhere. A
mob of Israeli Jews even attacked the house of an Arab member of the
Knesset, Azmi Bishara. But the police would not act against the rioters.

Unfortunately, the years of occupation have created, or have allowed to
flourish, an incredibly racist vantage point among the majority of
Israeli Jews. The majority of Israeli Jews are willing to accept the
killing of Palestinians and collective punishment of the Palestinian
population as justified state policy.

Can you tell us more about Palestinian politics within Israel?

Not surprisingly, Palestinians inside Israel have historically felt
themselves excluded and disempowered by the Israeli government. The
Communist Party of Israel was long a predominantly Arab party and
received the vast majority of Palestinian votes. The CP remains strong,
but a few Palestinian Knesset members have recently allied themselves to
the Labor Party and more and more Palestinians have joined newer
nationalist blocs. Azmi Bishara, who leads the Tajamoah (National
Democratic) Party, became the first Arab citizen to run for prime
minister last year. He and others actually call for the "de-Zionization"
of Israel--for the transformation of Israel from a theocratic state
privileging the Jewish majority to a democratic, secular state of all
its citizens.

You are painting a picture of an Israeli government, with the support of
a substantial part of its Jewish population, which aims toward permanent
subordination of Palestinian Arabs within its borders, along with
domination over something that might be called a Palestinian state but
what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. Essentially the same
vision that motivated apartheid South Africa.

Yes. And there are even more complexities. Within Israel there are
really four levels of citizenship, the first three being various levels
of Jewish participation in Israeli society, which are thoroughly
racialized. At the top of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the white
European Jews. At the level of power the huge contingent of recent
Russian immigrants--now about 20 percent of Israeli Jews--are being
assimilated into the European-Ashkenazi sector, though they are
retaining a very distinct cultural identity.

The next level down, which is now probably the largest component of the
Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews, who are from the
Arab countries. At the bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian
Jews, who are black. You can go into the poorest parts of Jewish West
Jerusalem and find that it's predominantly Ethiopian.

This social and economic stratification took shape throughout the last
50 years as different groups of Jews from different part of the world
came, for very different reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions
reflected national origins, they play out in a profoundly racialized
way.

The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary discrimination. They
were transported more or less involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On
arrival they were held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were
stolen from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi families.
In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began to try to reunite some
of those shattered families.

Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian citizens.

A rigid hierarchy, highly racialized both within and between religious
or national groups, orchestrates Israeli social life. Much of it is
legally enforced. The most significant difference between this scenario
and other similar ones is in the world's perception of the Israeli
reality. For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, South
Africa was always considered a pariah state. But Israel is not in that
position. Israel is given a pass, if you will, on the question of
racism. Because Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, there's a way
in which Israeli Jews are assumed to be either incapable of such
terrible racialized policies, or that it's somehow understandable
because of what Jews went through.

But the new intifada has refocused attention on the nature and extent of
Israeli racism, among other things. You have new reports from Amnesty
International looking at the Israeli treatment of its own Palestinian
citizens--minors, children, being arrested, beaten and held for days.
Israel treats Palestinians, inside or outside the Green Line, as being
less human than Jews. This is rooted in the very definition and Basic
Law of the Israeli state. And the new intifada may give us a chance to
challenge that apartheid character.

Max Elbaum is the former editor of CrossRoads magazine and author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, forthcoming from Verso.

**Copyright, ColorLines Magazine 2000