Date posted: October 14, 2010 By Michael Khaled for MIFTAH
Recent headlines and editorials have been sounding the alarm on a new Israeli policy requiring non-Jewish immigrants to Israel to swear allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic” state. Commentators and academics around the world are calling the just-approved measure fascist and some even compare it to racist laws in Europe that lead up to the Holocaust.
Within Israel, “liberal” Zionists are calling this a turning point at which Israel begins an inexorable march away from democracy. Though it is surely the most blatantly racist and discriminatory policy to come out of the Knesset, it is far from the first.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon wading through the bureaucratic labyrinth laid out by the Israeli Interior Ministry. Bouncing from office to office, building to building, on a strangely-hot October day, I had official after official tell me I was in the wrong place and I had to go talk to someone else. But the most foreboding aspect of the whole process was filling out the application itself before I arrived.
Firstly I was surprised to see the field on the front page asking to list my religion. Coming from the United States, where religion is rightly considered a personal subject and not a subject of government scrutiny, I seriously considered writing “none” or leaving the space blank. In a country that claims to be the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, this seemed to be a slap in the face of the principals of equality and liberalism. Listing religion may not be all that sinister, but a statement that applicants must sign lays bare the implications of making a religious declaration. I had to swear that I had not “committed any criminal offence or any act directed against the Jewish people”. It specifically references only the part of Israeli society that the Zionist agenda considers legitimate: Jews. It matters not to the officials who will decide if my application is approved if I had done anything to harm the fifth of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian.
The Israeli government has certainly been moving further toward the right and accelerating its descent toward authoritarianism with the election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist sidekick Avigdore Lieberman who spearheaded the push for the new loyalty oath for immigrants. Such requirements put one nation – whether you define it as racial, cultural, ethnic, or religious – above all others which is the antithesis of democracy in a bi-national state.
The laws that uphold that system have always been covered with a veil of legitimacy, by either hypocritically claiming to protect equality, promote social justice or address the ever-present security concerns. A 2003 law passed under Ariel Sharon’s government prevents Palestinians with Israeli ID’s who marry Palestinians from the Occupied Territories from bringing their spouses to live with them. In 2007 under the supposedly centrist Olmert government, the Knesset voted to allow the semi-governmental Jewish National Fund to discriminate based on race when deciding whether to lease land to non-Jews.
It used to be that Israel’s leaders could point to guarantees of equal rights in Israel’s basic laws that supposedly prevented discrimination based on race or national identity, but now the letter of the law is becoming just as discriminatory as the practice.
On one hand it’s a disgusting show of hypocrisy and racism, but on the other hand, at least now the subtlety and nuance is disappearing. The discrimination can now be seen, quoted, and denounced world wide.
The increasing visibility of Israel’s racist system is awakening international activism among citizens with a growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), and even a handful of governments showing increasing displeasure like the UK, Turkey and Spain withdrawing from the upcoming OECD tourism conference in Jerusalem.
Yet these efforts are still little more than a slight inconvenience when it comes to Israel’s international standing. The inertia of the international status quo requires movement not only from the bit players in Europe or the international peace camp, but from the halls of power in the center of it all: Washington D.C. Though hope is slight that things will change there any time soon, the conversation on the street is changing, people are not so afraid of criticizing Israel publicly, college campuses host more activists against Israeli occupation, and among Jewish Americans blind support is giving way to a more nuanced view of Israel especially among young Jews who look at the Jewish state’s human rights records and wonder how Israel represents them as Jews.
Michael Khaled is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). He can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.
Uprooted Palestinian
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