Arab leaders demand world acts after Israel passes ‘apartheid’ bill
Arab leaders called for international intervention against the Israeli government on Thursday after it passed landmark legislation harming the status of the Arab minority and raising comparisons with apartheid.
The law, named “Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People”, effectively gives state sanction to the creation of residential areas for Jews only that would be off limits to Arabs, according to legal scholars and Arab rights activists.
It also demotes the Arabic language from being an official language in Israel to one with an unspecified “special status”, while enshrining Hebrew as the “state language”.
A statement issued by the Arab Joint List, the major Arab political grouping and third-largest party in Israel, called on “the countries of the world and international organisations to pressure the Netanyahu government so as to restrain its crazy racist excesses”. Observers say the bill could be the beginning of a wave of sweeping Israeli government moves against the country’s Arab population.
“This is a creeping apartheid law that is just the beginning of a series of discriminatory laws against the Palestinian citizens of Israel,” said Thabet Abu Rass, co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an Israeli NGO that works to promote equality.
The law, which was passed at 3am on Thursday by a 62-55 vote after prolonged debate, weakens democratic aspects of the Israeli system and fortifies Jewish nationalist ones.
“It’s a tremendous blow to democracy because by law it gives dominance to one ethnic group over another and it doesn’t even add protection for the minorities,” said Galia Golan, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.
“It definitely takes us out of the western liberal camp and puts us in the xenophobic super-nationalist Eastern European camp.
“It’s terrible. No question, it’s a disgrace,” she said.
For Arab Israelis, who make up 20 per cent of the country’s population, the legislation is an attempt to further their alienation by the Israeli rightwing. Arab politicians publicly ripped up the bill after its passing in parliament. Ahmad Tibi, from the Arab Joint List, called
its passing the “death of democracy” in Israel.
“Everyone understands what this law is. It enshrines the Jewish majority as dominant and ruling without protection of the rights of anyone else,” Ms Golan said.
The law specifies that only Jews have the right to self-determination in the land and delineates the symbols of the state, which are Jewish.
Mr Abu Rass, a town planner by training, said that in practical terms this will translate into “the establishment of very quick Jewish settlements in Arab regions. There will be more penetration of Jewish settlements in the heart of Arab regions”, such as the southern Negev area, he said.
The clause gives legitimacy to an existing government policy of segregation and will make it harder for Arabs to challenge that policy in the courts, Mr Abu Rass said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke after the vote with great enthusiasm about the law, which promises to boost his popularity with right-wing voters.
“We enshrined in law the basic principle of our existence. Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, which respects the individual rights of all its citizens.”
But Arabs who have suffered discrimination since 1948 now see themselves as being formally defined as second-class citizens.
Ayman Odeh, the chairman of the Joint List, termed it “the law of Jewish supremacism that excludes more than 20 per cent of the citizens. It is a law intended to provoke, divide, disparage and continue the incitement wave of the Netanyahu government. This is the tyranny of the majority that seeks to run over the minority”.
Legal scholar Mordechai Kremnitzer wrote in Haaretz: “There is no choice but to conclude that policy akin to apartheid (on an ethnic basis) that exists in the territories is entering inside Israel.”