By 71 votes to 38the Knesset rejects Equal Rights Bill – Jewish MKs vote by 71-25 to reject equality between Jews and non-Jews
According to the idiots’ guide to ‘anti-Semitism’ otherwise known as the IHRA definition‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ is anti-Semitic. Leaving aside the fact that the two parts of this sentence are a non-sequitur, since you can support a Jewish right to self-determination and still claim that Israel is a racist state (and vice versa) the existence of something can’t be an endeavour. The language is deliberately obscure and clumsy but it is a fact that Israel and Zionism is racist. If it is anti-Semitic to tell the truth then that can only mean that anti-Semitism is justified!
The proof however is in the pudding. Last Wednesday Israel’ Knesset voted by 71-38 to reject a bill which was based on Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The Bill was based upon The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israelwhich stated that the State of Israel ‘will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’. This was preceded by the statement that ‘The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel’ which of course contained the same contradiction that is embodied in the description of Israel as a ‘Jewish and Democratic state.’
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| The Knesset |
A state based on racial domination cannot be democratic. Likewise if you say that the State will only be open for Jewish immigration, i.e. colonisation, then you cannot have equality. Nonetheless if this sentence had been incorporated in Israeli law then it would have given Israel’s non-Jewish citizens a right to equality.
Not only did all the government members vote for the Bill but the 11 MKs from the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid. 6 members of Yisrael Beteinu, the far-Right party of ex-Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman abstained, as did 4 members of the Israeli Labour Party.
The Declaration of Independence, which is often quoted by Zionists when arguing that Israel is a democratic, non-racist state was never incorporated into Israeli law. Instead we have the recently passed Jewish Nation State Law which says the the right to national self-determination is "unique to the Jewish people". .
It is because a Jewish State means a state which gives privileges to one section of inhabitants (Jews) and denies them to another section (non-Jews/Palestinian Israelis) that a Jewish state is inherently racist. The belief amongst the 80% of Israelis that it is ‘their’ state is what lies behind the visceral and open racism of the majority of Jews.
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| The Israeli flag flies with the Western Wall in the background |
This is manifested in popular opinion as measured in a poll by Israel’s Channel 10.
Over three-quarters of Israeli Jews said they would object to their child forming friendships with Palestinian youth of the opposite sex, and more than half said they would be disturbed if their child formed friendships with Palestinian youth of the same sex.
43% of respondents said that they were disturbed or very disturbed to hear people conversing in Arabic in a public space, and 42% said they believe that Jews should be hired for work over Arabs.
Exactly 50 % of respondents said it would bother them to have a Palestinian neighbour; half of respondents also said they would not rent an apartment to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.
37% of respondents reported discomfort over a high number of Palestinian pharmacists, and 40% reported discomfort over the prominence of Palestinian doctors and nurses.
Let us contrast this with a similar poll in YNet, the internet version of Israel’s largest paper, Yediot Aharanot in an article ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason on the 27th March 2007, quoting a survey by the Geocartography Institute, over half of Israeli Jews said they believed the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man was ‘national treason’. Note that they didn’t oppose such liaisons on religious but racial and national grounds.
Over 75% of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home. About 40% of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half of the participants agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to immigrate from the country and a similar percentage said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. 31% said they felt hatred, while 50% said they felt fear.
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| Protest against Israel's Nation State Bill |
Over 56% of participants said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both a security and a demographic threat to the country, in other words that the Arab presence in a Jewish state caused them to fear that one day there might be more Arabs than Jews.
When asked what they thought of Arab culture, over 37%replied, “The Arab culture is inferior.”
In an article on YNet in September 2006 Poll: 62% want Arab emigration, which was based on the the Israel Democracy Institute’s democracy index s total of 62% of Israelis wantrf the government to encourage local Arabs to leave the country.
Only 14% of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29% said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance.
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| Yair Lapid of the 'centrist' Yesh Atid (left) and Netanyahu |
Israeli Knesset rejects bill to ‘maintain equal rights amongst all its citizens’
Mondoweizz, Yossi Gurvitz on
The Knesset voted down today, by a margin of 71-38, the Basic Law: Equality bill, tabled by MK Mossi Raz (Meretz). The text of the bill was clear and concise: “The State of Israel shall maintain equal political rights amongst all its citizens, without any difference between religions, race and sex.” This is a direct quote from Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Following the resignation of Defense Minister Lieberman a few weeks back, the governing coalition has a razor-thin margin of one vote: it controls 61 votes out of 120. However, the coalition enjoyed the support of Yesh Atid, led by Israel’s Trump wannabe, Yair Lapid. Its eleven votes are unlikely to have delivered victory to the opposition, however, as many members of the Zionist Camp fled the hall before the vote.
Despite one the greatest political cons in history – “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”– Israeli law never recognized equality between citizens. An attempt to enter an equality clause to the Human Dignity and Freedom Basic Law, back in 1992, failed – mostly due to the opposition of the religious parties. The Israeli Supreme Court, doubling as the country’s High Court of Justice, found – or, rather, invented – emanations of equality in Israel’s Basic Laws; doing so often required the court to fall back on the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, claiming it was the expressed will of the Founders.
Doing so after today’s vote will require extraordinary powers of judicial juggling. And the court, which was never that great shining light its supporters portray it (see, for damning example after another, Michael Sfard’s superb “The Wall and the Gate”) is becoming less emboldened to face the government.
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| Formally there is equality between Arab and Jew in Israel |
Following the tumult of the Nation State Law, when the Druze filled the streets in protest – claiming, correctly, the law made them second class citizens – Netanyahu promised them he’d grant them an exemption somehow. Perhaps he’d declare them honorary Jews. Today, Netanyahu closed the gate of equality before them.
He did so with the votes not only of his ultra-nationalist coalition, but also with those of Lapid, whose party claims to be a center party while serving as a gateway drug to the extreme right. And by the absent votes of the frightened members of Labour. Those 71 votes represent the hard core of practical Zionism – Zionism as it is, not as it may be – who decided Israel would be a Jewish country and not a democratic one.
The Knesset told 20% of the country’s citizens that it would demand their loyalty, but would not grant them equality. They would have second class citizenship, dependent on the whim of the Jewish majority. Next time the government of Israel tells you it “shares values” with the US, remember what that value is: 3/5 of personhood.
So it goes.
Israeli press review: New poll shows rampant racism in Israel
Middle East Eye, 10 December 2018
Meanwhile, bill calls for increasing size of villages that can implement 'admission committees' to keep out non-Jewish residentsA man in the Bedouin village of Abu Nuwar in the occupied West Bank with the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the background (AFP/File photo)
Tuesday 11 December 2018
New poll shows racism rife amongst Israelis
A new poll by Israeli Channel 10 TV revealed that deep prejudice against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, is still the norm amongst Israeli Jews.
Over three-quarters of respondents said they would object to their child forming friendships with Palestinian youth of the opposite sex, and more than half of Israeli Jews in the study said they would be disturbed if their child formed friendships with Palestinian youth of the same sex.
Forty-three percent of respondents said that they were disturbed or very disturbed to hear people conversing in Arabic in a public space, and 42 percent said they believe that Jews should be hired for work over Arabs.
Exactly 50 percent of respondents said it would bother them to have a Palestinian neighbour; half of respondents also said they would not rent an apartment to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.
Some of Channel 10’s questions were designed to replicate those asked in a CNN poll and published in November in an attempt to measure levels of anti-Jewish racism amongst non-Jewish Europeans in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
To mirror the CNN question of whether European respondents were fearful of Jewish prominence in certain professions, the Channel 10 poll asked Israelis how they felt about Palestinian prominence in the country’s health care industry.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported discomfort over a high number of Palestinian pharmacists, and 40 percent reported discomfort over the prominence of Palestinian doctors and nurses. By contrast, the CNN poll found that 28 percent of European respondents expressed discomfort over the prominence of Jews in global finance.
The Israeli government voted on Sunday to support a bill that would increase the size of villages that may legally implement “admission committees” to weed out Palestinian citizens of Israel and other individuals deemed undesirable, Israel’s Channel 13 Reshet reported.
According to a current Israeli law passed in 2013, municipalities with up to 400 families may form boards that may bar others from moving in. Without any requirement to be transparent about the criteria used, these committees can deny an applicant admittance by claiming that his or her lifestyle is incompatible with life in the village.
Under the new bill - proposed by far-right lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich and approved on Sunday by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation - villages with up to 700 families would be permitted to form such boards to keep out potential residents. The proposed number may drop to 500 or 600 before the bill is passed into law.
The legislation came under harsh criticism from Tamar Zandberg, leader of the liberal-Zionist Meretz party, who argued that the bill would result in more municipalities refusing to admit not only non-Jewish applicants, but also Jews of Arab ethnicity, disabled citizens and members of the LGBT community.
“Not only should acceptance committees not be expanded, but they must be abolished,” Zandberg told the ministerial committee.
Smotrich’s bill follows another recent effort to expand the scope of Jewish-only settlements inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders. The controversial Nation-State law, passed in July, originally contained language mandating the construction of Jewish-only communities, but the provision was dropped before the bill was voted into law.
The original admission committees law was passed in order to circumvent a decision by the Israeli High Court, which ruled in 2000 that the rights of a family of Palestinian citizens of Israel had been violated when an Israeli village refused to let them live there because they were Palestinian.
An senior Israeli minister and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet says he is confident that once the Israeli army has a pretext for a war with its neighbour to the north, it “will return Lebanon to the Stone Age”, Channel 10 Newsreported.
Responding to a panelist who questioned whether the recent alleged discovery of tunnels on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon might mean that Israeli deterrence power has decreased, Construction Minister Yoav Galant threatened to destroy Lebanon itself – not only Hezbollah.
“I presume that when we have the reasons, then we will know what to do,” said Galant, a former top general in the Israeli army. “I propose that we trust in the IDF and in its power; we know what to do. That doesn’t mean that we want a battle or a war everyday. But if, regretfully, we get to war, we will return Lebanon to the Stone Age – no less than that.”
Asked if he meant Lebanon, the country, or Hezbollah, Galant said: "Both of them. It is unacceptable [that] Israeli citizens, Israeli children, Israeli women are threatened in our cities, and in Lebanon, it’s business as usual. When I say to return the Stone Age, I mean what I say."
When the show’s host pivoted to Galant’s political patronage, the minister affirmed he was still number two on the list of the Kulanu faction of the government, but hinted that he might switch to Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, since he shares its hawkish views on security.
"I never hid that my opinions on politics and security are identical to those of the Likud. And by the way, I’m the not the only one in the Kulanu party who holds those views," Galant said.
Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz similarly threatened to send Lebanon back to "the Stone Age" in 2014 and to "the age of cavemen" in April of this year, according to Israeli reports.
Five-thousand Bedouin citizens of Israel may be forced off their land so that an arms factory can be built on it, the financial journal Calcalist reported.
In the government’s zeal to remove the residents, it announced the plan to the press as a fait accompli, although it has yet to be officially approved.
Instead of waiting to consider complaints against the plan, including from residents who would displaced, the Israeli Authority for Resolving Bedouin Settlement in the Negev issued a statement to the press claiming that the objections had already been overruled.
The citizens who may be displaced currently live in unrecognised Bedouin villages, as well as in Abu Qureinat, Wadi al-Mashash, Wadi al-Na’am, Abu Talul and Sowaween.
Representatives of the 1,000 Bedouin families who currently live in the northern Negev desert area say the state-owned arms maker, Ta’as, known in English as IMI Systems, never presented its construction plans to them, or made any effort to find an alternate solution.
When the families pointed out that their grievances had not been heard, the government authority said “an error in transmitting information resulted in presenting the present stage as if the decision which is very likely to be accepted, was accepted".