Mada's Political Monitoring Reports

Summary:
This book is in two parts. The first part, containing four chapters, is the Third Annual Political Monitoring Report issued by Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research.

The first two chapters deal with the official policy of state institutions toward Palestinian-Arab citizens. The first describes the principal legislative enactments and decisions made by the Knesset. These legislative acts, which relate mostly to citizenship, demography, and land, greatly affect the status of Arabs as citizens in Israel, and teach us much about the public debate over Arab citizenship. Special focus is placed on decisions of the Knesset's Ethics Committee against Arab members of the Knesset (MKs). The information presented shows that, in 2004, the committee served as a political tool to punish Arab MKs and prevent them from carrying out their functions. The committee's actions provided another form of de-legitimization of the Arab minority in general, and of its leadership in particular.

The second chapter provides numerous examples of decisions of governmental authorities in a variety of areas. Three matters are of particular interest in this context. First, the policy to increase Jewish control of land, and prevent "Arab control", especially Bedouin control. Second, the separation of Jews and Arabs by means of legal and bureaucratic barriers that prevent Arab couples from living in Jewish communities. Alongside this policy, the state continued its aggressive and discriminatory policy of house demolitions in Arab communities, a policy that is not applied in Jewish communities. Third, the security establishment, in the form of decisions by the National Security Council (NSC) and the General Security Services (GSS), for example, interfered in the setting and shaping of policy toward Arab citizens of the state. This interference is apparent in the Arab education system, in the prevention of family unification of Arabs, and in the suppression of political activity.

The last two chapters of the report deal with unofficial policy, i.e., the manner in which Arab citizens are treated by Israeli society. The penultimate chapter presents public opinion surveys taken among Israelis over the past year, and compares the results with those of previous years. According to the surveys, the Israeli Jewish public is even more ethnocentric, anti-liberal, and anti-Arab than its elected leaders. Racist and undemocratic attitudes are common among Israel's Jewish population.

The final chapter presents a number of examples of the culture of hate and discrimination against Arabs in Israel, in the form of written and oral comments by politicians, journalists, academics, and rabbis. The chapter also discusses physical violence, by police and security forces as well as by ordinary citizens. In 2004 we witnessed calls to expel Arabs from a number of towns and cities, among them Ashkelon, Ashdod, Jerusalem, Lydda, Migdal, and Safed. A new right wing political party called publicly for the expulsion of Arabs from the state. We also show that modern technology (the internet and animated games on cell phones) is being used to encourage violence against Arabs. In this chapter, as in the first chapter, we document and refute the demographic claims that view Arabs as an enemy and a threat. We take special issue with racist articles published in The Jerusalem Post (as we took issue with Ma'ariv in our report for 2003). The chapter ends with documentation of discrimination against Arabs in all branches of the legal system, especially in the courts.

The second part of the book contains four articles.
The first article, written by Nimer Sultany, presents the author's principal conclusions drawn from the findings of Mada's three political monitoring reports. The writer views racism against Arabs as a mainstream attitude in Jewish-Israeli society, and finds a direct connection between that racism and the lack of meaningful Arab citizenship and the inequality existing in the state, on the one hand, and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, on the other hand. Arab citizenship, he believes, is a formal status only; Arab citizens are, therefore, in his terms, "citizens without citizenship". In the "Jewish and democratic state", democracy exists in formal terms, with a built-in discrimination in favour of the Jews. By its very nature the regime requires a Jewish majority, and as a result democracy is restricted. Thus, Arabs cannot attain substantive equality and genuine citizenship.

The article written by Nadim Rouhana focuses on the intellectual and political means used to advance the idea of the "Jewish and democratic state". He views this project as a case of "national self-deception". Rouhana analyzes the project's effect on Arab citizenship, discusses the inherent violence in the idea of a Jewish state, and probes the inevitable dynamic of resistance to the enterprise. He considers Mada’s Political Monitoring Project to be a tool to advance such resistance.

In their article Yoav Peled and Doron Navot analyze the status of Arabs in Israel following the mass protests in October 2000. They contend that the Or Official Commission of Inquiry attempted to restore the elements of the "ethnic democracy" and to reaffirm the boundary that separates Palestinians who are citizens and Palestinians who are not citizens. Contrarily, Peled and Navot argue, the Lapid Committee did the opposite, and reinforced the anti-democratic process that began in October 2000. The authors conclude that Israel is becoming an undemocratic majoritarian regime, finding that there has been a decline in the status of Arab citizens in the state, and that the line separating Palestinian citizens and Palestinian non-citizens has faded.

The point of departure in Amal Jamal’s article is that the liberal citizenship granted to Arabs in Israel is neither complete nor equal. He examines the strategies used by the Arab minority in recent years to improve their citizenship and status in the country. The objective of these strategies is to break down the restrictions of the liberal citizenship granted to Arabs. The substitute strategies of minority groups and of Arabs in particular, he contends, cannot be understood without examining state policy and its effect on the minority.