Israeli
Consensus Shows
Its True Colors
By Jonathan Cook
25 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
If
you want to understand what is concerning ordinary Israelis as they
prepare to cast their ballots next week, the most revealing poll is
also the one that has received least attention.
A few weeks after Ariel Sharon
broke up his Likud party to form a new “centrist” faction,
Kadima, his advisers conducted a poll to find out how potential voters
would respond if its list of candidates included an Arab.
The results were unequivocal:
Kadima would lose votes equivalent to between five and seven seats in
the 120-member Knesset from Israeli Jews worried that they might be
helping to elect an Arab.
Even allowing for a potential
increase in Kadima’s support from the country’s Arab minority
(a fifth of the population), the party decided the gamble was not worth
it. Ahmad Dabah, an Arab mayor, was placed 51st on the list, with no
hope of being elected.
Sharon established his new
party late last year as an escape chute from Likud before its drift
rightward became terminal. Kadima promised instead to occupy the centre
ground of politics, representing the Israeli “consensus”.
But that consensus is looking
increasingly like a Jewish, not an Israeli, one. The country’s
one million Arabs are not being invited to join the party in every possible
sense.
The principle of ethnic separation
was always at the heart of the Jewish nation-building project. Hundreds
of rural communities – including the kibbutz communes established
after the state’s birth in 1948 – are strictly off-limits
to the country’s one million Arab citzens. Even in the the handful
of “mixed” cities, Arabs inhabit their own isolated neighbourhoods.
Divisions are also enforced
in the education system, with separate Arab and Jewish schools; and
the “Hebrew labour” philosophy inherited from Zionism’s
pioneers means that much of the workplace is segregated too.
Decades of quiescence by
the Arab minority have done nothing to reverse the antipathy of the
Jewish majority. Another poll this week, published by the liberal Haaretz
newspaper, showed that 68 per cent of Israeli Jews reject living near
an Arab – and 41 per cent want apartheid-style separate recreation
facilities. Surveys show repeatedly that nearly half of Israeli Jews
favour the forced emigration of Arabs from Israel.
But Kadima’s decision
to exclude all meaningful Arab representation from its list points to
a far more worrying stage in this ideology of separation.
Kadima’s expected success
– according to projections, it is looking at up to 40 seats –
has depended on the public’s close association of the party with
the policy of unilateral separation. Sharon proved his own commitment
to separation with his disengagement from Gaza last year and the building
of a fence-cum-wall across the West Bank.
Sharon’s successor
as leader of Kadima, Ehud Olmert, will extend the program, promising
further small disengagements from the West Bank in an attempt –
in his own words – to draw the “final borders” of
an expanded Jewish state. It is the triumph of the “We are here,
and they are there” philosophy articulated by two recent Labor
prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin
and Ehud Barak.
But what kind of a Jewish
state inside final borders is Olmert proposing? Well, to start with,
one whose consensus has been crafted to silence a fifth of the population.
But there may be worse to come if, as expected, Kadima romps home to
victory.
According to the Israeli
media, Olmert has been flirting with a small but increasingly popular
far-right party whose seats he may well need to prop up the coalition
government he must form. Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party
is being hailed as the most likely kingmaker after the elections.
He could also be the face
of a very unpleasant future.
Lieberman, the Likud’s
director-general in the days of Binyamin Netanyahu’s premiership,
is a darling of the right. But in truth he is far closer to Kadima than
Likud.
Whereas Likud under Netanyahu
rejects all talk of separation and disengagement from the Palestinians
as a solution to the conflict, Lieberman is the arch-advocate of “reciprocal”
– as opposed to unilateral – separation. In short, he believes
that, if Israel is making sacrifices in Gaza and the West Bank by “expelling”
settlers from their homes, then the
Arab minority currently living in Israel should expect to pay a similar
price.
He wants hundreds of thousands
of Arab citizens who live in a small area of Israel adjacent to the
northern tip of the West Bank to have their homes transferred out of
the Jewish state and incorporated into what will be left of a ghetto
Palestinian state behind Israel’s separation barrier.
He also wants any remaning
Arabs to be stripped of their citizenship unless they pledge loyalty
to a “Jewish and democratic state”. In signing up, they
will forfeit the right to vote for Arab parties, which demand Israel’s
transformation from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens”.
Lieberman is said to believe
that the citizenship of up to 90 per cent of the Arab population can
be annulled this way. And what he is saying publicly, there is every
indication Kadima is saying privately.
For some time the Hebrew
media have been reporting Sharon’s interest in land swaps with
the Palestinians as a way – in one fell swoop – to annex
the settlement blocs and to strip Israel’s Arab minority of its
citizenship in a Jewish state. Olmert is assumed to be just as keen.
Kadima appears to be on a
winning streak. Separation of the crudest and most ruthless kind is
now, as the polls all too clearly demonstrate, precisely what the Israeli
consensus demands.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author
of the forthcoming “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State” published by Pluto Press, and available
in the United States from the University of Michigan Press
(http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=224729).
His website is www.jkcook.net