MB Civic

Susan Nathan: The Other Side of Israel
A Review by Reilly Vinall, an intern at the Council for
the National Interest in Washington, D.C.

The Arab American News.com   — June 3, 2006:

Although much of the outside world’s attention to the Israel/Palestine
conflict is focused on the occupation of the Palestinian territories,
there is another great injustice that is often overlooked: the situation
of the population of over one million Palestinians who live inside the
borders of Israel and hold Israeli citizenship. Although they represent
almost 20% of the country’s population, the “Israeli- Arabs” have long
been among the poorest and most marginalized of Israel’s people. “The
Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across The Jewish/Arab Divide,” is an
autobiographical account by Susan Nathan, a British Jewish woman who
immigrated to Israel in 1999 in accordance with the Law of Return.
However, in 2002, she left her home in Tel Aviv to live in Tamra, an
ethnically Arab town in northern Israel, in order to experience for
herself the conditions of Israel’s Arab minority. Her experience is a
remarkable story that poignantly exposes the inequality that continues to
exist within Israel.

During her youth, Susan Nathan spent much time with her family and friends
in apartheid-era South Africa. The terrible injustices of that county’s
society at the time left a great impression on her, and helped her towards
her eventual decision to cross the Jewish/Arab divide in Israel. Although
she arrived in Israel in 1999 as an ardent Zionist, over several years she
became more and more interested in discovering the true situation of the
Arabs inside Israel, who despite their sizable proportion of the
population, seemed all but invisible to her. This led to her decision to
move to Tamra, a single Jew in a town of over 25,000 Arabs. This was an
unprecedented action in Israeli society.

Ms. Nathan befriended many people in the town of Tamra, and was accepted
by an Arab family as one of their own. The deep friendships she developed
reflect her view that despite the unofficial policy of separation that is
actively promoted by the Israeli government, there is true hope of
reconciliation and cooperation. The situation in Tamra itself is a prime
example of the poor living conditions many Arabs face, largely as a result
of government policies.

Tamra grew very quickly over more than a half a century, due to an influx
of internally displaced refugees whose villages were destroyed during the
1948 war. Large amounts of land that were previously farmed by the area’s
Arab population had been confiscated by the government and given to Jewish
farming cooperatives and hilltop settlements, whose inhabitants live in
luxury in comparison to Tamra’s population. For example, in one of these
settlements, Mitzpe Aviv, the Jewish population is given free access to
the farmland that was confiscated from Tamra. On average, each resident of
Mitzpe Aviv has access to over ten times the amount of land available to
each resident of Tamra.

Despite having a rapidly growing population, the government strictly
defines Tamra’s city limits and expansion outside of those limits is
forbidden. Any buildings erected outside the delineated area will
invariably be demolished or repossessed by the state. As a result, Tamra
has a terribly high population density, with homes pressing upon each
other. Moreover, the Israeli state does not provide the city with anywhere
close to sufficient funding to provide such a dense population with a
modern standard of living. Nathan describes haphazard electric and
telephone lines and a poorly maintained and confusing network of roads,
which are lined with uncollected garbage. Since Tamra’s people are
forbidden to expand outwards, they are forced to continually increase
their density and expand upwards in crowded tenements. Despite the warmth
and friendliness she received from the population, Nathan admitted that
the town sometimes felt like “ghetto living,” and described a “sense of
suffocation.”

The warmth with which Nathan was greeted in Tamra contrasts sharply with
the hostility that Arabs often encounter in Jewish areas. According to
Nathan’s Arab friends, to visit a city like Tel Aviv is to be a target,
identifiable by language and appearance. They feel a profound sense of
being unwelcome, and fear encountering overt hostility, or even violence.
The Arabs Nathan spoke to cited polls that have been published which
indicate that a majority of Israeli Jews want all Arabs expelled from the
country. They also mentioned hearing of attacks on Arabs by Israeli youths
and racist police officers.

The housing crisis and “ghettoization” of Tamra is a familiar facet of
life for Arabs in Israel. Across the country, Arabs are refused building
permits, so as to strictly define the land area of Arab communities, and
preserve land for Jewish farms and settlements. As such, thousands of
families build their homes without official permits. Judged to be
“illegal” by the government, these homes are subject to demolition. Many
families recall police with bulldozers rolling into town at the crack of
dawn and tearing down houses, rendering them homeless in an instant. Often
these “illegal” homes rest on land that has been inhabited for many
generations by the Arab families.

An example of the discrimination and suspicion that Arab citizens of
Israel encounter, described by Nathan, is the security procedures at Tel
Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. The personnel at the airport use
a main criterion of whether a passenger is a Jew or a non-Jew, rather than
an Israeli or a non-Israeli, to determine threat. Jewish passengers are
nearly always given free passage without questioning. Foreigners are asked
questions, such as whether they have had dealings with Arabs. Arab
citizens themselves are inherently assumed to be a danger. They are
subject to long periods of questioning on their activities, their
acquaintances and reasons for travel. Body searches are common. The
treatment described is not only applied to Arab youths, or those known for
involvement in “subversive” activities; even prestigious Arab journalists
and university professors have been given the same humiliating treatment.

The author also notes that many businesses, such as airlines and hotels,
do not have Arab towns, even fairly sizable ones such as Tamra, registered
on their computer databases. She was only able to persuade Bezeq, the
national telecommunications company, to install a new line in her
apartment in Tamra after several weeks of requests, finally threatening to
go to the media with complaints of discrimination. It is Ms. Nathan’s view
that such entrenched discrimination is intended to keep the Arab
population perpetually segregated, afraid to venture out of their confined
towns and villages. The only way to avoid getting into trouble with the
authorities, which is seemingly inevitable for Arabs in predominantly
Jewish areas, is to remain in their delineated communities. As a result,
“citizenship” of Israel takes on a wholly different meaning, dependent on
ethnicity.

Nathan describes at length the inequities of the country’s education
system. Israel has developed two systems, separating children along ethnic
lines, with the ostensible justification of allowing Arabs to preserve
culture and heritage. However, it is her view that this only permits the
state to maintain a weak and under-funded Arab educational system, with
greatly lower academic standards. Teachers for the Arab schools are
approved by the state security service, the Shin Bet, and the curriculum
is designed to remove references to Palestinian history and culture. For
example, there are no references to the Nakba, the forced depopulation of
Arab Palestine in 1948. One teacher lost his job for giving his students a
brief history of the PLO. The Shin Bet prohibits even great Arab and
Palestinian literature from inclusion in the curriculum. Nathan tells
another story by citing figures for school funding in 2001, published by
the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2004, indicating that the average Arab
student received resources of approximately 105 British pounds yearly,
compared to 485 pounds spent on Jewish students.

Nathan describes the inherent discrimination against Arabs in Israel’s
economy. Even highly educated Arabs are often forced to work in sectors
such as construction or factories because many areas of the economy are
strictly off-limits to Arabs, under the pretext of the work being
“security-related.” According to Ms. Nathan, the prohibited sectors
include Israel’s large establishment of military industries, prisons, the
aerospace industry, airlines and airports, telecommunications firms, water
and electricity companies, the state textile industry and even the Bank of
Israel. Unemployment figures for the Arab population are approximately
double the national aggregate.

Another topic touched upon in the book is the plight of thousands of
internally displaced refugees in Israel. Many have been forced into a
semi-nomadic lifestyle, particularly the Bedouin people of the Negev
region in southern Israel. Approximately 70,000 Bedouins live in terrible
conditions in the Negev. Because the state is unwilling to apportion them
land and building permits to establish proper towns, they must resort to
living in tents and tin shacks. Anything more permanent that is built is
quickly deemed “illegal” by the authorities and demolished. The same
situation is true of Arabs living across the country in temporary housing,
grouped together in what are officially termed “unrecognized villages.”
The residents of these villages cannot hope to receive basic services,
such as electricity, running water, sewage services, or well-built roads.
At any moment, the bulldozers may roll in if the residents attempt to
erect permanent housing.

Nathan grew disenchanted with the supposedly “dovish” left-wing parties in
Israeli politics. Despite the Left’s ostensible position of supporting
some level of Arab rights and statehood, it is in fact the Labour Party
that has overseen the most aggressive periods of expansion of the illegal
settlements in the occupied territories. Labour contributed as much as
Likud to producing “facts on the ground.” Even the most left-leaning
parties that are accepted into the political mainstream do not support
“conceding” any more to the Palestinians than the end of the occupation
and the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza – less than one
quarter of historic Palestine. They reject any notion of a right of return
for the Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes since 1948.
Additionally, even these supposedly left-wing parties rarely, if ever,
raise the issue of the injustices and discrimination facing Palestinian
citizens of Israel. Indeed, just like the “hawkish” right-wing parties,
the Israeli left is fully determined to maintain demographic superiority
over Arabs, no matter how marginalized the Arab minority is to become. The
number of Israelis in the mainstream that truly support equality and
rights for Palestinians is appallingly low, Nathan believes.

Nathan visited the West Bank and observed the desperate situation of its
residents. She noted the complete dominance of the Israeli Defense Forces
in the territory, and how quickly homes and infrastructure can be
destroyed. One prominent issue is that of the lack of access to water. The
West Bank rests atop the largest aquifers in Israel-Palestine, which is
one reason cited for the reluctance to end the military occupation.
Despite the plentiful source of water, most of it is taken by an Israeli
company for sale in their country and to settlers in the West Bank.
Indeed, Palestinians have access to water only at certain intervals, while
the illegal settlements throughout the territory have swimming pools and
sprinkler systems.

On one occasion, Ms. Nathan spoke to a former Israeli soldier who served
in a tank unit in the West Bank. The young man told her of incidences
during which he received direct orders to fire on children throwing
stones, civilian targets that could not possibly be interpreted as posing
a real threat to a tank.

Susan Nathan’s eye-opening account of “The Other Side of Israel” is rarely
reported to the outside world. Although the war crimes committed by the
occupation forces have been documented, outsiders rarely hear of the
equally important issue of rights and equality for Palestinians, both
those under occupation and those in Israel proper. Ms. Nathan’s choice in
moving to an Arab town represented an action that is currently taboo in
Israel – crossing the ethnic divide. Having already been deeply influenced
by her experiences in apartheid South Africa, Nathan was equipped to
recognize the core issue that blocks understanding between Israelis and
Palestinians – the institutionalized segregation and state-induced fear of
Palestinians that undermines future peace and understanding. Until the
Israeli government is prepared to conduct a massive reform in its
treatment of Arabs, it is likely that peace and reconciliation will remain
nothing more than a dream.

http://www.arabamericannews.com/newsarticle.php?articleid=5449

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