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Israeli Officials Dub New Land Law “Apartheid”
OCCUPIED
JERUSALEM, July 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Israeli
cabinet sparked charges of racial discrimination Monday, July 8, after
it approved a bill enabling state land to be reserved for Jews only
“for security reasons.”
The
bill, sponsored by Rabbi Haim Druckman, a deputy for the far-right
National Religious Party, to overturn a March 2000 ruling by the
Supreme Court, was approved by 17 ministers to late Sunday, July 7, a
government official said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Human
rights groups, the main opposition party, the government’s legal
advisor and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres all criticized the move,
which Druckman on his part called a “victory for Zionism.”
The
measure, which still has to be approved by the Israeli parliament,
stems from a suit brought to the Supreme Court by Adel Kaadan, an
Israeli Arab who wished to buy land in the cooperative village of
Katzir in Galilee, but was rejected because he was an Arab, said AFP.
The
village was set up in 1982 by the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency,
whose mission is to attract Jews living abroad to come to Israel
and establish Jewish communities.
As
a result of Kaadan’s petition, the Supreme Court ruled there should
be no discrimination between Jews and Arabs in the distribution of
state lands, even those managed by the Jewish Agency.
According
to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel
(ACRI), the state holds title to 93 percent of all land in Israel,
the vast majority of which is leased by the Jewish Agency.
ACRI’s
chief legal adviser Dan Yakir said that since the Supreme Court
ruling, the Jewish Agency has not been allowed to discriminate about
who lives on the land it administers.
However,
if the proposed bill is passed by the Knesset (parliament), it would
give the Jewish Agency the legal backing to prevent any non-Jewish
Israeli from living on land under its control, Yakir told AFP.
“With
the support of the government, the chances are that this bill will be
passed, unfortunately,” Yakir said.
“This
regrettable decision by the Israeli cabinet amounts to apartheid,”
Kaadan told the Israeli daily newspaper, Ma’ariv.
“Peace-loving
people, both Arabs and Jews, are struggling to bring people closer
together and strengthen coexistence, and in one moment a government
rises and in one unfortunate decision kills these budding flowers of
peace,” he said.
“I
don’t know where the common sense and conscience of all those who
supported the acceptance of such a racist decision are.”
ACRI,
which has been representing the Kaadan family’s case, slammed the
decision, saying the state was prohibited from discriminating against
its citizens in the allotment of public lands.
“The
Kaadan family’s battle ... is a legal struggle over the nature of
democracy in Israel, as defined in the Israeli Declaration of
Independence,” the organization said in a statement.
“The
treatment of Arab citizens by the state as enemies until proven
otherwise has no place in a democracy. This prejudicial attitude must
not be given expression in the discrimination against citizens based
on their national origin.”
Attorney
general and government legal advisor Elyakim Rubinstein urged
ministers not to support the bill when it came before the Knesset,
saying it would widen the rift between Jews and Arabs, the Israeli
daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported.
Rubenstein
said the bill was unnecessary, adding that the pursuit of equality
between Jews and Arabs does not run counter to the realization of
Zionism.
The
Supreme Court ruling in the Katzir case was not the end of Zionism, he
added. The decision was rejected out of hand as “racist” by
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and the Labor party, the second largest
party in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-leaning government.
Peres,
Sharon and Labor Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer all missed
Sunday’s vote because of a meeting with the Egyptian intelligence
chief General Omar Soleiman.
Peres
said in a statement that “the Labor party would fight with all its
strength against this racist decision.”
The
decision went against the agreement which set up Sharon’s coalition
and the government’s basic line, which speaks explicitly about full
equal rights for all citizens of Israel,
he said.
The
head of the left-wing opposition party Meretz, Yossi Sarid, called it
“a racist stain on Israel.”
“No
other government in the democratic world would have adopted such a
law,” he said.
The
question is supremely sensitive in Israel,
which fought for years against a United Nations general assembly
resolution, passed in 1975 and only rescinded in 1991, which equated
Zionism with racism.
“If we are not already totally an apartheid state, we are
getting much, much closer to it,” said former cabinet minister and
leftist Meretz party founder Shulamit Aloni, reported Ha’aretz.
“We
are also moving farther and farther away from the founding document of
the state of Israel,” she said, in a reference to the nation’s
1948 Declaration of Independence, which pledged “development of the
country for the benefit of all its residents” and “complete social
and political equality to all its citizens, regardless of religion,
race, or gender.”
Aloni, an attorney, said Israel had already put
segregation into effect in a number of ways, among them in
appropriating Arab-owned land, designating it as “state land,” and
earmarking it for use by specifically Jewish towns and villages.
She angrily dismissed suggestions that the law was an outgrowth
of Israeli-Arab rioting at the outset of the current Palestinian
uprising. “If you see this as a life-and-death matter, that means
that the state of Israel views its Arab citizens as the enemy.”
“Perhaps we should turn every Israeli Arab village into a
detention camp, like we do in the occupied territories, so that
Druckman and the rest of the messianics could take away their land as
well,” Aloni said.
“By the right of our might, we are acting as a racist nation.
South Africa, as well, was white and democratic. But that was not the
intention here.”
Hashem
Mahameed, Arab Israeli member of Knesset, told Shouki Khatib, the head
of the supreme committee for Arab Israelis in a letter, September
2001, that there is a plan to expel Israeli Arabs from inside the
lands that was occupied in 1948, called Israel.
He
told him that he found a report issued by the National Security
Research Center in Haifa University which said that the increase in
the number of Palestinians in Israel is dangerous the security of
Israel.
The report also calls for the eradication of this
danger.
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