On the 12th of May 2010, an Israeli Magistrates Court extended the political detentions of Palestinian civil society activists Dr. Omar Said and Ameer Makhoul by 4 and 5 days, respectively. The extensions were issued in closed door hearings in which Said and Makhoul were not permitted to meet their legal representatives. (Video)
Israeli Palestinians
The Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday ruled that two Israeli Arab men arrested last week over allegations of spying and ties to Hezbollah will remain jailed until early next week… and ruled that Makhoul will not be able to see a lawyer until next Friday at the earliest. Dozens of activists gathered earlier Wednesday outside the Petah Tikva court to protest the arrest of the two Israeli Arabs over allegations of spying and ties to Hezbollah.
“We are demonstrating over the collective slander. An Arab doesn’t commit a crime alone, but rather in the name of the Arab nation. This is plainly an attempt to isolate and exclude the Arab population from any circle of legitimacy.”
In the past two weeks the Israeli internal intelligence agency, the Shabak / Shin Bet, arrested two prominent Israeli activists in the middle of the night. The men are well known leaders of Palestinian organizations inside Israel… arrested under secret evidence and a gag order was issued to the Israeli press regarding their arrests.
The original Hebrew version of the gag order issued by the Israeli court in the matter of the arrest and investigation of Ameer Makhoul, and a translation.
The military censor on Monday lifted a gag order on news that two Israeli Arab political activists were arrested last week on charges of spying and contact with a foreign agent from Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Omar Sayid, a member of the Balad movement, and Amir Makhoul, director general of the charity Ittijah (Union of Arab Community-Based Associations) were detained by the Shin Bet security service and police anti-terror squads.
IOA Editor: “The Only Democracy in the Middle East” has a convenient way of dealing with non-violent opposition: Putting it away.
Israel is intimidating [us] because we are reasserting our community’s stake in the Palestinian struggle. Twenty years ago few considered the Palestinians in Israel as a part of the Palestinian people or the Palestinian cause. During the Oslo process of the 1990s, we were considered an internal problem for Israel to deal with, but our networking, advocacy and lobbying has changed this. Israel is increasingly repressing us to divide Palestinians from each other and isolate us from the outside world.
IOA Editor: See also Ittijah General Director Ameer Makhoul Arrested by Israeli Authorities
This morning at 3:10 a.m. [6 May 2010], Israeli Security Agency (ISA) agents accompanied by Israeli police raided Ameer Makhoul’s family home in Haifa and arrested him. Mr. Makhoul is a human rights defender and serves as the general director of Ittijah – The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations and as the Chairman of the Public Committee for the Defense of Political Freedom in the framework of the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel.
IOA Editor: See also Ameer Makhoul: Israel’s repression of its Palestinian citizens unites us in struggle
UPDATE: Welcome, again, to the many new readers from “The Only Democracy in the Middle East” who cannot read this story in local media due to Israeli censorship — yet another Shin-Bet-initiated, court-approved gag order. Please come back to read more about the Occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and all matters the Israeli government tries to prevent you from knowing. (9 May 2010)
The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.
This morning [22 April 2010], the Israeli Border Police prevented Mr. Ameer Makhoul, the Director of Ittijah – Union of Arab Community-Based Associations inside Israel, from leaving the country. Makhoul, who also serves as the head of the Popular Committee for the Defense of Political Freedoms, received a prohibition order from leaving the country upon his arrival to the Jordan River Crossing. The order, which was issued by the Israeli Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai, prohibits Makhoul from leaving the country for a period of two months.
A 2007 report on racial profiling by Israeli carriers… concluded: “it is hard to find any Arab citizen who travels abroad by air and who has not experienced a discriminatory security check at least once”… [This] incident follows on the heels of a diplomatic crisis between Israel and South Africa over revelations that spies posing as El Al staff have been operating at Johannesburg airport, gathering information on non-Jewish passengers visiting Israel.
We have rights not just in this land, but also rights over this land. This is a historic axiom. Even if the generation that experienced the events of Land Day in 1976 does not get to see the desired change, our message will be passed to all future generations as they mark Land Day each year.
Recent poll reveals steep rise in racist views against Arabs in Israel; many participants feel hatred, fear when overhearing Arabic, 75 percent don’t approve of shared apartment buildings. Over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason, according to a recent survey by the Geocartography Institute.
Scandar Copti: “Successive Israeli governments that prevent the most basic things, such as self-definition, in every way possible, whether through racist laws, the naming of streets, the way the state handles social welfare situations. Racism and discrimination is employed at all levels. I can talk to you about 500 families in Jaffa, in my area, who have received eviction and demolition orders for their homes and are living under an existential threat”
The current Knesset is the most racist Israeli parliament since the country’s founding, according to a report published Sunday by the Coalition Against Racism and the Mossawa Center, which works to promote equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Jonathan Cook: Israel has nationalised 93 per cent of the country’s territory, confining most of its 1.3 million Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, to 120 or so communities that existed at the time of the state’s creation in 1948. Meanwhile, more than 700 rural communities, including Nevatim, have remained exclusively Jewish by requiring that anyone who wants to buy a home applies to local vetting committees, which have been used to weed out Arab applicants.
Jonathan Cook: An Arab-owned restaurant in the Israeli city of Haifa has been caught in a whirlwind of legal action and threats of violence after staff refused to serve a soldier in military uniform, an incident that is rapidly tarnishing the city’s reputation as a model of good Jewish-Arabs relations.
MK Taleb El-Sana (United Arab List-Ta’al): [The law] “proves the failure of Zionism, which needs to legislate a law in order to force the Zionist narrative and to rewrite history during which the Zionist movement committed crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people.”
The ultimate Israeli dream is that the Coptis and Tibis will disappear from sight. If the so-called demographic problem can’t be solved by driving Arabs out, we’ll try to get rid of them another way: destroy their identity, cloud their national memory and turn them into Israelis, not to mention Zionists. It won’t work. We are not only talking about economic discrimination, but about trampling on national heritage. This won’t work either.
The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.
Overall, the Arab population in Israel [approximately 1.5 million people] dropped from an average of 3.4% for the years of 1996 to 2000, to 2.6% for 2008. In comparison, Egypt’s growth rate is 2.2%, with Jordan’s at 2.4%.
Jaffa Councillor Omar Siksik: “For six decades the authorities have not built one new house for the Arab population, and in fact they have demolished many Arab homes, while building social housing for Jews.”
The Tel Aviv District Court rejected a petition this week against a decision to lease land in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood for the exclusive use of members of the religious Zionist community.
MP Zahalka: “Imagine the outcry if a Jewish representative in the US or Britain was expected to swear loyalty to his country as a Christian state.”
Israel is pushing the Palestinian community to a big confrontation, in order to harm the whole community. We must look at the whole of the Palestinian community since 1948. We need to include the 1.4 million Palestinian people living in Israel in our efforts for just solution.
“I, Ahmed Tibi, a tall, proud Arab, is happy to be on the same side as prominent Arab intellectuals who came out forcefully against Holocaust denial in the Middle East and other places around the world.” And “Those who were victims of that horrible death, which is a byproduct of a malicious exercise of power – a destructive… must be attentive to the cries of the bereaved mother whose home was destroyed and whose children were buried underneath it; to the pain and cries of a doctor who lost his daughters; to the victims of the other, even if the other is his victim, the victim’s victim.”
An Arab-Israel student at the Ariel College in the West Bank was told to get off a bus because she “dared” to speak Arabic on her cell phone, and was also subjected to a full body search.
IOA Editor: Despite the biased tone of the report, the facts speak for themselves. As does the reality of the “Israeli-Arab minority.”
Amir Nizar Zuabi: “I don’t draw the line between: you’re Israeli, he’s Palestinian, or Muslim or Christian. I draw the line in a different place completely. I draw the line between people who believe that all people were born equal, and hence deserve the same things, same rights, same duties, same everything, and people who say, ‘Yes, but I am more special.’”
This new arrangement makes an already problematic situation even worse. Those same lands that the state expropriated from Arabs in the past for “public use,” and which were then added to the vast land reserves it controls, are now being privatized, meaning they are being sold to the highest bidder. As long as he’s a Jew, of course. Granted, you won’t find a sign anywhere saying “no entry for Arabs,” but aside from that, all the rules of the Wild West are in force.
IOA Editor: This is one of the most important issues in Israel today, defining the very nature of the nominally “Jewish and democratic” state. Excluding Palestinians who are Israeli citizens from land ownership has been the foundation of Israeli-statehood from 1948. (Much has been written on the subject, starting with Sabri Jiryis’ The Arabs in Israel, 1966.) This current twist is designed to continue the practice, which is anchored in a complex web of laws that are updated as circumstances change, and in order to circumvent Israeli Supreme Court rulings that threaten to undo the old order. The bottom line: the state legally bars its Palestinian Arab population – 25% of Israel’s total – from buying land in the ‘free market,’ demonstrating again that it is neither Jewish nor democratic – and how evil this very concept is.
MK Ahmed Tibi: “Since the foundation of the state, the Israel Lands Administration is solely used as Jewish land administration. The director of the Israel Lands Administration has used all the tactics, with the help of the Jewish Agency, to allocate state land only to Jews. Despite the bitter attempt over the decades, not even one Arab town has been established since the state’s foundation.”
“IDF dogs are trained to pounce and attack any Arab who shouts Allah Hu Akbar, as a Pavlovian reaction,” said [MK Ahmed] Tibi. “So here I say: Allah Hu Akbar. Are there any dogs here to attack me?”
“Since the foundation of the state, the Israel Lands Administration is solely used as Jewish land administration. The director of the Israel Lands Administration has used all the tactics, with the help of the Jewish Agency, to allocate state land only to Jews… [N]ot even one Arab town has been established since the state’s foundation.”
The bill, proposed by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu Party, suggests changing the wording of the current oath taken by MKs so that instead of swearing loyalty to “the State of Israel and its laws,” MKs will be required to vow loyalty to the State of Israel as a “Jewish democratic state.”
The IDF Spokespersons’ Unit said Golan issued the order against Sheikh Ra’ad Salah “on the grounds of ensuring the security of the State of Israel and maintaining public peace and order.”
After answering questions from Israeli security employees regarding her work and the film festivals in which she had taken part, [documentary film director Sahera Dirbas] was asked to enter a separate room for continued questioning, where a female security guard demanded she remove all her clothing.
