The
UN's top human rights official has condemned Israel's military actions
in the Gaza Strip, saying that war crimes may have been committed.
Navi
Pillay told an emergency debate at the UN Human Rights Council in
Geneva that Israel's military offensive had not done enough to protect
civilians.
Illustration by GKIMAGES.COM
Israel
has once again unleashed the full force of its military against the
captive Palestinian population, particularly in the besieged
Gaza
Strip, in an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression. Israel's
ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems
from the vast international military cooperation and trade that it
maintains with complicit governments across the world. Over the period
2008-19, the US is set to provide military aid to Israel worth $30bn,
while Israeli annual military exports to the world have reached billions
of dollars.
In recent years, European countries have exported
billions of euros' worth of weapons to Israel, and the EU has furnished
Israeli military companies with research grants worth hundreds of
millions. Emerging economies such as India, Brazil and Chile are rapidly
increasing their military trade and cooperation with Israel, despite
their stated support for Palestinian rights. By importing and exporting
arms to Israel and facilitating the development of Israeli military
technology, governments are effectively sending a clear message of
approval for Israel's military aggression, including its war crimes and
possible crimes against humanity.
Israel's military technology is
marketed as "field-tested" and exported across the world. Military trade
and joint military-related research relations with Israel embolden
Israeli impunity in committing grave violations of international law and
facilitate the entrenchment of Israel's system of occupation,
colonisation and systematic denial of Palestinian rights. We call on the
UN and governments across the world to take immediate steps to
implement a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on
Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid.
Adolfo Peres Esquivel Nobel Peace Laureate, Argentina, Ahdaf Soueif author, Egypt/UK, Aki Olavi Kaurismäki film director, Finland, Alice Walker writer, US, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Nobel Peace Laureate, South Africa, Betty Williams Nobel Peace Laureate, Ireland, Boots Riley rapper, poet, arts producer, US, Brian Eno musician, UK, Caryl Churchill playwright, UK, Chris Hedges journalist, Pullitzer Prize 2002, US, Cynthia McKinney politician, activist, US, David Palumbo-Liu academic, US, Etienne Balibar philosopher, France, Federico Mayor Zaragoza former Unesco director general, Spain, Felim Egan painter, Ireland, Frei Betto liberation theologian, Brazil, Gillian Slovo writer, UK/South Africa, Githa Hariharan writer, India, Giulio Marcon MP (SEL), Italy, Hilary Rose academic, UK, Ilan Pappe historian, Israel, I
smail Coovadia former South African ambassador to Israel, James Kelman writer, Scotland, Janne Teller writer, Denmark, Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour), UK, Joanna Rajkowska artist, Poland, Jody Williams Nobel Peace Laureate, US, John Berger artist, UK, John Dugard former ICJ judge, South Africa, John McDonnell MP (Labour), UK, John Pilger journalist and filmmaker, Australia, Judith Butler philosopher, US, Juliane House academic, Germany, Karma Nabulsi Oxford University, UK/Palestine, Ken Loach filmmaker, UK, Kool AD (Victor Vazquez) musician, US, Liz Lochhead national poet for Scotland, UK, Luisa Morgantini former vice president of the European Parliament, Italy, Mairead Maguire Nobel Peace Laureate, Ireland, Michael Mansfield barrister, UK, Michael Ondaatje author, Canada/Sri Lanka, Mike Leigh writer and director, UK, Naomi Wallace playwright, screenwriter, poet, US, Noam Chomsky academic, author, US, Nurit Peled academic, Israel, Prabhat Patnaik economist, India, Przemyslaw Wielgosz chief editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Polish edition, Poland, Raja Shehadeh author and Lawyer, Palestine, Rashid Khalidi academic, author, Palestine/US, Richard Falk f
ormer UN special rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, US, Rigoberta Menchú Nobel Peace Laureate, Guatemala, Roger Waters musician, UK, Ronnie Kasrils former government minister, South Africa, Rose Fenton director, Free Word Centre, UK, Sabrina Mahfouz author, UK, Saleh Bakri actor, Palestine, Sir Geoffrey Bindman lawyer, UK, Slavoj Zizek author, Slovenia, Steven Rose academic, UK, Tom Leonard writer, Scotland, Tunde Adebimpe musician, US, Victoria Brittain journalist, UK, Willie van Peer academic, Germany, Zwelinzima Vavi secretary general of Cosatu, South Africa
Israeli police detain a protester during Monday’s protest by Israeli Arabs in Nazareth against the Gaza offensive. Photograph: Reuters/Ammar Awad
Madj Kayyal – self-confident, purposeful, brimming with energy – has the air of a man who feels he’s part of something big.
Over coffee on a hot summer’s morning in Haifa, in northern
Israel, the 23-year-old holds forth enthusiastically about how his generation has turned its back on political parties, with their hierarchies and compromises, and fashioned a newer, more fluid form of political activism dominated by smaller networks linked by social media.
“There is a big change happening,” he says. “There are internal changes in Arab society and the political movement here, and in the way people are organising.”
Kayyal’s cause is that of Palestinians in Israel. Comprising more than 20 per cent of the Israeli population, Arabs are the Jewish state’s largest minority and their position goes to the heart of some of the country’s biggest social debates. But, according to Kayyal, the younger generation haven’t merely embraced new ways of doing politics. They also want more than their parents did.
“In the 1990s it was a revolutionary thing to say ‘I am Palestinian’ or hold the Palestinian flag. It was a big issue to declare your identity,” he says. “The attitude now is to put identity into action. In the 1990s, the action was to declare solidarity – to say, ‘We are Palestinian and we support Gaza.’ In 2014, the youth movement doesn’t say, ‘We want to declare our anger.’ It says, ‘We want to change the law.’ And how are we going to do that? By taking to the streets.”
The descendants of 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who remained on their land when Israel was established in 1948, the Arabs in Israel have been under the spotlight in recent weeks as the conflict in Gaza has escalated into the deadliest confrontation here in a decade.
It was not in the West Bank but in the Arab towns of the Galilee, in the north of Israel, that some of the biggest demonstrations broke out earlier this month after a 16-year-old boy,
Muhammad Abu Khdeir, was abducted and killed near Jerusalem in what the Israeli authorities say was a racist revenge attack following the killing of three Jewish teenagers.
Street protests
Those incidents were part of the sequence of events that spiralled into the Gaza war. And as battles have raged in Gaza, the Arab communities of northern Israel have continued to take to the streets. On Monday hundreds of protesters clashed with police in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, during a 3,000-strong protest against the military strikes on Gaza.
Israel’s Arab minority, largely concentrated in the towns and cities of the Galilee, occupies an ambiguous space in the country’s political and social map. They have Israeli passports, attend Israeli schools and universities and vote in Israeli elections. According to prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, they enjoy full civil rights.
Yet this is only part of the story. Half of families below the poverty line in Israel are Arab, even though the Arab community accounts for just one fifth of the population. Two-thirds of the children defined as suffering from malnutrition in 2010 in Israel were Palestinians. Schools are segregated.
A number of Arab politicians are members of the Knesset but even the Israeli foreign ministry, on its website, observes that the Arab community is “a politically peripheral group in a highly centralised state”, an Arabic-speaking minority in a Hebrew-speaking state, and “essentially non-assimilating”.
Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, Arab citizens have been exempted from compulsory military service out of consideration for their family, religious and cultural affiliations with the Arab world “as well as concern over possible dual loyalties”, as the ministry puts it. There are just 2,200 Muslims in Israel’s security services, which includes the police and prison staff.
As individuals, many Palestinians have achieved success in the Jewish state as judges, politicians, doctors, writers, broadcasters and academics. The number in the civil service is growing. Yet, within the community, there is deep-seated anger about harassment and discrimination, and what is seen as an attempt in recent years to amend the laws to weaken their rights.
Grievances include a law of loyalty which requires citizens to express full recognition of Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state; the right of communities in Jewish suburbia not to accept Palestinians as residents; and the right of the state to discriminate by law against Arabs in the privatisation of lands.
“[Foreign minister] Avigdor Lieberman’s election slogan was that the problem is not the West Bank and the settlements, the problem is the Palestinians inside Israel,” says
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, a Haifa-based legal centre.
Inferior status
“Emphasising the Jewish character of the Israeli state is mainly targeting the citizenship status of the Palestinians in Israel, giving them secondary and inferior status and portraying their existence as a problem.”
The killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir was the “trigger” for protests in the Galilee, says
Mohammed Zeidan of the Arab Association for Human Rights in Nazareth, but their deeper cause was a sense of anger after years of discrimination and an increasingly hostile climate – compounded by a sense that the peace process had been buried and the international community had lost interest.
In Haifa, a relatively prosperous port town with a mixed population, social integration is “non-existent”, says
Nadim Nashif, who runs
Baladna, an educational organisation for young Palestinians in the town.
Jews and Arabs work alongside each other, they buy and sell to each other, but mixed marriages are rare and the communities live in different areas, maintaining merely “the minimum [contact] needed in order to have some kind of normality”. In Nazareth, about an hour’s drive from Haifa, this division is visible. There are two cities: crowded and run-down old Nazareth, where the Arab majority lives, and Nazareth Illit, or upper Nazareth, a hilltop development where the Jewish population (and increasing numbers of well-to-do Arabs) can enjoy landscaped public spaces, low crime and a fancy new shopping centre.
When standing for election last year, the mayor of Nazareth Illit said he would “rather cut off my right arm” than build an Arab school in the district.
‘Glass wall’
“You think we are living together,” Zeidan says, sitting in his office on a bustling shopping street in lower Nazareth. “But if you look closely, you will see that there is a glass wall that separates the two communities.”
There’s not much enthusiasm for the two-state solution in the Galilee, where the benefit to Palestinians could be relatively limited. The problem, Nashif argues, is the idea of a state built explicitly for one group.
“If tomorrow a Jewish person from New York takes a plane and comes here, he has much more rights than I do,” he said.
“On the other hand, it’s also time for Palestinians to recognise that there are Jewish people here and they probably will stay here, so you cannot have a Palestinian state unless you want to have a tiny space in the West Bank.”
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