PRETORIANEWS
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
(Refer: “Palestinians reduced to second-class citizens inIsrael”) Like so many of her anti-Israel cohorts, Haneen Zoabi is adept at bending the truth to suit her own purposes – in this case accusing Israel of official discrimination against her 1.5 million Arab citizens and the practice of apartheid. To the average reader it would all seem quite reasonable.
Bandy about words such as “Jewish privilege” “racism”. “restricted”, “distorted” etc, not to mention the accusation that in Israel there are more than 40 laws which discriminate against her “Palestinian” citizens (they are not Palestinians but Arab Israelis) and one cannot be blamed for believing that in terms of her Arab community, Israel must be guilty of behaviour most foul.
What Zoabi, the first female Arab Israeli member of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), fails to acknowledge is that, were it not for Israeli democracy, which recognizes its Arab population as full citizens with the full civil, social and political rights applicable to any other Israeli, she would not be occupying the seat that she does. Neither would an Arab judge be a member of Israel’s Supreme Court; neither would there be 4 Arab political parties in parliament,; neither would Arab Israelis have served as Israeli Ambassadors to Finland and Greece and neither would an Arab, Majalli Wahaba have served as Acting State President in 2007 in the absence of the Israeli incumbent.
There are many other examples of Arab participation in what is a very normal and fully democratic Israeli society fromIsrael’s Miss World to her representative in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Zoabi cites discrimination through Citizenship Laws, Education Laws, Nakba Laws and “various loyalty laws” but fails to explain that the Citizenship Laws, for instance, apply not only to Arabs but to anyone who is not Jewish by birth or conversion.Israelis, after all, a state for the Jewish people, the same way thatSaudi Arabiais a state exclusively for Muslims. Many other countries have laws governing the right of entry based on religious, social or other factors.
Without wasting further space in refuting Zoabi’s other allegations, I wish to quote the words of Dr. Tashbih Sayyed, a Shi’ite Pakistani scholar who visited Israel, (more than the vast majority of Israel’s critics have done) expressly to determine whether “there was any truth in the media allegations that Israel was an apartheid state”.
In his report (“A Muslim in a Jewish Land”, Muslim World Today. June 2010 http://www.muslimworldtoday.com/land30.htm ) he concluded that, “Israel Arabs are protected by Israel’s democratic principles and that the Muslim Arab citizens of Israel are afforded all the rights and privileges of Israeli citizenship” He further noted that “Israel is one of the few countries in the Middle East, in contrast to the non-Israeli Arab world, where Arab women enjoy the same status as men and have the right to vote and be elected into public office. Muslim women”, according to Sayyed, “are more liberated inIsrael than in any Muslim country, as Israeli law prohibits polygamy, child marriage and female sexual mutilation.”
Amazingly, within her tiny borders,Israelhas accommodated 1.5 million indigenous Arabs who lived in this region prior to the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1948. Despite the potential dangers presented by this presence,Israel, from the very beginning, granted her Arab population full rights of citizenship without discrimination – hence Ms. Zoabi being the very vocal entity that she is.
Any thinking person would acknowledge that for a country as vulnerable and threatened asIsrael, her level of democracy is unprecedented and the continual charge of her being a race-based apartheid state is no more than devilish propaganda and an horrendous lie.
Media Team Israel 