'Jews-only' law sparks firestorm
By Bradley Burston, Ha'aretz Correspondent

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=184504&displayTypeCd=\
1&sideCd=1&contrassID=2


A proposed law that would allow Jews to bar Arabs from
buying homes in their communities could expose Israel
to a fresh wave of condemnation recalling the
now-rescinded UN resolution equating Zionism and
racism, critics of the bill said Wednesday.

In a decision that set off a storm of debate, Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet Sunday voted to
endorse a bill that would allow areas within Israel
which have been designated as state land to be devoted
to residential use by Jews alone. The bill still faces
considerable legislative hurdles before it can be
passed into law.

Although worded in the gray phraseology of legislative
practice, the measure goes to the heart of a crucial
dichotomy of modern Israel: how to maintain a
pluralistic state that is at once formally Jewish in
character and genuinely democratic in practice.

"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.

"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."

The bill was prompted by a landmark Supreme Court
ruling over the efforts of the northern Israel Jewish
village of Katzir to bar an Israel Arab from buying a
house there. Although defined as a "community
settlement", without the complex communal
interrelationships of kibbutzim and moshavim, Katzir
residents voted to keep Israeli Arab Adel Ka'adan from
buying a plot and building a house there.

After years of legal wrangling, the court in March,
2000, accepted Ka'adan's argument that the policy of
the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body which
adminsters state lands for many Jewish villages,
discriminated against Arab citizens and was therefore
illegal.

Sponsored by National Religious Party MK Haim
Druckman, critics said the proposed law was designed
to bypass the court decision, formalizing
descimination on Israel's lawbooks.

Education Minister Limon Livnat, who spearheaded the
cabinet decision to ratify the bill, said the purpose
of the measure was to clarify de facto policies in
founding specifically Jewish communities within the
nation. "This does not stem at all from
discrimination, rather from the main basis of Zionism
- the return of the Jewish people to its land."

Livnat dismissed suggestions that the bill was
anti-democratic, saying that each sector in israel
should be allowed to live among its own. Moreover, she
said, "All of us were raised on the same Zionist
values, according to which, the state of Israel may,
from the standpoint of national security - the wider
view of security, not necessarily of concrete security
... foster the value of a Galilee with a Jewish
majority."

But cabinet minister Dan Meridor, a conspicuous
dissenter as the cabinet endorsed the bill by a wide
margin, denounced the proposed law as "a grave error"
and "flagrantly discriminatory".

"It is not permissible to allow an Israeli law to
state that a non-Jew may be prevented from living in a
particular place for security reasons," Meridor said.
"This is not a security matter at all. There is no
need for flagrant discrimination." Indeed, he said, by
contrast to discrimination that Jews have experienced
in the Diaspora, the Jewish state legally does not
discriminate against non-Jews.

"As to the charges that Zionism is racism - what are
we ourselves saying here?"

In one of the darkest moments of Israeli diplomacy,
the United Nations passed a resolution in 1975
declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial
discrimination." Despite strenuous lobbying efforts by
Israel, the resolution remained on the books until the
Gulf War and the subsequent Madrid Middle East peace
conference led the world body to rescind the Zionism
is racism measure in December, 1991.

Over the past two years, however, the collapse of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process, coupled with open
warfare betwen the sides, have revived Arab-led
denunciations of Israel as a state that practices
racism akin to South Africa's long-repealed apartheid
regulations that overtly favored whites over blacks
and people of mixed race.

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."

The debate over the law split Ariel Sharon's ruling
Likud party, with Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, in
the past a relative moderate on such issues, left
sitting firmly on the fence. "Legislation such as this
has international repercussions that are not good for
the state of Israel," said Sheetrit, who abstained in
the Sunday cabinet vote.

"I don't think that this must be made into law. I
don't believe that you should make a law that
specifies that one discriminates against someone from
the standpoint of his rights in the state of Israel.
On the other hand, I can certainly understand that
there are population groups in Israel who wish to live
apart, particularly community settlements, like
Bedouin, Arab, Jewish, Christian or any other category
for that matter."

Asked why he refrained from voting against the
proposed law, Sheetrit said, "There is a central
question on this point - Is there a conflict between
the values of a Jewish state and of a democratic
state? If such a conflict does exist, it must be
reduced to the minimum.

"We must reach an understanding, but not by means of
laws or Supreme Court appeals to force people to
accept into their midst people who will spur disputes
and trouble within the community ... But if there's no
problem, there's no reason not to let them live there,
whether Jew, (Muslim) Arab, or Christian."

As the debate over the proposed law intensified,
Livnat said she viewed the decision as "a very great
victory for those who view Israel as a democratic
Jewish state as opposed as those who see it as the
nation of all its citizens. There is no racism in
this."

Livnat bristled when an interviewer on state-owned
Israel Radio went further, drawing a parallel to
anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany. "When the Jews came
here after the World War Two Nazi Holocaust, perhaps
it would not have been expected that Jews would do
something like this to Arabs," the interviewer said.

"Any comparison of this type is totally unacceptable,"
Livnat replied. "Are we exterminating a people? Are we
killing people, or forcing them into concentration
camps? How can anyone make such a comparison?"

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More on this topic at:
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/Israel/






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