Ha'aretz, Sunday, January 11, 1998
Because he's an Arab
Ha'aretz Editorial
Mayor Amram Mitzna and the Labor faction of Haifa council frustrated the appointment of
Meretz representative Ghassan Abu Warda as chairman of the local education department.
Nobody denies the claim that it was the duty of Mitzna and his party to honor the
agreement with Meretz, but the appointment was blocked on the grounds that Abu Warda, who
serves as deputy mayor, lacks the skills required for the job. The basic reason for
keeping the job from Abu Warda was that he is an Israeli Arab. In the first days of his
struggle for the job, this was said expressly both by anonymous sources within Haifa Labor
Party and by a senior Likud representative, who stated that until there is an Arab chief
of staff, there will be no Arab education department head.
Opponents explained that a majority of students in Haifa are Jewish, and they should
not be under the supervision of an Arab. Later, when resistance to this racist reasoning
arose, it was said that Abu Warda is indeed worthy of serving as deputy mayor of Haifa,
but lacked the skills necessary for the education position.
None of these explanations is satisfactory. What is true for a senior army officer is
not true for the manager of a municipal education department. Service in the IDF before
full peace is achieved raises emotional difficulties for many Arab Israelis. This is not
true of their participation in the Israeli education system.
Also, the claim that Abu Warda does not have the proper skills is not logical. He is an
academic and a lawyer by profession; no wrongdoing is associated with his name, nor any
criminal conviction or improper behavior. The political system has no tools to measure the
degree of his suitability to stand at the head of the education system as a political
appointment, nor is such a test necessary. This is the nature of democracy: government and
municipal department heads are political appointments, and those working with them have to
have the appropriate professional skills.
The truth about the appointment of advocate Abu Warda is the same as for other
political appointments in the government and municipal systems; nobody can say in advance
and for certain whether his skills are less than those that allow Yehoshua Matza to serve
as Health Minister or Michael Eitan as Science Minister.
There has never been an aptitude test for Jewish public activists. The denial of Haifa
Mayor Mitzna on the matter will not help him here, and there is no alternative but to
conclude that the main reason for preventing Abu Warda's appointment to the job is his
Arab origin.
Even though the initiative to disqualify Abu Warda came from the Haifa Labor faction,
the national party should not accept the ease with which Mitzna's demand was met. The
Labor standing committee, and primarily its chairman Ehud Barak, should unambiguously
express their opinion about the act committed by Mitzna and his colleagues.
One can only wonder at why such a crass decision, originating from racist
considerations, has aroused only a weak cry ending only in the withdrawal of Meretz from
the municipal coalition. Meretz should have awakened outrage among the enlightened public.
Bombastic talk about making Israeli Arabs part of the country does not have to be tested
by the manning of the top of the IDF pyramid, but by the manning of the hundreds and
thousands of jobs that Jews and Arabs are permitted to hold, for professional and
political reasons.
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Source:
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=12105&mador=3&datee=1/11/98
