http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/04/30/Opinion/Opinion.25319.html
Equal rights are not a favor
By David Kimche
(April 30) - The shooting at the Umm el-Fahm crossroads on Saturday
night raises the specter of an Israeli version of the Turkish-Kurdish
conflict.
The Kurdish minority in Turkey has demanded recognition as an
autonomous national minority. The Turkish majority has refused to
grant them their demands, and over the years thousands of people -
Kurds and Turks - have been killed. Could it happen here?
There are two ways to deal with the problem: one is to treat the
Israeli Arab minority as a hostile element that has to be repressed;
the other is to consider them as equal citizens, enjoying equal rights
as the Jewish majority.
"How can we regard the Arabs of Israel as equal citizens when they
display such hostility to the state?" many Israelis would ask.
"How can we consider ourselves to be a true democracy upholding
liberal values when not all of our citizens are treated equally?"
other Israelis would respond.
The hostility that many Israeli Arabs demonstrate towards the state
emanates from two sources: one is the general feeling of solidarity
that many Israeli Arabs feel for their Palestinian brethren. They are,
after all, one people who were arbitrarily divided by a green line,
and it is as natural for them to display solidarity with their own
people as it is for Jews all over the world to show similar feelings
for the State of Israel.
This source of hostility will only be removed when the peace process
will be culminated, and we reach full understanding with our
Palestinian neighbors.
The second source of hostility stems from the gross inequality and
discrimination that has been the lot of Israel's Arabs for the last 50
years.
A typical example is a news item that appeared in the Hebrew press
yesterday, according to which out of 85 Magen David Adom stations in
the country only two were in non-Jewish communities. In the town of
Umm el-Fahm, for instance, there is neither an MDA first aid station
nor a fire station, despite a written promise made by Moshe Katsav,
who was at the time the minister responsible for Arab affairs, that
both would be installed in 1999.
There are dozens of similar examples of discrimination, from Interior
Ministry or Education Ministry budgets to town planning and building
permits and job opportunities, to say nothing of the daily acts of
discrimination that Arab Israelis suffer at the hands of Jewish
Israelis.
Back to the question of how a hostile sector could be granted equal
rights. There exists an inherent vicious circle, for the more we
refuse to grant equal rights to the Arab citizens, the greater their
hostility will be to the Jewish majority, and the greater their
hostility, the less the state will be inclined to grant equal rights.
There can only be one way to break that vicious circle, and that is
the only manner in which we can consider ourselves to be a true
democracy.
There is, obviously, no way we will ever induce the Arabs of Israel to
embrace the Zionist ideology, nor, equally obviously, should we ever
try to do so. They have their own culture, their own history, their
own heroic figures and they certainly do not include Theodor Herzl
among them.
We can, however, significantly reduce their hostility by making real
efforts to reduce the sort of discrimination shown by MDA and by
assiduously granting equal rights to the Israeli Arabs as equal
citizens.
There are those who will say that the Arabs don't have the same
commitments to the state, and don't serve in the army. Nor do the
haredim.
Regardless, in any true democracy equal rights come before equal
commitments. And just as it would be justified to mobilize haredim for
national service, the same should be done for the Arab minority.
We come back to the Umm el-Fahm shooting and the tendency of many to
demand greater repressive measures in order to prevent such incidents
in the future. Repressive measures usually have the opposite effect.
They generate greater hostility which in turn creates more such
incidents.
This is not to say that all efforts should not be made to apprehend
the assailants who randomly took the life of an innocent person.
Every effort should be made to find them, and it must be in the
interest of the leaders of the Arab community to cooperate in this
effort, for the last thing they should want is a deterioration of the
situation into violence.
The most fundamental dictum of any democracy is that the law must be
applied equally to all citizens, in our case to Arabs and Jews alike.
This basic truism must be guarded zealously by all who believe that
Israel must be guided by democratic principles, and it is by these
principles that we must direct our policies with regard to the
minorities - Arab, Druse, and Circassian.
The Jewish character of the State of Israel must be upheld as the only
Jewish state in the world. But within that state all citizens must be
treated equally and have equal rights.
