Commentary Magazine


Topic: Israeli Arabs

Using a Double Standard on Hate Crimes to Bash Israel

Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?

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Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?

That’s certainly the conclusion many liberals leaped to about a similar wave of anti-Arab attacks in Israel. But what I actually just described is the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and there has–quite properly–been no similar rush to denounce America. Since the American government and people overwhelmingly condemn such attacks, and America remains one of the best places in the world to live openly as a Jew, liberals correctly treat such incidents as exceptions rather than proof that the U.S. is irredeemably anti-Semitic. But somehow, Israel never merits a similarly nuanced analysis.

Consider just a few of the attacks I referenced in the first paragraph: This past weekend–on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year–swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity at Emory University in Atlanta, and also on a synagogue in Spokane, Washington, on the other side of the country. In August, a Jewish couple was attacked in New York by thugs who shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw a water bottle at the woman, and punched her skullcap-wearing husband. In July, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked by stick-wielding thugs in Los Angeles. On August 9, an Orthodox rabbi was murdered in Miami while walking to synagogue on the Sabbath; police insist this wasn’t a hate crime, though they haven’t yet arrested any suspects, but local Jews are unconvinced, as a synagogue and a Jewish-owned car on the same street were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans just two weeks earlier. And in April, a white supremacist killed three people at two Jewish institutions near Kansas City, Kansas.

A Martian looking at this list, devoid of any context, might well conclude that America is a deeply anti-Semitic country. And of course, he’d be wrong. Context–the fact that these incidents are exceptions to the overwhelmingly positive picture of Jewish life in America–matters greatly.

Yet that’s no less true for anti-Arab attacks in Israel. As in America, both the government and the public have almost unanimously condemned such attacks. As in America, culprits have been swiftly arrested in some cases, like the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July; also as in America, the failure to make arrests in other cases stems not from tolerance for such crimes, but from the simple fact that some cases are harder to solve than others.

Finally, as in America, these incidents belie the fact that overall, Israeli Arabs are better integrated and have more rights not only than any of their counterparts in the Middle East, but also than some of their counterparts in Europe. Israel, for instance, has no laws against building minarets, like Switzerland does, or against civil servants wearing headscarves, as France does. Arabs serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and sometimes the cabinet; they are doctors, university department heads, judges, and high-tech workers.

Clearly, anti-Arab prejudice exists in Israel, just as anti-Jewish prejudice exists in America. But a decade-old tracking project found that it has been declining rather than growing. And successive governments have been trying hard in recent years to narrow persistent Arab-Jewish gaps: For instance, an affirmative action campaign almost quadrupled the number of Arabs in the civil service from 2007 to 2011. Indeed, as Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, argued in August, it’s precisely the Arab minority’s growing integration that has outraged the anti-Arab fringe and helped spark the recent rise in hate crimes.

So it’s past time for liberals to give Israel the same courtesy they extend America: Stop looking at hate crimes in a vacuum and start seeing them for what they are–isolated incidents that don’t and shouldn’t condemn an entire country as “racist.”

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Israel and Its Arabs: Rockets, Riots, and the Dream of Coexistence

One age-old critique of Israeli deterrence, self-defense, and unwillingness to give away the store in negotiations with the Palestinians was psychological: didn’t Israeli leaders realize, it was asked (rhetorically), how they were radicalizing a new generation of Palestinian youth, who only knew “occupation?” I often would wonder why these same voices didn’t ask the reverse question: what if a generation of Israelis grew up in a time of recurring intifadas and ceaseless rocket fire, condemning Israeli youth to PTSD and burdened by an instinct to constantly look over their shoulder? How might such a generation feel about its Arab neighbors?

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One age-old critique of Israeli deterrence, self-defense, and unwillingness to give away the store in negotiations with the Palestinians was psychological: didn’t Israeli leaders realize, it was asked (rhetorically), how they were radicalizing a new generation of Palestinian youth, who only knew “occupation?” I often would wonder why these same voices didn’t ask the reverse question: what if a generation of Israelis grew up in a time of recurring intifadas and ceaseless rocket fire, condemning Israeli youth to PTSD and burdened by an instinct to constantly look over their shoulder? How might such a generation feel about its Arab neighbors?

Of course, neither argument is a legitimate defense of violence. The importance of personal responsibility in the Middle East cannot be reiterated enough. Whatever the pretext, whatever the grievance, the conflict would spiral completely out of control if the affected population decided contempt and vengefulness were sufficient cause for vigilantism. And Israelis should (and generally do) know better than to say, “well, the other side does it.” But those who would blame Israeli policies for the “radicalization” of Palestinian youth should take a look at the other side of that equation, and be consistent. The New York Times delves into the topic today.

In an article about Israeli soul searching after the murder of an Arab teen last week, the Times makes yet another foray into the world of moral equivalence but ends up undermining its own point. After all, the Times did not also write an accompanying article about Palestinian or Israeli-Arab soul searching. Nonetheless, even if such soul searching is one-sided, it is welcome. No society should desensitize itself to the murder of children.

The Times then tries to pin Israeli radicalization on the religious right, but accidentally stumbles upon a different point. The reporter discovers that religious leaders are condemning such violence in no uncertain terms and discouraging their followers from even contemplating it. The Times goes looking for another factor, and finds one:

Tamir Lion, an anthropologist who studies youth, said he was troubled by the changing attitudes among Israel’s young people. For many years, Mr. Lion interviewed soldiers about why they chose to enter combat units. “The answers,” he said on Israel Radio, “were always about the challenge, to show I could make it, the prestige involved.”

That began to change in 2000, he said. “I started to get answers — not a lot, but some — like: ‘To kill Arabs.’ The first time I heard it, it was at the time of the large terror attacks, and since then it has not stopped.”

A generation has grown up in a period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with suicide bombs and military incursions, rocket fire and airstrikes. Young people on both sides may think about the other more as an enemy than as a neighbor.

Those who blamed Israel for radicalizing Palestinian youth could do so freely because they never thought Israeli youth could be radicalized in sufficient numbers to expose their hypocrisy. They might now be wondering if they were wrong.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think they were: Israeli youth may be resentful of the Palestinians who have tried to kill them since the day they were born, but the rare vigilantism will likely remain rare. In part, that’s because of such soul searching. When Israelis go missing, the entire nation holds its breath. When a gruesome hate crime is carried out, Israelis wonder what went wrong.

And that’s what makes this current conflict so worrying for Israelis. It was epitomized by the scene of Arab rioters in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat destroying a light-rail train station built to connect them with the rest of the city. The symbolism was impossible to ignore. As Jonathan Schanzer told the Free Beacon:

The total destruction of the modern light rail—which was seen as a symbol of coexistence between Israeli and Arab areas of Jerusalem—is evidence of mounting frustration among Israeli Arabs, who have increasingly clashed with Israeli police as tensions reach a boiling point following the murders.

“These are Arab-Israelis in Jerusalem, and they destroyed a multi-million dollar project that connected them to the rest of the city,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). “This is apartheid, self imposed.”

Israelis know Hamas and its supporters want an unending genocidal war against the Jews. But they believe that Israel’s Arabs want what they want: peace, safety, coexistence. When Israel’s Arabs destroy symbols of such coexistence, when they explicitly reject Jewish Israelis’ overtures, they raise the concern that the coexistence they prize is illusory, a time bomb with an exposed fuse.

Another intifada, or something like it, would reinforce this concern. And Israelis who see–and deplore–the rise in anger and mistrust after the last intifada know how precarious that coexistence will be if each generation grows up with its own intifada. And they’re all too aware of the limits of soul searching if they’re the only ones engaging in it.

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The New Israel Fund—Civil Rights or Political Warfare: An Exchange

Editor’s note: In her March 28 post “An Alternative Model for Pro-Israel Liberals,” Evelyn Gordon compared the work of philanthropist Robert Price to that of the New Israel Fund and J Street. The New Israel Fund’s Naomi Paiss has written in defense of her group. Evelyn Gordon’s response follows.

In the latest paternalistic attack on pro-Israel progressives, Evelyn Gordon attempted to save liberals from themselves. By equating the New Israel Fund and J Street with disloyalty to Israel, she resurrects a disproven canard now only used by those with an ultra-nationalist political agenda. Her depiction of the New Israel Fund (NIF) and our grantees is particularly scathing. And wrong.

The New Israel Fund has always prided itself on being a cutting-edge organization. We gave Israel’s first rape crisis centers their seed money, we were the only organization outside of Israel to support the 2011 social justice protests, and our partners have been instrumental in shaping Israel’s human-rights law and policy.  We were also the first funders of Arab civil society in Israel. 

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Editor’s note: In her March 28 post “An Alternative Model for Pro-Israel Liberals,” Evelyn Gordon compared the work of philanthropist Robert Price to that of the New Israel Fund and J Street. The New Israel Fund’s Naomi Paiss has written in defense of her group. Evelyn Gordon’s response follows.

In the latest paternalistic attack on pro-Israel progressives, Evelyn Gordon attempted to save liberals from themselves. By equating the New Israel Fund and J Street with disloyalty to Israel, she resurrects a disproven canard now only used by those with an ultra-nationalist political agenda. Her depiction of the New Israel Fund (NIF) and our grantees is particularly scathing. And wrong.

The New Israel Fund has always prided itself on being a cutting-edge organization. We gave Israel’s first rape crisis centers their seed money, we were the only organization outside of Israel to support the 2011 social justice protests, and our partners have been instrumental in shaping Israel’s human-rights law and policy.  We were also the first funders of Arab civil society in Israel. 

Our support in the Arab sector has always been multi-faceted. We fund employment and empowerment opportunities for Arab youth at-risk around the country. We work to redress unequal funding to Arab schools and communities. We fight for greater Arab representation on public bodies and committees. And no one does more for Arab and Bedouin women, on issues ranging from polygamy and honor killings to drastically increasing their ability to become leaders in their communities. A glance at our website and list of just our current grantees could have spared COMMENTARY the embarrassment of running a column so contrary to fact.

And, yes, we proudly fund groups like Adalah and Mossawa who engage in critical work on behalf of the Palestinian Israeli communities they serve, using strategies of litigation and community organizing.

Gordon’s depiction of Adalah as undermining Israel and exacerbating anti-Arab discrimination is simply ludicrous. Funding Adalah means that Palestinian Israelis have a voice in the Israeli courts. In 2011, Adalah won a precedent-setting case on behalf of the Palestinian Israeli Zubeidat family, whose application to move into the town of Rakefet was rejected on the basis that they were “socially unsuitable” to live in the town. Last year, another Adalah petition resulted in the cancellation of 51 demolition orders in the unrecognized Negev Bedouin village of Alsira. Although unrecognized, Alsira has been in existence since before the founding of Israel. If carried out, the demolition would have left more than 400 homeless.  

Adalah’s work often benefits other marginalized groups, including achieving a victory a few years ago permitting Israelis—all Israelis—receiving social welfare benefits to own cars, thereby enlarging their employment opportunities.

In the U.S., groups working to promote and protect minority rights are lauded. Just look at the NAACP, La Raza, or for that matter, the ADL. Some factions in Israel, however, have been keen to vilify not only the specific work of groups working for minority rights, but the mere right of such groups to exist.

Israelis, though, are keenly aware of the issues facing minority populations. In a recently published report on racism in Israel, an astounding 95 percent of Israelis expressed concern about racism in the country. And only a little over 10 percent felt the government response was adequate. 

Minority rights for the Arab community often come hand in hand with progress for other marginalized sectors. The big-tent Coalition Against Racism is one group gaining traction in the efforts to make Israel more inclusive. A broad partnership spanning the Israeli spectrum, the group is made up of organizations representing Palestinian Israelis, Mizrachim, Ethiopians, Russians, the Reform movement, the social justice movement, and more. The coalition is an unprecedented endeavor. Rarely in Israel do such disparate groups come together to discuss and formulate joint solutions to make Israel a more just and equal society for everyone. The NIF-supported coalition, who just visited the U.S. to an enthusiastic reception by American Jewish groups, is an amazing model that represents the best of Israel.

We at the New Israel Fund believe in a broad-based and integrated approach to changing Israeli society. And that is exactly why it is so critical to support the civil society groups engaged in our work on the ground, and why our fundraising has increased every year while that of other Jewish organizations is stagnant or declining. American Jews do have a heartfelt investment in the liberal values of democracy, equality, and social justice. Their investment in NIF means they understand that the activists and organizations we support are working for a better Israel.  

Naomi Paiss is the Vice President for Public Affairs at the New Israel Fund

Evelyn Gordon replies:

Naomi Paiss argues that NIF supports a wide spectrum of activity in Israel, citing the fund’s list of current grantees to prove this point. This list indeed includes many unexceptionable organizations–groups that, even if I disagree with them, genuinely strive to improve Israel according to their own lights. And if funding them were all NIF did, neither I nor most other Israelis would have any problem with its operations.

But these innocuous grantees don’t change the fact that NIF also funds many organizations actively engaged in political warfare against Israel. Thus every donation to NIF that isn’t earmarked for a specific organization ends up funding anti-Israel political warfare.

To take just one example, numerous NIF-funded organizations contributed to the infamous Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of “war crimes” during its 2009 war in Gaza and recommended indicting it in the International Criminal Court. Many of these groups remain NIF grantees to this day, including Adalah, Breaking the Silence, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Bimkom, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and Physicians for Human Rights. The Goldstone Report’s anti-Israel slurs have been so discredited that even its lead author has repudiated it. The commission’s mandate was thus to arrive at a predetermined verdict—or in other words, to conduct political warfare against Israel rather than honestly to investigate the facts. Consequently, the organizations that submitted anti-Israel allegations to it knowingly contributed to this warfare. Yet the NIF apparently has no problem with its grantees engaging in such activity.

Nor was the Goldstone Report an aberration: Many NIF grantees routinely spend more time and effort libeling Israel overseas than trying to reform it at home. Take, for instance, Breaking the Silence, whose stated mission is “to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories” by disseminating “testimony” from former soldiers about alleged crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces. But most Israelis know BTS’s claims of widespread abuse are false. Moreover, BTS refuses to divulge details that would enable the IDF to investigate its allegations and (if warranted) prosecute the perpetrators–something that would actually benefit the country by helping to squelch any abuses that do occur. For both reasons, the organization has found little traction at home.

So instead, BTS began taking its “testimony” on tour to college campuses throughout the U.S.–places that are already hotbeds of anti-Israel activity, and where there’s no ready supply of IDF veterans to refute its allegations. Smearing the IDF to American college students does nothing to change the army’s behavior, but it does erode Israel’s support overseas. In short, it’s simply anti-Israel political warfare.

This brings us to Ms. Paiss’s second main argument: that even the grantees I consider problematic also do much laudable work, and therefore deserve support. Here, my response is the same as it was with respect to supporting NIF itself: If these organizations confined themselves to, say, bringing anti-discrimination lawsuits, I’d have no problem with NIF supporting them. But Adalah, ACRI, Bimkom, BTS, PCATI, and many other NIF grantees also spend a lot of time and money on anti-Israel political warfare. Thus by funding these organizations, NIF is funding that warfare–and that’s true even if the grant is earmarked for other purposes, since money is fungible.

Adalah, whose activities Ms. Paiss defends at great length, is an excellent example: In addition to its submissions to Goldstone, it has urged other countries to refer Israel to the ICC, to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel” and to end “normal relations” with it. It co-authored a report that accuses Israel of being “a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.” It drafted and still promotes a “democratic constitution” that would eradicate the Jewish state by mandating a “right of return” for millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees, end Israel’s role as a safe haven for Jews worldwide by abolishing the Law of Return, grant Arab parties a de facto veto over all legislation, and more. All this, incidentally, would seem to violate two of the NIF’s own funding guidelines: Adalah “Works to deny the right of the Jewish people to sovereign self-determination within Israel” via projects like its “democratic constitution,” and “Employ[s] racist or derogatory language” by hurling slanders like “apartheid” at Israel. And the same goes for many other NIF grantees (NGO Monitor has an excellent summary here; clicking on its links provides additional detail). 

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Obama, Tibi and the Apartheid Canard

That Desmond Tutu once again accused Israel of apartheid yesterday is nothing new; he’s one of several Nobel Peace laureates who have made second careers out of Israel-bashing (think Jimmy Carter or Mairead Maguire). But it’s far more worrying when similar rhetoric is used by a sitting U.S. president – as Barack Obama did in the most outrageous but widely overlooked line of his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this month. Culminating a series of rhetorical questions about what Israel would do if no Palestinian state arises, he asked, “Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”

As Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid noted, “There is not much distance between this statement and an explicit warning that Israel is liable to turn into an apartheid state.” In short, even if Israel isn’t an apartheid state today, the U.S. president considers it perfectly reasonable to assume it will be someday soon – that instead of a democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, it will become the kind of state that imposes legal restrictions on certain citizens because of their ethnicity. But since Israeli Arabs haven’t been subject to special restrictions since Israel abolished its military administration in 1966, and no subsequent Israeli government has ever contemplated reinstating such restrictions, on what exactly does Obama base this assumption?

The logical conclusion is that he got it from the Israeli Arab leadership and radical Jewish leftists, both of which accuse Israel of apartheid ad nauseam. Yet believing these accusations requires willfully ignoring the facts.

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That Desmond Tutu once again accused Israel of apartheid yesterday is nothing new; he’s one of several Nobel Peace laureates who have made second careers out of Israel-bashing (think Jimmy Carter or Mairead Maguire). But it’s far more worrying when similar rhetoric is used by a sitting U.S. president – as Barack Obama did in the most outrageous but widely overlooked line of his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this month. Culminating a series of rhetorical questions about what Israel would do if no Palestinian state arises, he asked, “Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”

As Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid noted, “There is not much distance between this statement and an explicit warning that Israel is liable to turn into an apartheid state.” In short, even if Israel isn’t an apartheid state today, the U.S. president considers it perfectly reasonable to assume it will be someday soon – that instead of a democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, it will become the kind of state that imposes legal restrictions on certain citizens because of their ethnicity. But since Israeli Arabs haven’t been subject to special restrictions since Israel abolished its military administration in 1966, and no subsequent Israeli government has ever contemplated reinstating such restrictions, on what exactly does Obama base this assumption?

The logical conclusion is that he got it from the Israeli Arab leadership and radical Jewish leftists, both of which accuse Israel of apartheid ad nauseam. Yet believing these accusations requires willfully ignoring the facts.

This past December, for instance, one Ahmed Tibi wrote an article for The Hill accusing Israel of treating its Arab citizens like southerners treated blacks in the Jim Crow era. The analogy was a trifle marred by the tagline at the end, in which Tibi admitted he is currently deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset: Blacks didn’t occupy prominent positions in southern legislatures under Jim Crow, much less in South Africa under apartheid. It was further undermined when another Arab deputy Knesset speaker, Hamad Amar, wrote a riposte in The Hill the next week terming Tibi’s claims arrant nonsense. The spectacle of two Arab deputy speakers of parliament publicly dueling, without any fear of consequences, over whether their country discriminates against Arabs isn’t exactly an example of proto-apartheid behavior. But hey, who you gonna believe: Tibi or your lying eyes?

Then there are all the other Arabs in prominent positions – college presidents, hospital directors, ambassadors, army officers, Supreme Court justices and more. The Elder of Ziyon blog has a must-see poster collection featuring these and many other examples that are the very antithesis of apartheid. But hey, who you gonna believe: Haaretz’s Gideon Levy or your lying eyes?

Indeed, on the issue that seems to concern Obama most – freedom of movement, which he highlighted in the rhetorical question immediately preceding the one on Arab Israelis – Arab citizens and permanent residents arguably have greater rights than Israeli Jews: For instance, they can freely visit the Temple Mount, which Israeli Jews can’t; they can also visit the Palestinian Authority, which Israeli law bars Jews from doing. In fact, their freedom of movement is precisely why terrorist organizations consider them prize recruits. It’s a sad day when Palestinian terrorists have a better grasp of Israel’s true nature than the U.S. president.

Obama, of course, is just a symptom of a much larger problem: Too many Western liberals willfully close their eyes to the truth when it comes to Israel, preferring to parrot the current bon ton. But for an administration that explicitly pledged to pursue “evidence-based policy,” a little more attention to the evidence on Israel would be a nice place to start.

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Why Do Arabs and Muslims Keep Trying to Move to the “Apartheid State”?

As Israel Apartheid Week circumnavigates the globe this month, a Jordan-based Palestinian journalist has offered an eloquent rebuttal that every Israel supporter should memorize and quote. If Israel is really an “apartheid state,” asks Ramzi Abu Hadid, “Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the ‘apartheid state’? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East?”

Specifically, he noted, “thousands of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip … try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life,” while “tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims have put their lives at risk by crossing the border into Israel from Egypt, where border guards often open fire at women and children.” In addition, “many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the ‘apartheid state’ than they do among their Muslim ‘brothers.’”

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As Israel Apartheid Week circumnavigates the globe this month, a Jordan-based Palestinian journalist has offered an eloquent rebuttal that every Israel supporter should memorize and quote. If Israel is really an “apartheid state,” asks Ramzi Abu Hadid, “Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the ‘apartheid state’? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East?”

Specifically, he noted, “thousands of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip … try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life,” while “tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims have put their lives at risk by crossing the border into Israel from Egypt, where border guards often open fire at women and children.” In addition, “many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the ‘apartheid state’ than they do among their Muslim ‘brothers.’”

Abu Hadid doesn’t provide hard numbers, but the data amply prove his claims. During the first 11 months of last year alone, for instance, 13,851  illegal migrants entered Israel from Sinai; the biggest contingents were Muslim refugees from Sudan and Eritrea. And the risk of being shot by Egyptian guards is just one of the dangers they braved to reach “the apartheid state”: Migrants also face horrific abuse from the Sinai Bedouin who smuggle them over the border.

As for Palestinians, those who “try to infiltrate into Israel every morning” are only part of the story. To that, add the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have moved to Jerusalem in recent years rather than remain on the Palestinian side of Israel’s West Bank security barrier. Then add the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought and obtained Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli Arabs.

Altogether, some 350,000 Palestinians have acquired citizenship through “family reunification” since Israel’s founding in 1948, according to veteran journalist Nadav Shragai. But the numbers surged following the 1993 Oslo Accord – i.e., precisely when Palestinian statehood for the first time looked like a real possibility: In 1994-2002, fully 137,000 Palestinians acquired Israeli citizenship through marriage. The numbers have since dropped drastically, but that isn’t because Palestinian demand has fallen: It’s because in 2003, Israel enacted new restrictions on family reunification in response to the second intifada.

Abu Hadid’s argument also has a flip side, as he himself noted: Unlike Israel, many of its Arab neighbors do engage in legalized discrimination against Palestinians. In Jordan, for instance, “the government has been trying to strip thousands of us Palestinians of our Jordanian citizenship – a move Israel never made against its Christians and Muslims.” He might also have mentioned a long list of other discriminatory practices: Until recently, for instance, Jordan barred Palestinians from Gaza from owning property or working in any job except manual labor and farming, while Lebanon also bars Palestinians from owning property or working in a long list of professions.

In short, the simplest response to the “apartheid” charge is the one Americans once used to counter Soviet propaganda: Just look at the direction of the population flow. It turns out Arabs and Muslims are voting with their feet in favor of the “apartheid state.”

 

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