When the Pales-tinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Azmi Bishara, left Israel some weeks ago, resigning his Knesset seat in protest against the conditions of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, the Israeli press spoke about him as someone who betrayed his parliamentary role and the Israeli state. Many Israeli Palestinians are certain that the security services are in the process of constructing a case against Bishara, one of Palestine’s foremost intellectuals and politicians.
Bishara, like Israel’s one-and-a-half-million Palestinian citizens, sees himself as a member of the Palestinian nation, whose country was given by the British to the Zionists after the Nazi Holocaust. Like other Palestinian citizens of Israel, Bishara does not consider his Israeli ID card as the price he has to pay for being allowed to stay on his land. That price includes total loyalty to the Israeli state, despite the fact that the Palestinians – 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens – own only 3.5 per cent of Israeli lands, and that Israel is not a democracy as far as its Palestinian citizens are concerned.
In recent months, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have published a Future Vision document, calling for their recognition as an equal minority. Adallah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has published a document calling for the writing of a democratic constitution for Israel (which currently has no constitution). In addition to these documents, Israeli Palestinian intellectuals have also prepared a document, called ‘the Haifa Convention’, to be released soon. All three documents aim to provide basic human rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and reverse discriminatory policies by successive Israeli governments, including massive land confiscations, house demolitions, non-recognition of villages (many of which have no electricity or water) and the misrecognition of Palestinians’ national identity.
As a result of its failure to defeat Hizb’ullah in the recent war in Lebanon, and in view of these documents – which denote Palestinians’ growing ambitions for self determination – Israel is regarding Azmi Bishara, and with him all Palestinian citizens, as a strategic threat. Bishara, outspoken and forthright, reminds liberal Israelis of their racism and, unable to deal with his ideas, many Israelis turn to reinventing him as a security risk.
The danger is that this demonisation might spread: indeed, I was appalled by a report published in Haaretz about two Israeli Palestinian doctors who were refused entry onto a train to Tel Aviv, where they were going for a medical conference, with the excuse that one of them was not carrying his ID card, even though he works for an Israeli hospital and was carrying his hospital ID card.
As Pastor Niemoeller said in relation to the Nazis, today the Israeli security forces are coming for Azmi Bishara, tomorrow they may come for other Israeli Palestinians, and the day after tomorrow, it might be oppositional Jewish citizens and sympathetic visitors (like Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire, who was injured by Israeli police tear gas as she was participating in a peaceful demonstration in Bil’in). We must remember that the end to the conflict cannot come at the expense of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, even if Israel holds ‘peace talks’ with Syria or Saudi Arabia. Democracy begins at home.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
