Being Honest About Jews, Jewish Identity and Zionism in an Age of Identity Politics

You cannot understand the obsession with 'anti-Semitism' today without understanding how Jewish identity has changed

The idea for this article, which was published in Electronic Intifada  came from someone who wrote to me.

They asked which of the following applies to British Jews?  
Black people experience 

1     Deaths in custody

2     Worse health inequalities

3     Their children are disproportionately in pupil referral units

4     They are disproportionately under employed

5     They are not given same opportunity to access community asset development scheme when organisations given funding to ensure this happen

6     Why are they disproportionately over represented in prisons?

7     Why did the EU not investigate the EHRC on all these counts as they are a national body for the member state equality

8     A disproportionate number who are subject to stop and searched

9     Over medication in the treatment processes for mental health

10   Disproportionate homelessness

        When posed like this it is clear that  British Jews are not oppressed. Antisemitism is confined to noxious comments on social media, at worst.  There are very few anti-Semitic attacks. It is precisely because Jews don't suffer from state racism that the racist media - from the Daily Telegraph to the Guardian - have no hesitation in plugging 'antisemitism.

The above questions have crystallised in the article below.

Tony Greenstein

Britain’s Labour Party lost support among Jewish voters before Jeremy Corbyn became its leader. (Ben Cawthra/Sipa USA/Newscom) 

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 26 June 2019

Cries of “anti-Semitism” are the charges every supporter of the Palestinians has to face. I doubt that there is a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism.

The rationale for these accusations include the suggestion that we are operating “double standards” in singling out Israel for criticism. We are alleged to criticize Israel because it is a “Jewish” state. Israel is the “targeted collective Jew among the nations,” Irwin Cotler, a former government minister in Canada, has written.

Today, a different, more subtle argument is developing: Israel and Zionism are an integral part of Jewish identity. That is why opposition to Zionism and Israel is automatically anti-Semitic.

This argument was tested earlier this decade in an employment tribunal which assessed allegations that Britain’s University and College Union was anti-Semitic because it supports BDS – the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Ronnie Fraser, the pro-Israel campaigner who had taken legal action against the union, argued that Zionism was an integral part of Jewish identity.

That argument was rejected by the tribunal’s judges in 2013. The tribunal concluded that “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel” was “not intrinsically a part of Jewishness.”

Another variant of this argument is to suggest that as Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, opposition to it must be anti-Semitic. Since there are Islamic and Christian states, opposition to Israel cannot be other than anti-Semitic. However this is to obscure the fact that Israel is unique because it is the only ethno-religious state in the world.

Inherently racist

Defining ethnicity and nationality in terms of religion means a state will be inherently racist.

Being Jewish in Israel is not a religious but a racial identity. Jews have privileges that are not accorded to non-Jews.

As a Jew in Israel, you have access to 93 percent of “national” land controlled or owned by the Jewish National Fund. Imagine that in Britain, which is nominally a Christian state, I was unable to rent a flat because it was Christian national land.

How would that not be anti-Semitic?

The Islamic states of the Middle East are certainly backward and regressive political formations. However they do not systematically grant Muslims special privileges.

On the contrary, the Islamic nature of the Iranian or Saudi states operates to legitimize the oppression and persecution of Muslims. Arguably Jews in Iran are better off than Muslims.

The French Revolution, which ushered in the emancipation of the Jews, also introduced the separation of religion from the state. This is why Zionism was based on a rejection of emancipation which it saw as leading to the “assimilation” of Jews to non-Jews.

When France’s Constituent Assembly convened in September 1789 to discuss the Jewish question, the civil liberties advocate Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”

Anti-Semitism was widespread in the ethno-religious and nationalist Christian states of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. These states proved receptive to the Nazis.

The savagery of the Holocaust in Romania was too much even for Hans Frank, a leading Nazi lawyer and Governor of the Generalgouvernment (Poland). He contended that some of the massacres committed in Romania were much worse than Nazi violence in Germany, where “we use the art of surgery, not of butchery.”

In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard was also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Christianity was an essential part of Hungary’s fascist Iron Cross. And Slovakia’s Hlinka Guard – which deported Jews to Auschwitz – was led by a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso.

Moral panic

The British political establishment, including much of the leadership of the Labour Party, has been in the grip of a form of mass hysteria, a moral panic about anti-Semitism. The mere denial of the existence of anti-Semitism is proof that you are an anti-Semite.

The situation resembles that other example of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials. The historian Elizabeth Reis writes about the dilemmas that faced the women in these trials:

During examinations, accused women were damned  if they did and damned if they did not: if they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil.

What is this “anti-Semitism” that is so all-pervasive? In many respects, it resembles the allegations of being sympathetic toward communism made in the West during the Cold War.

Among the theoreticians of this “new anti-communism” is Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with The Guardian. In 2016, he argued that “93 percent [of British Jews] who told a 2015 survey that Israel forms some part of their identity as Jews can take criticism of Israeli governments and of Israeli policy” but not anti-Zionism.

It should be noted that Freedland was concealing the full picture. The same survey asked British Jews whether they identified as Zionists – 59 percent said “yes” and 31 percent said “no.” The proportion identifying themselves as Zionist dropped by 13 percent since a previous survey was conducted in 2010.

Unsustainable

A similar claim was made earlier this year by Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement – a pro-Israel lobby group. Katz was referring to a comment by the Labour lawmaker Richard Burgon who described Zionism as “the enemy of peace.”

The comment had been made at a 2014 meeting but a video of Burgon’s speech was only published this April. When the video was circulated online, Katz stated that Zionism is “a core part of their [British Jews’] identity.”

In other words, criticism of Zionism, the ideology and the movement, as opposed to the government of Israel, is intrinsically anti-Semitic because you are attacking the identity of most Jews. This argument is unsustainable on a number of levels.

First, the identity of Jews has changed repeatedly.

Before World War II, most Jews were anti-Zionist. To say that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism is to say that Polish Jews, 90 percent of whom died in the Holocaust, were anti-Semitic on the basis that – in Warsaw and other major Polish cities – they voted overwhelmingly during 1938 elections for the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund.

Secondly, the reasons for the change in Jewish attitudes to Zionism is primarily a product of socio-economic changes which have driven them to the right.

And thirdly, the argument that it is racist to criticize or oppose a group’s identity is flawed and illogical. It has extremely reactionary implications.

When I was a child I used to visit relatives in London’s East End. We would go to eat in Bloom’s, the Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. We would have to queue to get a place at lunchtime.

In 1996 Bloom’s closed, the reason being that the Jews had moved out of the East End to be replaced by Bengalis and other immigrant communities.

The Jews of the East End have migrated to the London suburb of Golders Green and elsewhere.

During the first half of the 20th century, Britain’s Jews were predominantly working class and prominent in the trade unions. When Phil Piratin, England’s only Communist member of parliament, won the constituency of Mile End in East London during the 1945 general election, it is estimated that half of his vote came from Jews.

Jews formed an identifiable part of Britain’s working class and its most politically conscious part. Jews led the anti-fascist movement. At one time there were more than 30 Jewish trade unions.

Moving rightwards

Today, there is no Jewish working class. Jews have climbed the socio-economic ladder and – in many cases – moved rightwards politically. When it is argued that “anti-Semitism” under current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has led to the loss of Jewish support for the party, that is simply untrue.

According to a poll in April 2015, 69 percent of Jews were planning to vote Conservative in the following month’s general election and only 22 percent for Labour. That was despite the fact that Labour was then led by Ed Miliband, its first Jewish leader.

William Rubinstein, a historian, wrote in the 1980s about “the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status.” That rise “has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.”

As the Jews changed, so too did anti-Semitism. State-sponsored anti-Semitism disappeared in Britain to be replaced by racism against Black and Asian people.

Rubinstein’s conclusion was that the change in Jews’ socio-economic position “has rendered obsolete (and rarely heard) the type of anti-Semitism which has its basis in fears of the swamping of the native population.” It has made “Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.”

Geoffrey Alderman, a Jewish Chronicle columnist and right-wing Zionist, wrote in a 1983 book [Jewish Community in British Politics] that by 1961, “over 40 percent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 percent of the general population.”

Alderman shows that British Jews frequently became much more conservative than the rest of the British population.

That is illustrated by the March 1978 by-election which took place in the Ilford North area of Greater London. Labour had previously held this seat by just 778 votes. By-elections are held in Britain when a parliamentary seat becomes vacant, usually due to a death or resignation.

During the 1978 by-election Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s svengali, came to the constituency to make a blatantly racist anti-immigration speech.

One might expect that Jewish voters of all people would react against this. Not a bit of it. The Conservatives gained the seat on a swing of 6.9 percent but among Jewish voters there was a swing of 11.2 percent.

As Jews move to the right, they become more sympathetic to Zionism, British foreign policy and US imperialism. That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Blackmail

The argument that opposition to a group’s identity is racist is part of the poisonous legacy of identity politics which eliminates the distinction between oppressed and oppressor. That legacy would have one believe that even the powerful and privileged have an identity and their claims have equal validity to those they exploit.

In the absence of class and race, identity politics become a justification for the status quo.

Of course, it is true that racists will disguise an attack on a particular ethnic or racial group by attacking its religion.

When right-wing firebrand Robert Spencer attacks Islam as “warfare against unbelievers” or his colleague Pamela Geller writes that “the Quran is war propaganda,” then that is racism, not a critique of religion. But when someone defends Salman Rushdie because he published The Satanic Verses, that is a defense of reason against religious bigotry.

The same applies to Zionism. If someone attacks Israel because it is a Jewish state, then that is anti-Semitic. But nearly all criticism of Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

On the contrary, it is anti-Semites – from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Steve Bannon in the US – who use support for Israel to disguise their anti-Semitism.

Opposition to a particular identity is not racist.

In Afghanistan many, if not most, people consider the burka an integral part of Islam. Is it seriously suggested that it is intrinsically racist and anti-Muslim to oppose the burka, even when such opposition comes from Muslim women?

In many countries in Africa female genital mutilation is part of the identity of those living there. Is opposition to FGM racist?

There are many religious practices that are reactionary, medieval and barbaric. Opposition to them is not racist.

The same is true with the Jewish community. Although there is no doubt that most Jews in Britain are more liberal than the Jewish leaders and the Board of Deputies, there is little doubt that the majority are supporters of Zionism. It is also arguable that a majority of Jews do not realise the extent of Israeli racism and how Zionism mandates a form of apartheid.

However it is a fact that a Jewish ethno-nationalist state in Israel cannot be other than a racist apartheid state. The argument that it is anti-Semitic to oppose an identity that is itself based on support for racism is untenable.

If indeed the majority of Jews do support a Zionism that mandates the demolition of Palestinian villages such as Umm al-Hiran in order to build Jewish towns in their place, then that is clearly a racist identity. If the majority of British Jews support a state where the chief rabbi of Safed issues an edict that non-Jews cannot rent property from Jews, then how is that not racist?

The idea that opposition to religious identity is, in itself, a form of racism is a form of blackmail.

Both apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the US were justified by particular interpretations of the Bible. Was opposition to the identity of white planters or West Indian slave owners racist?

Tony Greenstein is a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

Hundreds of Israelis Demonstrated in Afula Against the Sale of a House to an Arab

This is why Israeli Apartheid is Unique and why John McDonnell’s defence of Zionism and the Israeli state was so wrong

In the wake of Labour's NEC decision on September 4^th to endorse the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, Palestine solidarity activists fly posted bus stops in London declaring that Israel is a racist endeavour.

This was immediately denounced by John McDonnell who told BBC’s Politics Live that "It is not the right thing to say. It is against the examples that we set out and linked to the IHRA definitions."

In a further interview with Jewish News McDonnell elaborated on these comments, stating that ‘It is anti-Semitic to oppose a Jewish state, of course it is.’ Israel calls itself a Jewish state but what does that mean?  The demonstrations in Afula last June against the sale of a house to an Arab give us a clue.

As people may be aware, I am currently bringing an action for defamation against the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for calling me a ‘notorious anti-Semite’. They are defending this on 4 grounds, one of which, is that “The Claimant lied when he claimed in The Guardian newspaper that the International Definition of Anti-Semitism prevents criticism of Israel.”

Letter from 62 Jewish people criticising the IHRA - handed over to Peter Kyle MP for Hove

In fact what I and the other 61 signatories wrote was somewhat more nuanced, viz. that ‘The new definition has nothing to do with opposing antisemitism, it is merely designed to silence public debate on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.”

At first sight the CAA is right. The IHRA states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. 

The Home Affairs Select Committee, whose Report in October 2016 triggered Theresa May’s acceptance of the IHRA definition also stated that: ‘It is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies...’ (paragraph 24)

The key question running through the debate over the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is whether or not the Israeli state is just another liberal democratic state, or whether it is suis generis.

It is my contention that Israel is unlike any other country because it is, uniquely, an ethno-nationalist state. Hitler’s Germany after the 1935 Nuremburg Laws was a state not of its own citizens but the German Volk. Germany claimed that Germans, wherever they lived formed part of the German Volk/nation and this led in 1938 to the crisis over Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, where ethnic Germans lived, and in turn to the Munich Agreement.

Likewise Israel claims that it is the nation state, not of its own citizens but all Jews, wherever they live in the world. It has just passed a Jewish Nation State Law to make this explicit. Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish State is not at all similar to Britain’s definition of itself as a Christian state.  My rights as a Jewish inhabitant of England have no relationship to my religion, if any.  Political and civil rights in the UK are not dependent on one’s religious affiliation. That is because religion in Britain has no relationship to nationality or citizenship.  However in Israel being Jewish is primarily a national/racial question, not simply a matter of religion. 

At first sight the CAA is right. The IHRA states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’.  

The Home Affairs Select Committee, whose Report in October 2016 triggered Theresa May’s acceptance of the IHRA definition also stated that: ‘It is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies...’ (paragraph 24)

The key question running through the debate over the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is whether or not the Israeli state is just another liberal democratic state, or whether it is suis generis.

It is my contention that Israel is unlike any other country because it is, uniquely, an ethno-nationalist state. Hitler’s Germany after the 1935 Nuremburg Laws was likewise a state not of its own citizens but the German Volk. Germany claimed that Germans, wherever they lived formed part of the German Volk/nation and this led in 1938 to the crisis over Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, where ethnic Germans lived, and in turn to the Munich Agreement.

 Israel claims that it is the nation state, not of its own citizens but all Jews, wherever they live in the world. It has just passed a Jewish Nation State Law to make this explicit. Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish State is not at all similar to Britain’s definition of itself as a Christian state.  My rights as a Jewish inhabitant of England have no relationship to my religion, if any.  Political and civil rights in the UK are not dependent on one’s religious affiliation. That is because religion in Britain is distinct from nationality or citizenship.  However in Israel being Jewish is primarily a national/racial question, not simply a matter of religion.

This was demonstrated most clearly in Afula, a Jewish-only city of around 50,000 in northern Israel, in June of this year. Afula’s Jewish residents were outraged that a property in the town had been sold to an Arab. This was a carbon copy of a similar demonstration in 2015 when many of the successful bidders for building plots were found to be Arabs. The protestors demanded the cancellation of the whole bidding process and the Nazareth District Court was happy to oblige. Similar protests and actions have been held in other towns. 

In 2011 in Safed the Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a paid state official, issued an edict forbidding Jews to rent property to Arabs. Eliyahu’s edict was supported by dozens of rabbis. To this day he remains a salaried official of the Israeli state.

All Western states are racist but Israel is uniquely so. Racism and segregation form the core of its identity as a Jewish state. Racism is not simply a policy that can be changed but inherent to Israeli society. Another word for it is Zionism.  

If I want to rent a property in the UK my religion is irrelevant. I would not expect a landlord or letting agent to even ask me what my religious identity is but in Israel religion is crucial in determining whether someone is part of the volk, the national community. It is written on everyone’s ID car.

demonstration by far Right Israelis

Israel is a ‘Jewish state’ or more accurately a state of the Jewish nation. What Israel is not is a state of its own citizens. Recent attempts to even debate such a proposal in the Knesset were blocked.  Knesset Council Bans Bill to Define Israel as State for All Its Citizens

Uniquely in the modern world, the Israeli state owns and controls 93% of Israeli land which is reserved for the use of the ‘Jewish people.’ The Jewish National Fund, a para-state organisation set up by the JNF Law 1953 ensures that access to that land is barred to the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians. 

The JNF is quite open about the fact that ‘it should not be obliged to allocate lands in its possession to non-Jews.... Whoever seeks to prevent the allocation of JNF lands solely to Jews must confront the assertions of these laws’ referring to three land laws passed in 1960-61 which gave the JNF and the Israeli Land Administration joint responsibility for administering Israeli state land.

Israeli Arabs are confined to 3% of the land.  Not one new Arab town or village has been created in Israel since its formation 70 year ago despite a more than 10 fold increase in their population. This contrasts with hundreds of new Jewish towns and communities.

In Israel land is segregated in the same way as it was in Apartheid South Africa.  The only difference is that Israel sees no need to pass a Group Areas Act relying on a series of opaque laws, regulations and administrative practices instead.

Being Jewish in Israel means having very real and significant privileges. A Jewish state means that you constantly worry about the ‘demographic threat’ that the Arabs pose. In Expert confirms Jews and Arabs nearing population parity Aron Heller wrote that ‘Israel will be faced with a daunting choice between becoming a binational state or one in which Arabs and other minorities do not have equal rights.’

That is why Israel constantly encourages Jewish immigration at the same time as it takes steps to minimise the Arab population.  Politics in Israel are ethnicised at every level and in every sphere of civil and social life.  The 20% of the population that are Palestinians are not represented at any level in the government, the senior civil service or the judiciary. It means segregation in most areas of life including education and housing. It also results in government supported campaigns against miscegenation, sexual relations between Jews and Arabs that are reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws (Israel's vile anti-miscegenation squads).

What is particularly shocking is not only that McDonnell has so little historical or political awareness but that he is prepared to jettison the Palestinians for the sake of a pact with the devil, in the form of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement.

The idea of religious states died out with the French Revolution. Nationality became a function of residence in a certain territory not religion.  In the words of Count Clermont-Tonnerre, a Deputy in the French Constituent Assembly, "Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals…." Tonnerre’s words represented the views of 18^th-century rationalists and French revolutionaries toward Judaism and the Jewish question. That was why Zionism, like the Jewish Orthodoxy, hated Emancipation and the French Revolution (alongside Hitler and European fascism).

Signs in Nazi Germany saying 'Jews not welcome here'

In Israel being Jewish signifies one’s race and nation not simply religion. The idea that Jews form a separate nation and thus Jewish self-determination, which the IHRA refers to, is an anti-semitic argument that implies that Jews aren’t members of the nations amongst whom they  live.

There is also no right to a Protestant or Catholic or Islamic state.  A simple understanding of the fight for democratic rights and the works of people like Thomas Paine and JS Mill eludes McDonnell. It is a sign of the intellectual poverty of debate in the Labour Party that people actually buy into the argument that Jews only have one state in the world.  No religion should have any state.

There are those that argue that there are Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is true but they are not ethno nationalist states.  In both countries being a Muslim is not a privilege.  On the contrary Islam is used to justify the regime’s tyranny and oppression of Muslims.

It needs emphasising that Israel is not just another Western state. Israel is unique in not having its own nationality. Jews are a separate nationality to that of Arabs and there are about 130 nationalities in Israel of which only one, Jewish, confers rights.

Israel is a state that was founded on the basis of Jewish racial supremacy. When the Supreme Court ruled in Ka’adan that the State could not discriminate against Arabs by refusing to sell them State land, the response of the Knesset was to pass in 2011 an Acceptance to Communities Law which allowed communities of less than 500 people to set up Admission Committees which screened potential residents on ethnic or other grounds such as colour. 

Imagine if, in Britain, someone who was Jewish was told that they could not purchase land because it was owned by the Christian National Fund.  There would be an uproar but that is the situation in Israel in respect of Arabs.

McDonnell’s desire to appease the Labour Right is worrying. First he suggested that Margaret Hodge’s abuse of Jeremy Corbyn should not be made the subject of a disciplinary investigation despite having said nothing about the disciplinary proceedings against Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and myself. Then McDonnell called for full support for the IHRA and now he is denouncing activists for saying that Israel is a racist rotweiller that guards over Western interests in the Middle East.

Those who think that this will not have any effect on McDonnell as Labour Chancellor should think again. McDonnell has begun travelling the same road that his famous predecessor, Sir Stafford Cripps, took.  Cripps started off on Labour’s far-left, got expelled and ended up as Attlee’s Chancellor and the enforcer of austerity.

Foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy. If McDonnell bends the knee to the Zionists now then he is he going to doff his cap to American foreign policy and the ‘special relationship’ later. We can only imagine what McDonnell’s response will be when faced with a hostile banking sector and a run on the pound. If he can’t criticise Margaret Hodge’s vile attack on Jeremy Corbyn and support the mandatory reselection of Labour MPs then it is to be feared that McDonnell will end up as another Dennis Healey

If Jeremy Corbyn fell under the proverbial bus McDonnell would immediately be a target. When it seemed that Corbyn might be overthrown stories began to appear in the press concentrating on McDonnell’s past such as sponsoring an Early Day Motion supporting the International Jewish Anti-zionist Network.

If McDonnell really thinks that Israel is no different from any other western state then he should look at the following articles on Afula. 

Tony Greenstein

Hundreds of Israelis Demonstrate Against Home Sale to Arab Family

Former mayor joined protest: 'the residents of Afula don't want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it's their right. This is not racism'

Ha’aretz Jun 14, 2018

About 150 residents of the northern city of Afula demonstrated on Wednesday afternoon against the sale of a house to an Arab family. Protesters waved Israeli flags and carried signs condemning the sale and the homeowners who sold their house to Arabs, one of which read: "Traitors against the Jews will get no rest."

Former Afula Mayor Avi

It's what used to be called Apartheid

Protesters raised Israeli flags and shouted slogans against the sale of the house in the city's Yizrael neighborhood. Chairman of Joint Arab List Ayman Odeh wrote in response to the protest:

“It is not a surprise that in a country that has founded 700 towns for Jews and not even one for Arabs, the idea that Arabs should be pushed aside does not shock citizens. And still, it is more than a little worrying to see how our hope for living together is crumbling due to hatred and racism fueled by the government.”

Member of Knesset Yousef Jabareen (Joint List) added that

“racism ethnic superiority have become a legitimate reality under this right-wing government. This protest should rock the political system and keep up at night all those who care about equality and human dignity.”

Ayelet Shaked of Jewish Home and ardent advocate of  annexing the West Bank

A notice calling on residents to turn out for the demonstration made reference to “the sale of homes to those who are undesirable in the neighbourhood” and went on to say: “One transaction has already been carried out and everything needs to be done to cancel it and to put a stop to this phenomenon from the beginning. Friends, now is the time to come together. All Jews are responsible for one another! Today it's us, tomorrow, it's you.”

In response to the Afula protest, the Coalition Against Racism organization called for a halt to efforts by “those inciting the public against the possibility of living together.” The phenomenon will not stop without “clear responses by courageous public figures and political leaders,” the organization said, adding: “Now is the time for the voice of the sane majority in Afula, both politicians and the wider public, to be heard.”

About two years ago, Afula residents held a number of demonstrations objecting to a bidding process for lots in a residential neighborhood of the city in which all 43 successful bidders were Arab. Approval of the bids was rescinded by the Nazareth District Court after the court found that some of the successful bidders had engaged in improper coordination of their bids and that the minimum bid provisions were vague and misleading.

Jews not welcome - another Nazi practice imported into Israel

Half of Jewish Israelis say they wouldn’t want an Arab as a neighbor. In March, Kfar Vradim’s local council head Sivan Yehieli ordered to halt bids for selling building plots of land in his community, after 50 percent of the winners so far turned out to be Arabs. In a letter he disseminated among the community’s residents he promised that “no more land would be sold until an appropriate solution was found to ensure our ability to maintain our communal life and the special character of Kfar Vradim."

The so-called nation-state bill passed the first of three Knesset calls in May in a version that has a clause allowing the establishment of communities for Jews only. Clause 7b of this bill specifically states that “the state can allow a community composed of people of the same faith or nationality to maintain an exclusive community.”

Umm al Hiran - a village demolished in January 2017 to make way for Jewsh settlers

When racism and segregation are perceived as 'legitimate rights'

Protests against Arab families moving into Jewish cities are a reminder that until everyone is free to choose where they want to live, the Israeli regime will remain segregationist and racist at its core.

+972 Magazine, Suhad Bishara 21 June 2018

Illustrative photo of demonstration by far-right Israelis. (Activestills.org)

The protest comes just a few months after Sivan Yehieli, the head of the Kfar Vradim Municipal Council, announced that his pastoral town must maintain its Zionist-Jewish character after 58 Arab citizens won bids to build their homes in the town.

Let’s make one thing clear: 150 protesters are not an aberration in Israel. They were simply expressing overtly the racist segregation upon which Israel’s land regime was founded. This is precisely how military rule over Israel’s Arab citizens – in effect from 1949 until 1966 – functioned: “cleansing” vast swaths of land in order to settle Jews and to ensure reserves of land that would continue to exclusively serve Israeli Jews.

This “cleansing” process was implemented, among other ways, via the construction of hundreds of new Jewish towns and communities, as well as through the establishment of admissions committees in kibbutzim, moshavim, and other communities.

Yehieli faithfully represents the Israeli planning authorities’ policy aimed at demographically re-engineering the country. He represents an Israeli legal system that refused to allow the implementation of its own decision to allow the internally-displaced Palestinian residents of Iqrit and Bir’im to return to their villages, that gave the green light to the Admissions Committees Law, and that allows the state to uproot the residents of Umm al-Hiran in order to replace them with Jewish citizens – just like during and immediately following the Nakba. And we can expect much more of the same.

Bedouin women collect their belongings from the ruins of their demolished homes in the village of Umm al-Hiran, Negev desert, January 18, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Much of the criticism leveled at the racism of Afula’s residents focuses on the lack of development in Arab communities, which results in the necessity of young Arab citizens to seek housing solutions in nearby Jewish towns.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arabs cannot be barred from 'Jewish' towns and communities

The decision of Israel's Supreme Court in Ka'adan has effectively been overturned by the Knesset and by the Supreme Court itself

This thinking prevents envisioning a situation in which an Arab citizen of Israel has the right to choose where she/he wants to live simply because it suits her/him to live there. It buys into the paradigm of a discriminatory, racist, and apartheid-like land regime that forces them to find a circumstantial explanation for the phenomenon, rather than simply calling it by its name: racism and segregation.

Imagine a scenario in which the Israeli government takes unprecedented steps to allocate land for the development of Arab communities. Imagine that it begins developing Arab communities of all kinds — cities, villages, and agricultural communities — while also ensuring the development of industrial and commercial zones in accordance with the principles of distributive and restorative justice.

But yet, even in this scenario, it remains the right of every Arab citizen to decide where he or she wants to live — be it Kfar Vradim, Tel Aviv, or Afula.

As long as Israeli state authorities cannot or will not imagine the country’s land as open to all, we cannot talk about justice or constitutional rights. The Israeli regime will remain segregationist and racist at its core. Segregated living will remain racist, even under the guise of “separate but equal.”

Imagine protesters demonstrating against Jews buying homes in a Christian town in Europe. Israelis would declare them racists and anti-Semites, and Israel’s prime minister would surely remark that it reminds him of the dark days leading up to the Holocaust. Inside Israel, however, an almost identical scene is framed by Afula’s former mayor Avi Elkabetz as such: “The residents of Afula do not want a mixed city. They want a Jewish city — and this is their right. This isn’t racism.”

Thus racism in Israel magically becomes the “legitimate right” of the Jewish citizen.

Attorney Suhad Bishara is the Director of the Land and Planning Rights Unit, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. This article was first published in Hebrew on Haokets. Read it here.