Jan 11: Mixed Cities

It's Friday in Israel, and the weather is beautiful. We are driving south to Jerusalem, and the biting cold has been replaced by a cool breeze and a clear, sunny sky. The scenery is absolutely amazing – everything is green and fertile, with rolling hills off in the distance, verdant orchards closer by. But the stories bely the peacefulness of the situation – about 60 seconds ago, we drove past the site of a suicide bombing, where a car once pulled up alongside a bus and exploded. No matter how gorgeous this land is, it's impossible to forget that Israel is the home of violent unrest. Given the beauty of the land, it's not hard to understand why people might want to fight over it.

Last night, we attended a round-table discussion about the right to education as it applies to indigenous groups and national minorities. The speakers were diverse – UNESCO and EU representatives, a Hebrew professor, the Nazareth mayor, and Arab NGO representatives – but the attendees, excluding Hannah and myself, were uniformly Arabs. The topic of conversation: the state education system and the substantial Arab population. Currently, Arabs are required to study the Hebrew Bible, take all classes in Hebrew, and essentially replace their own cultural teachings with those of the colonialist Jewish population. International standards guarantee a right to culture, and prohibit discrimination in public schools, but Israel continues its pursuit of a Jewish state with impunity. Obviously, the Arabs aren't happy.

While the panelists were informative, the conversation was hardly fruitful. No matter the advice, recommendations or comparisons made, the comments repeatedly returned to one issue: the Arabs, a national minority and indigenous group, oppose the formation of the state of Israel. I expected the participants to be liberal – attendees of human rights conferences tend to be – and it's quite possible they were ... but the injustices inherent in the 1948 statehood, referred to by Arabs as “the Disaster,” are impossible for even the most liberal of scholars to overlook. And while I understand that position, and agree that the Arabs have been subjected to injustices and indignities that the international community should not have allowed, I find myself wondering what good we can possibly do, when the only satisfactory remedy would be to turn back the clock.

But the work must go on! We are driving to Ramle, a “mixed city” in which both Arabs and Jews live, but where the Arabs are segregated into their own neighborhoods, and suffer from an astonishing lack of equality. While Jews get garbage pick-up twice a week, Arabs have to call repeatedly to get it picked up once a month. While police regularly patrol Jewish neighborhoods, calls for help from Arab districts are rarely answered. And while development continues apace in the Jewish areas, Arabs are consistently denied building permits, forcing them to construct “illegal” homes that are at risk of demolition any day. Many of the Arabs in Ramle are Bedouin, internally displaced persons who relocated to the city after being forced off their agricultural land in the early 1950's, and we hope to start drawing connections between the hardships faced by Bedouin city-dwellers and those faced by the Bedouin in the Negev, who are treated as trespassers and refused all civil services even though their families have often lived in the same place for five or more generations. The state often views these issues as separate problems, but they can all be traced back to the displacement at the time of the Disaster and the Zionist plan Israel has in place.

We have reached the West Bank. We aren't going in, obviously, but the wall between Israel and Palestine tracks the highway for miles. While there were once regular checkpoints, they are now spaced about an hour apart. They are fairly “easy” to get across, but Israeli citizens are no longer allowed in, for security reasons. It's segregation on a national (or international) scale, and it makes our pathetic efforts for human rights seem laughable.