Discrimination Against Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Palestinian citizens of Israel are those Palestinians who remained behind in what became the state of Israel following the Nakba (1947-9), or "catastrophe," when approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land by Zionist forces in order to make way for a Jewish-majority state.

Between 1948 (when Israel declared independence) and 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel were subject to military rule. After 1966, martial law was lifted but to this day they continue to suffer from widespread, systematic and institutionalized discrimination affecting everything from land ownership and employment opportunities to family reunification rights. Today, there are approximately 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, about 20% of the population.

INSTITUTIONALIZED DISCRIMINATION

• There are more than 50 lawsthat discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. directly or indirectly, based solely on their ethnicity, rendering them second or third class citizens in their own homeland.

• 93% of the land in Israel is owned either by the state or by quasi-governmental agencies, such as the Jewish National Fund, that discriminate against non-Jews. Palestinian citizens of Israel face significant legal obstacles in gaining access to this land for agriculture, residence, or commercial development.

• More than seventy Palestinian villages and communities in Israel, some of which pre-date the establishment of the state, are unrecognized by the government, receive no services, and are not even listed on official maps. Many other towns with a majority Palestinian population lack basic services and receive significantly less government funding than do majority-Jewish towns.

• Since Israel's founding in 1948, more than 600 Jewish municipalities have been established, while not a single new Arab town or community has been recognized by the state.

• Israeli government resources are disproportionately directed to Jews and not to Arabs, one factor in causing the Palestinians of Israel to suffer the lowest living standards in Israeli society by all socio-economic indicators.

• Government funding for Arab schools is far below that of Jewish schools. According to data published in 2004, the governmentprovides three times as much funding to Jewish students than it does to Arab students.

• According to the 2009 US State Department International Religious Freedom Report, “Many of the national and municipal policies in Jerusalem were designed to limit or diminish the non-Jewish population of Jerusalem.”

• In the Spring of 2011, Jerusalem city councilman Yakir Segev stated: “We will not allow residents of the eastern [occupied Palestinian] part of the city to build as much as they need... At the end of the day, however politically incorrect it may be to say, we will also look at the demographic situation in Jerusalem to make sure that in another 20 years we don't wake up in an Arab city.”

• The Nationality and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinians from the occupied territorieswho are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel from gaining residency or citizenship status. The law forces thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to either leave Israel or live apart from their families.

• In October 2010, the Knesset approved a billallowing smaller Israeli towns to reject residents who do not suit "the community's fundamental outlook", based on sex, religion, and socioeconomic status. Critics slammed the move as an attempt to allow Jewish towns to keep Arabs and other non-Jews out.

• The so-called "Nakba Bill" bans state funding for groups that commemorate the tragedy that befell Palestinians during Israel's creation in 1948, when approx. 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed to make way for a Jewish majority state.

• The British Mandate-era Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance law allows the Finance Minster to confiscate land for "public purposes.” The state has used this law extensively, in conjunction with other laws such as the Land Acquisition Law and the Absentees' Property Law, to confiscate Palestinian land in Israel. A new amendment, which was adopted in February 2010, confirms state ownership of land confiscated under this law, even where it has not been used to serve the original confiscation purpose. The amendment was designed to prevent Arab citizens from submitting lawsuits to reclaim confiscated land.

• Over the entirety of its 63-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-1967) that Israel did not rule over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights.

• Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barakand Ehud Olmert have both warned that a continuation of the occupation will lead to Israel becoming an "apartheid" state. Barak stated: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, heroes of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, have both compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid.

• Today, there is a virtual caste system within the territories that Israel controls between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, with Israeli Jews at the top and Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the occupied territories at the bottom. In between are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem.

INCREASING INTOLERANCE FOR DISSENT & DIVERSITY IN ISRAEL

• In September 2011 a survey foundthat a third of Israeli Jews don’t consider Arab citizens to be real Israelis.

• According to a February 2011 survey, 52% of Israeli Jews would be willing to limit press freedoms to protect the state's image, while 55% would accept limits on the right to oppose the government's "defense policy.”

• Also in September 2011, Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of settlements in Hebron and Kiryat Arba and head of the West Bank setter rabbis' council, told a conferencethat Arabs are “wolves,” “savages,” and “evil camel riders.”

• A poll done by the Israel Democracy Instituteand released in January 2011 found that nearly half of Israeli Jews don't want to live next door to an Arab.

• In January 2011 the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported thatcivics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students. One teacher said, "When we have a discussion in class about equal rights, the class immediately gets out of control… The students attack us, the teachers, for being leftist and anti-Semitic, and say that all the Arab citizens who want to destroy Israel should be transferred." Another said: "We're not talking about a minority, or children from families that have extreme political views, but about normal children who are afflicted with ignorance… The political discourse in recent years has given them the legitimacy to be prejudiced."

• In November 2010 the chief rabbi of the town of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, issued a ruling forbidding Jews from renting property to Arabs. Eliyahu had previouslyadvocated hanging the children of terrorists.

• In December 2010, dozens of municipal chief rabbison the government payroll signed a letter supporting Eliyahu and his decree prohibiting Jews from renting property to non-Jews. One of the signatories, Rabbi Yosef Scheinen, head of the Ashdod Yeshiva (religious school), stated, "Racism originated in the Torah… The land of Israel is designated for the people of Israel."

• In December 2010, the wives of 30 prominent rabbis signed an open letter calling on Jewish women not to date or work with Arabs. The letter stated: "For your sake, for the sake of future generations, and so you don't undergo horrible suffering, we turn to you with a request, a plea, a prayer. Don't date non-Jews, don't work at places that non-Jews frequent, and don't do national service with non-Jews.”

• According to a September 2010 poll, half of Israeli Jewish students don't want Arabs in their classrooms, while an earlier surveyfound about the same number oppose equal rights for Arabs.

• In September 2010, the spiritual leader of the Shas party (which sits in PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government), Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, declared that non-Jews were created to “serve” Jews, stating that: "Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world - only to serve the People of Israel... Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.”

• In August 2010, on the eve of peace talks in Washington, Yosef delivered a sermon describing Palestinians as "evil, bitter enemies" and calling on god to make them "perish from this world" by striking them with a plague.

• In 2001, Yosef, delivered a sermon in which he stated:"It is forbidden to be merciful to [Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable…The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world.”

• In August 2010, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of a state-funded religious school in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, published a book that condoned the murder of non-Jewish children on the grounds that they may grow up to pose a threat to the state, writing that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks against them "curb their evil inclination.” Several other prominent rabbis subsequently endorsed the book.

• In July, 2009, Israel's Housing Minister, Ariel Atlas, warned against the "spread" of Israel's Arab population and said thatArabs and Jews shouldn't live together, stating: "if we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don't think that it is appropriate for [Jews and Arabs] to live together.

• In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, Israel's devastating three-week military assault against Gaza that killed more than 1300 Palestinians in the winter of 2008-9, the Israeli daily Haaretzreported that Israeli army units had been printing t-shirts depicting disturbing, violent images such as dead Palestinian babies, Palestinian mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child, bombed-out mosques, and a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target superimposed on her belly and the caption, “1 shot, 2 kills”. Another showed a Palestinian baby, growing into a boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."