Isn't that a culture that is coerced? Israeli Arabs have been intimidated by the rise of the Jewish right over the last few years. See Rekhness, These committees cannot refuse candidates on the basis of race, religion, nationality or physical disability Rekhness, Its proposals included dropping Arabic as an official language, requiring the state to devote resources specifically towards the establishment of Jewish settlements in the territories occupied in the War, and instituting Jewish law as the basis for Israel's legal system Rekhness, In , Sawsan Rahami Ravid, Barak.
Haaretz, Sep. Israel's discrimination against its Arab citizens. Middle East Monitor, Jun. Twenty-one such draft bills had been submitted to the Knesset members for consideration compared to eleven in According to Rahami, all of these laws sought to demote the status of Arab citizens and reduce their rights, while posing a continual threat to the legitimacy of their presence in Israel.
At the start of , the 19th Knesset approved a law proposing to distinguish between Muslim and Christian Arab citizens. Knesset passes bill distinguishing between Muslim and Christian Arabs. Sayed Kashua d Kashua, Sayed. Sayed Kashua's occupation? Don't get him started. In this case, the Arab parties would have to merge to survive. Most of these bills have not been passed in the Knesset or are still being discussed. Nevertheless, their consequence is a "growing mutual alienation of Arabs and Jews in Israel" Rekhess, Rekhess, Elie.
The bills erode the already fragile relationship between the populations, increase Arab frustration and rage, and, at the same time, augment Jewish fears and concerns about the loyalty of the Arab population to the Jewish State. Sayed Kashua the columnist dreams of Israel becoming a country for all its citizens, although nowadays the government is doing the exact opposite: "it is trampling it, reasserting that Jews are Jews and Arabs are Arabs" Kashua, d Kashua, Sayed.
Today still, when registering for an Israeli ID Card, people have to fill out a form indicating their 'nationality' where, for Arabs, the single option is 'Arab'. Applicants from minority populations also have to indicate their grandfather's name. Ironically, Israeli Arabs - as Israeli citizens - often experience prejudice from the outside world as they can been seen as partners of the Israeli government: "[ After realizing that when moving to the United States for a sabbatical year the I-columnist family would be seen as Arab Muslim, Kashua declares that "it won't help to start explaining that, yes, we really are Arabs, but we have Israeli citizenship.
No one there will give two hoots about our passport. If our Israeli citizenship is meaningless over here in Israel , is it going to prove useful in the United States of America? Not a chance! In the column mentioned earlier in which the I-columnist describes the public service commercial against prejudice, shown on Israel television and sponsored by the Justice Ministry, Kashua asks:.
Discrimination is a violation of the law and this is how the Justice Ministry is fighting it? Are the apartment owners, real-estate agents and builders who don't sell or rent apartments to Arabs, Ethiopians or Russians punished for perpetrating discrimination? Are the municipal rabbis who explicitly call for discrimination against Arabs removed from their posts?
And where is the law when it comes to admission committees for communities, family unification, allocation of resources, the establishment of new towns? Kashua, a Kashua, Sayed. Sayed Kashua's children hear only one Zionist story.
In the columnist's view, discriminatory laws and the failure to punish discrimination go beyond the legal sphere and implicate the most day-to-day interactions between people. This is spread in the difference in language status, in the business sphere and in the media. But still Israeli Arabs, as well as facing discrimination within their own country, are forced to deal with the prejudice directed against them by people from others countries, who think of them as Israeli citizens and thus Jewish themselves, since they have Israeli citizenship, or as citizens with a supposed dual loyalty, since they may have close relatives who did not receive Israeli citizenship.
And still these Arabs must be thankful to Israel because they have their rights assured by the state despite the social situation of discrimination in which they find themselves. In fact it is notable that Kashua has almost ceased writing about his own prejudices in the last few years.
A growing sense of detachment from Israeli society can be perceived in his columns. Kashua himself told me that it is getting harder and harder to laugh in Israel. Living abroad has started to occupy his mind Kashua, d :. It's true that they'll be different, but in a different way. They'll be immigrants, and maybe they'll have an accent, and they'll feel a little strange. But they'll be strangers in a strange land, and not in their homeland.
Price tag: Sayed Kashua will do anything for a good night's sleep. He spoke very slowly, emphasized each letter and nodded his head after every word. Yalla, bye," he hung up. I looked at my wife, who looked back at me. This salesman apologizes and says "I didn't intend to insult you," but the I-columnist takes him to be a "racist idiot. Sayed Kashua: Racist, but polite. Haaretz, Jun. He recognizes his own prejudices: "Okay, I'm a racist.
Last Friday, I realized that I'm both an idiot and a racist. The column tells of a picnic organized to celebrate the birthday of a boy from his son's class. The boy's mother compliments the I-columnist for his son's politeness. As he is about to leave his son at the party, having arranged to pick him up later, he sees Amir, another of his son's friend, whose parents are Ethiopian. I introduced myself and mentioned my son's name.
I couldn't control myself, and I couldn't wipe the dumb smile off my face. The I-columnist is self-consciousness about the fact that he felt a need to compliment Amir for his politeness but did not feel the same about Tomer, whose mother is Ashkenazi.
Did I not expect a black kid to be polite? They must have been insulted, I thought to myself. What have I done? Now they'll probably think I'm a racist, trying to hide behind the compliments I'm heaping on their son.
Why "even though"? What the hell is happening to me? The I-columnist recognizes that there are preconceptions one cannot avoid and that in practice these become prejudiced behaviors.
In this case, the prejudice happens to be directed against black people. At this same party, the I-columnist is introduced to a woman who, as soon as she realizes that she is having a conversation with an Arab, says: "Ex-treme-ly pleased. It seems that the columnist deals with prejudice and racism in two different ways.
Where the discrimination is shown by Israeli Jewish society against Israeli Arabs, the fear of the other is highlighted, a fear mainly related to physical violence. On the other hand, the I-columnist is able to consider discrimination as a point of view and almost a 'natural' behavior in dealing with the different and the other. In the column "Sayed Kashua racially profiles his own kids and gets a shock: Ahead of his sabbatical in Chicago, the Haaretz columnist concludes he is both a non-white and a racist" Kashua, h Kashua, Sayed.
Why Sayed Kashua is leaving Jerusalem and never coming back. Haaretz, July 4. I am nothing but a backward racist. This I-columnist usually sees enlightened liberal people as archetypes of non-prejudiced individuals. Translated as 'Ashkenazim,' these enlightened folk are the ones who built the modern State of Israel and have been the most powerful section of Israeli society ever since.
The desire to be white can be found in a large number of Sayed Kashua's articles. Looking for a school where his children can study during his sabbatical year in the United States, the 'I-of-the-columnist' concludes: " I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I smiled.
I felt that celiac, which I'd never even known existed, was a much more fitting illness for our family rather than thalassemia, which is a disease common among Mizrahim and with quite similar symptoms. Terms Of Service. Privacy Policy. Subscriber Agreement. JPost Jobs. Cancel Subscription. Customer Service. The Jerusalem Post Group. Breaking News. Iran News. World News. JPost NY Conference. Diplomatic Conference.
In the civil service it was hardly more complicated: Jews were not taken on, or veteran Jewish officials were confronted with insurmountable language difficulties, which were rarely imposed upon Moslems. Periodically, a Jewish engineer or a senior official would be put in jail on mysterious, Kafkaesque charges which panicked everyone else.
And this does not take into account the impact of the relative proximity of the Arab-Israel conflict. At each crisis, with every incident of the slightest importance, the mob would go wild, setting fire to Jewish shops. This even happened during the Yom Kippur War. Is it any wonder that the exodus to France and Israel continued and even increased?
I myself left Tunisia for professional reasons, admittedly, because I wanted to get back into a literary circle, but also because I could not have lived much longer in that atmosphere of masked, and often open, discrimination. It is not a question of regretting the position of historical justice we adopted in favour of the Arab peoples. I regret nothing, neither having written The Colonizer and the Colonized nor my applause for the independence of the peoples of the Maghreb.
I continued to defend the Arabs even in Europe, in countless activities, communications, signatures, manifestos. But it must be stated unequivocally, once and for all: we defended the Arabs because they were oppressed. But now there are independent Arab states, with foreign policies, social classes, with rich and poor. And if they are no longer oppressed, if they are in their turn becoming oppressors, or possess unjust political regimes, I do not see why they should not be called upon to render accounts.
Besides, unlike most people, I was never willing to believe as the liberals naively, and the communists artfully, repeat that after independence there would be no more problems, that our countries would become secular states where Europeans, Jews and Moslems would happily coexist.
I even knew that there would not be much of a place for us in the country after independence. Young nations are very exclusive; and anyhow, Arab constitutions are incompatible with a secular ideology. And this, by the way, has been recently underlined most appositely by Colonel Qadhafi.
He only said aloud what others think to themselves. I thought, in spite of everything, that the effort was worth making. After all, we had never occupied a major place; it would have been enough had they allowed us to live in peace. This was a drama, but a historical drama — not a tragedy; modest solutions did exist for us.
But even that was not possible. We were all obliged to go, each in his turn. Thus I arrived in France, and found myself up against the legend which was current in left-wing Parisian salons: the Jews had always lived in perfect harmony with the Arabs. I was almost congratulated for having been born in such a land where racial discrimination and xenophobia were unknown. It made me laugh. I heard so much nonsense about North Africa, and from people of the best intentions that, honestly, I did not react to it at all.
The chattering only began to worry me when it became a political argument that is, after The Arabs then made up their minds to use this travesty of the truth, which fell on willing ears once the reaction against Israel had set in after her victory. It is now time to denounce this absurdity. If I had to explain the success of the myth, I would list five converging factors. The whole responsibility for the Middle East conflict rests on the Jews of Europe.
The Arab Jews never wanted to create a separate country and they are full of trust and friendship towards the Moslem Arabs. This is a double lie: the Arab Jews are much more distrustful of the Moslems than are the European Jews, and they dreamed of the Land of Israel long before the Russian and Polish Jews did. In , Weinstock notes, almost one million Jews lived in the Arab world, whereas today there are about 4,, the great majority of them in Morocco.
According to Weinstock, there is no precedent for such a dramatic termination of Jewish communities anywhere in the world, including during the Holocaust. What, then, brought about the massive departure of Jews from the Arab countries? It was not Zionism that disconnected the Jews from their surroundings, he says.
On the contrary: In most cases, the Zionist movement had a hard time mustering supporters. Jews also tried to become part of the Arab national-liberation movements. For example, the chief rabbi of Egypt during the midth century, Chaim Nahum, often spoke out against Zionism; in Iraq, Jewish communists founded the Anti-Zionist League.
Activist Jewish communists in North Africa expressed solidarity with the Maghreb peoples and were in the forefront of the demand for national liberation. Weinstock cites a large number of attacks and pogroms against Jewish communities that are rarely mentioned in history curricula in Israel. In , 25 Jews were killed in the Algerian city of Constantine. In Iraq, Jews were murdered in the Farhud of , a three-day pogrom. Many Jews were arrested, tried and convicted, some were sentenced to death, others were given jail terms or slapped with large fines.
At this stage, the Jews were forbidden to leave the country, but in March Iraq allowed the Jews to emigrate, provided they gave up their citizenship and their property.
The majority of the Jewish population 90 percent of the community of , left that year, amid a massive plundering of their property by the authorities. In Egypt, anti-Jewish disturbances broke out in November , on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, but the declaration of the State of Israel three years later triggered serious persecution.
Hundreds of Jews were arrested, accused of involvement in Zionist or communist plots and had their property confiscated. Continuous attacks on Jews began that June. Bombs were planted in the Jewish quarter of Cairo, and it and the Jewish section of Alexandria were set ablaze. The Jews who were driven out were not allowed to take with or sell their property.
Is there anything in common among the different communities? Jews were not allowed to bear arms in these countries, in which carrying a weapon was considered a salient sign of manhood. In some cases, as in earlyth-century Morocco, Jews were made to go about barefoot, or to wear humiliating clothes.
In return for protection by the government, the Jews had to pay a special tax.
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