The New Middle East (35 page)

Choosing to be unproductive is the key factor among the Haredi men. Discrimination seems to be a key factor in the unproductiveness of the Arab community. A report by the International Monetary Fund in 2012 said: ‘For every education attainment level, Arab workers earn much less than Jewish workers, and earnings gaps are particularly high for those with university degrees. This suggests that some non-economic factors exist, including distrust and discrimination towards Arab people.’
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In fact Arab workers earn around a third less than the country’s average salary.
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Even the brightest Arab employees in Israel believe they will eventually hit a glass ceiling.

But it is not just discrimination, it is a self-chosen exclusion from a key life experience of the Jewish majority that plays a part. The UK has the ‘old boy network’, the US has its fraternities, Arab countries have ‘
wasta
’. Israeli ‘
wasta
’, connections, comes from the national service years. That experience is a melting pot where bonds are formed for life that stretch between social classes. The Haredim and the Arabs in Israel are outside that because they refuse to serve in the country’s military, though for very different reasons. In the case of the Arabs it is because they do not want to be part of an army that is occupying and regularly in conflict with Palestinians in the territories.

The Arab community in Israel has the most complicated unresolved identity of any group of people in the Middle East. They are
not
just like the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, because their history over the last sixty-odd years has been totally different. The Arabs in Israel have a unique identity. That makes the dream of some right-wing Israelis – in a final peace deal with the Palestinians, to swap those living in communities on the Israeli side of the Green Line for Jewish settler communities on the other side of it – totally unworkable. The important word among the various labels of Arab Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, etc. is the word ‘Israel’. These people are Israeli. They have a very complicated relationship with the state, but it is their home, and most of them given the choice would choose to live inside it, not to jump ship to a Palestinian state in the increasingly unlikely event that one were to be formed. Surveys have shown that around half of the country’s Arabs have a sense of ownership towards the state of Israel.
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What concerns almost all Arabs though is that they believe the state of Israel does not have a sense of ownership towards its Arab citizens.

‘We accept the definition of the state of Israel as Jewish and democratic. But no one in the Arab community accepts the definition of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, period,’ Mohammad Darawshe told me. Mohammad runs the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an organisation that promotes equality among Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. There are eight million people living in Israel. Six million are Jewish. One point six million are Arabs. The rest are largely non-Arab Christians.
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‘In the past the state defined itself equally as Jewish and democratic, and it was getting more democratic and that created more space for the non-Jewish members of society. The trend in the last five years is to make it more Jewish, to even triumph over the democratic identity, which is reducing the space for the non-Jews to feel some sort of belonging.’ That trend is recognised by non-Arabs too. The Israeli Democracy Index’s report for 2012 found that ‘within the Jewish public, the balance between “Jewish” and “democratic” in the definition of the State continues to tilt toward the “Jewish” component.’

‘It makes you feel that you are some sort of temporary guest and that the option of getting rid of you is possible,’ said Mohammad. But that’s not the only reason Israel’s Arab communities feel literally unloved.

The country’s Supreme Court in January 2012 upheld a ruling that says Israeli citizens may live in Israel with their spouses unless their spouses are Palestinians from the West Bank. So if you are an Arab citizen of Israel or a Jewish citizen of Israel you can bring your wife from anywhere else in the world, but you can’t bring her the half an hour down the road from the West Bank. It was this ruling that
Ha’aretz
described with the headline ‘Supreme Court thrusts Israel down the slope of apartheid’, adding that this was a ‘demographic ruling that protects Jews while harming Arab citizens’.

For a long time it was not only the Israelis who made this country’s Palestinian citizens feel lonely, it was the rest of the Arabs too. Nobody wanted to speak for them because they were everyone’s poor relation.

For a period before the Second Intifada, while the peace movement in Israel could still draw breath, the Arab voters were courted by the political left. But the right wing managed to turn their presence in the left camp into a taint by claiming that governments which relied on Arab members of the Knesset were illegitimate. The phrase ‘Jewish majority’ was bandied about to imply that a government could not be trusted unless it had a majority without Arab support.

This sent Arab political participation in the electoral process into a slow tailspin from the elections in 1999. It had gone from 75 to 53 per cent by 2009.
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And then suddenly in the 2013 election it pulled up again to 56 per cent. When I asked Mohammad Darawshe why, he told me:

It was a response to the encouragement by the Arab League which for the first time called for the Arab citizens to participate, which you could call ‘Halal’, stamping Arab citizenship in Israel. Until now being Israeli citizens as Arabs was something to hide in front of the Arab world and sometimes to even be ashamed of. The Arab League gesture towards Arab citizens seems to accept that unique nature of Israeli citizenship for this group of Arabs. It’s saying it’s OK, we even need you in the Arab world.

But as far as a growing number of Israelis are concerned, that is where the Palestinian Arab community in Israel should be, shoved into the Arab world.

‘No, it’s not bad and it’s not good. It’s like third gear in a car, sometimes you use it and sometimes you don’t.’ David was an ordinary enough-looking man. He was short and stocky with a neatly trimmed light brown beard on a broad face. He wore a casual sweater and jeans. We were sitting on a couple of rocks on a blustery hilltop where he was building himself a new home.

The only thing extraordinary about David was that the ‘it’ we were discussing was killing children. David did not think it was always a bad thing. He was a religious ultra-nationalist Jewish settler, and he told me he was at war with the Arabs. All Arabs.

His single-floor wooden bungalow stood on stilts on the side of a hill alongside a few others in the middle of a barren piece of land deep inside the West Bank. It was part of what the settlers call an outpost, which conjures up for them their sense of a pioneering spirit. David considered its construction to be a declaration of his war. The state of Israel says his settlement is illegal because it is built on private Palestinian land. David believed God wanted him to live here. He believed it was his duty to live here, and if that meant killing Arab children to stay, then no man could tell him that wasn’t right.

‘Obviously it is wrong by [your] Christian humanist rules,’ he told me as he waded through a long convoluted justification for his statement. I interrupted his flow. ‘Where do you draw the line? Is a nine-month-old baby a threat to you?’

‘It is not a matter of threat, it is a matter of war. In the Christian understanding of the Bible, which is based on a mistranslation of the Ten Commandments, the Christians reckon it says: “Thou shalt not kill.” It does not say that in Hebrew, it says: “Thou shalt not murder.” Killing is fine.’

David spoke to me candidly on the basis that I would not identify him, so I have not. David is not his real name. He has served time in jail for violent gun crimes against members of the West Bank Palestinian community. But David is not just some brutish idiot. He is articulate and he works in one of Israel’s hi-tech industries. He has a clear and, in his own mind, very rational argument to justify his presence here.

Men like him build outposts on the Palestinian hilltops. Then when they have created a line of dots of occupied land, more people come to fill in the gaps between the dots. As their numbers grow, and while the legal case to throw them out slowly winds its way through the Israeli courts, the IDF moves in to protect these isolated outposts from possible attacks. Once the army is there, more families feel secure enough to move in too, so the outpost eventually becomes a bigger settlement. The wooden bungalows are replaced by bricks and mortar, and as the homes become permanent, so does the determination of the less hard-line settlers to stay.

To remove all these people and their homes, the Israeli government has to send in those bulldozers Netanyahu talked about. They also have to contend with the images of Israeli families being literally dragged kicking and screaming from their homes. And those images do not play well with right-wing or even mainstream Israel. The present political leadership therefore often does everything it can to drag its feet on implementing court orders with appeals and delaying tactics until hopefully they can find a way to keep the settlers, who are also right-wing voters, where they are, or at worst in another nearby settlement with bigger and better homes.

‘I’m fighting a war, I choose to be here. I’m saying, by being here, this is my land and no one else’s,’ said David. ‘The world, the UN or international courts may or may not agree. I don’t care. I’m just not interested, I believe in my rules and my rules say this land is mine. And that is why I choose to live specifically here, in a place which some people would say shouldn’t be mine. And in that sense it makes this the front line of the war.’

‘And where do those rules come from?’ I asked him.

‘The Bible,’ he said. David told me he considered there to be two main forces at work within the Jewish people. Those who strongly identified themselves as Jewish – and in that group he placed the ultra-Orthodox and religious ultra-nationalists like himself. And those who wanted to merge their Jewish identity with other cultures. That is where he placed the majority of the secular community and the state of Israel.

‘I’m here because I am Jewish. There is nothing else that gives me the right to claim this land. I wasn’t born here. I didn’t buy it from anyone. No government or law gave it to me. In fact they told me to leave, but I’m still here.’

David’s vision of a Greater Israel starts with the West Bank but ultimately includes areas which are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Sinai, and slivers of Iraq. I asked him how representative he thought his views were of the wider population. ‘I’m in the minority without a doubt. It used to be one per cent or less. I would guess now in some things it’s ten per cent, in others it’s getting to be a majority, in other aspects it’s less than one per cent still, but it’s growing all the time.’

‘Most people would see you as a bit of an extremist nutcase wouldn’t they?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. But throughout the history of the Jewish people, it has always been individuals or very small groups going against the will of the majority that led the way forward. I’d like to believe I’m one of those people who is paving the way for everyone else to follow later.’

He would no doubt have found proof of that statement in the success of the Jewish Home Party in the 2013 polls. Naftali Bennett, is – within the hard-line settler community anyway – a more moderate voice. Among his new MPs there are people like him and there are people like Orit Struk. She comes from the very hard-line settler community in the West Bank town of Hebron. While she was entering parliament her thirty-year-old son was serving a thirty-month jail sentence for kidnapping and assaulting a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy who he later dumped naked by the side of the road.
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The West Bank settlements have the highest number of conscripts who choose to serve in IDF combat units during their national service. That figure was nearly double that of those living in the Tel Aviv area.
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That helped add to a sharp rise in the number of IDF infantry officers who are religious Zionists from 2.5 per cent in 1990 to 31 per cent in 2007.
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As the country has drifted to the right so has the army. That has raised concerns that there would be rebellion within the ranks if the politicians ever told them to carry out the evacuation of settlements in the West Bank as Sharon instructed the IDF over Gaza.

‘An increasing number of the young people in the IDF are the children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land. This presents a staggering problem . . . It’s a different Israel. Sixteen per cent of Israelis speak Russian.’
⁴⁰
Those were the words of US President Bill Clinton in 2010. He was identifying the two most right-wing forces in Israel today: the settlement movement and the Jews who emigrated from the former Soviet Union.

‘Russian Jews’, as they are called in Israel regardless of where in the former Soviet Union they came from, have been blamed for fundamentally altering the nature of Israeli society. They are accused of making it less tolerant, less democratic, and of collectively being the greatest obstacle to peace. They are the arch-rivals of both the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs in Israel when it comes to issues of the state. They are stridently secular and nationalist.