The Unmaking of Israel (23 page)

By 2009, more than eighty families belonged to the religious settlement group in Akko. Members of the group and their supporters often describe the city as if it were a battlefield, on which two armies thrust and parry via the real estate market. Akko’s Arabs have been “taking control of neighborhoods in the north and east,” the settler newspaper
Besheva
reported just after the 2008 riots. But by moving into one of the eastern neighborhoods, the settlement group “stopped the Arab encroachment.” There is “an Arab nationalist push for young families living in the Galilee to invade into Akko,” says Sara Paparin, development director of the
hesder
yeshivah. The interpretation of Arab migration to the city as an organized campaign is one I heard repeatedly in Akko. Its basis appears to be psychological: a projection of what Jewish nationalists are doing onto the actions of the perceived enemy. The enemy should know its place. “We certainly won’t expel them,” Nachshon Cohen says of the city’s Arab residents, but “the question is whether . . . they accept not only that we are here, but that Akko is a Jewish city.”

Akko’s
hesder
yeshivah opened its doors in 2003. The idea came from the settlement group. The yeshivah website explains the importance of bringing Jews to the city: “Akko of our days is the front line. . . . The risk [here] of losing the Jewish majority and the Zionist identity of the city is the highest in the country.” At one time the site also declared that the students “project power, determination and confidence in everything having to do with the Jewish future of the city,” though the language has since been toned down. One way of projecting power, intentional or not, particularly disturbed the yeshivah’s Arab neighbors: When students on leave from the army visited the yeshivah, they carried their military assault rifles. Even if students were from within Israel, the combination of skullcaps and guns fit the evening-news image of West Bank settlers.

In 2006, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, someone in Wolfson tried to make up for the lack of mosque and minaret by putting a loudspeaker on an apartment house roof to sound the chant announcing the daily end of the fast. The yeshivah students saw that as violating the religious status quo. That year, the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah—traditionally marked by dancing with Torah scrolls—fell during Ramadan. The procession of dancing yeshivah students left the study hall for the streets and “private Arab areas,” according to a Knesset report. The report avoids stating whether the students or Arab bystanders started the brawl that followed. This ambiguity is wise, given how a brawl smolders from shouts to pushes to blows. The shots fired in the air, however, clearly came from a student’s army-issue rifle. The police arrested the student and broke up the melee. Afterward, the street-corner police station was established to keep the peace in Wolfson.

The response was not sufficient. The city burst into flame two years later, again on a religious holiday. In Jewish areas of Israel, the streets are empty of cars on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The custom is that no one drives. Near midnight on Yom Kippur, 2008, an Arab resident of Wolfson drove to the east side of town to pick up his daughter at a relative’s apartment. Young men hanging out on the street—the kind of bored toughs who do not spend the holy day fasting and praying but are quick to defend Jewish honor—began hurling stones at the car. The driver and his two passengers took refuge in his relative’s apartment, which was surrounded by an angry crowd. A rumor spread in the Old City that Jews had killed someone. Young Arabs tried to reach the apartment, clashed with Jews, and smashed car and shop windows on their way home. Arabs living on the east and north sides of town fled their homes, several of which were torched; Jewish rioters threw stones at Arabs and police and chanted “Death to Arabs.” The violence lasted four days.

This time neither the yeshivah nor the settlement group was at the center of the storm, though someone in Wolfson did express his view of the yeshivah by tossing a Molotov cocktail through the office window, causing a small fire. Arab activists cited the presence of the yeshivah and settlement group among the ignored portents of the explosion. “That’s the trend of recent years—a trickle of the extreme right into Akko. They’ve turned everything upside down,” an Arab resident of Wolfson told a reporter.

Afterward, the settlement group “took the lead in making the statement that this is a Jewish city and it’s ours,” administrator Yishai Rubin told the settler magazine
Nekuda
. On Simhat Torah, a week and a half after Yom Kippur, the group hosted 600 young Orthodox Jews from out of town who “flooded the streets of Akko and raised morale,” Rubin said. Once again, the ritual was religious, but the statement was nationalist. The riots were over. The “psychological war” was not.

Akko is only one of the mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel that religious nationalists have set out to “save” by importing the settlement model. Two families from the West Bank settlement of Beit El established the original toehold in Lod, southeast of Tel Aviv, in 1995. By 2009, the Lod group had expanded to 250 families, and was building a housing development on the “seamline” between mainly Jewish and mainly Arab neighborhoods. That was the defensive tactic, meant to create a wall blocking Arab migration. For offense, the settlement group established a premilitary academy in a majority-Arab neighborhood. “We’re absolutely starting a process that declares that we are not abandoning the area and that we’re going to Judaize it,” the group’s director told
Nekuda
.

One of the Lod settlers, Ariel Ben-David, helped establish a parallel group in the neighboring town of Ramleh. “I grew up as a settler,” he told the settler magazine. “It was hard for me to leave the settlements, and it was important for me to live in a place where there was also a national struggle,” meaning a struggle between Jews and Palestinians. Many of the Ramleh settlers came from the hypernationalist communities of Beit El, Elon Moreh, and Yitzhar.

Another settlement group has moved into Jaffa. Until 1948, Jaffa was the commercial center of Arab Palestine. Since then, it has been the southern end of Tel Aviv, the one part of the metropolis with a mix of Arabs and Jews. A
hesder
yeshivah followed the settlement group. The dean of the yeshivah, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, moved to Jaffa from Beit El. Mali, an extremely wary interviewee, told me that “Arabs don’t interest us.” His goal, he said, was to connect to local Jews. The yeshivah, however, is in Ajami, the Arab-majority part of Jaffa.

A few blocks away from it is a state-owned lot for which the Bemuna company has acquired development rights. The company’s name means “In Faith”; it builds for “the religious Zionist public” and announced it would sell the apartments exclusively to Orthodox Jews. Among the company’s other projects is one in the West Bank settlement of Pnei Hever and another in Arab a-Sawahra, a Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The head of the company told an Orthodox news site that one attraction of the Jaffa project is that it provides “ideological value added” for religious couples. The news site’s sympathetic report forthrightly describes buyers as “settling in Jaffa.”

“Akko is not alone,” Knesset member Uri Ariel of the far-right National Union party wrote after the 2008 riots. Arabs were engaging in deliberate block-busting in Israeli cities, he said. After Jews were pushed out, neighborhoods became “hothouses of crime, drugs and prostitution,” wrote Ariel. “In Israeli cities, a creeping Arab conquest is taking place.” Religious settlement groups, in his description, were a first line of defense, “stabilizing the situation in many cities and preventing Jewish flight.” But on the national level, the solution was “to encourage voluntary emigration of the Arabs.” Ariel, a veteran leader of the West Bank settlement movement, did not specify how Arabs were to be so “encouraged.” His article does make clear that in the view from the settlements, the Green Line had truly been erased. Israeli cities and West Bank hills were fronts in the same war.

In
God of Vengeance
, Sholem Asch’s classic Yiddish play, a character in an unnamed Eastern European town a century ago runs a brothel in his basement while trying to bring up his daughter as a chaste Jewish girl on the floor above. To protect her purity, he places a Torah scroll in his home. He has a matchmaker find a pious groom for her. His plan fails. A wooden floor cannot keep the two realms of his life apart. Reverence for a sacred scroll cannot ward off corruption when people ignore the words written in it.

Let us read Asch’s drama as an allegory for what happens when a fragile democracy tries to maintain an undemocratic regime next door in occupied territory. A border, especially one not even shown on maps, cannot seal off the rot. Nor can politicians’ declarations of reverence for liberal values.

In recent years the corrosive effects of the occupation on Israel have been glaring, especially the vocal, shameless efforts of the political right to treat Israeli Arabs as enemies of the state rather than as fellow citizens. “Settling” in Israeli cities is just one symptom of this illness. Unchecked, the offensive against democracy has grown wider. The political right uses charges of treason to attack critics of policy in the occupied territories, and seeks legislation to curb dissent and the rights of Arab citizens and to bypass the Supreme Court.

Obviously, the occupation is just one factor in the inequality of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which dates to the beginning of the state. The abolition of the military government over Israeli Arabs in 1966 did not instantly end discrimination or the ideas on which it was based.

An example: the unnatural survival of the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund was a statement that Israel had not yet learned to see itself as a state rather than as a national movement. Both bodies were established to serve Jews in their struggle for self-determination. Independence made them obsolete, but they were not dismantled. Instead, their relation with the government was defined by law, and they provided services in its place. The agency built the infrastructure for rural Jewish communities; Arab communities remained less developed. The JNF owned land designated for the use of Jews alone. Much of it was “absentee property”—land that Arab refugees left behind, which the government seized and sold to the JNF.

The JNF’s role, which lasts to today, is just one expression of planning and land-use policies that reflexively serve Jews rather than citizens in general. A recent wave of eviction notices against Jaffa’s Palestinians illustrates the problem. After 1948, Arabs who remained in Jaffa were forced to move into a small section of the city. Many moved into buildings that other Arabs had left behind, becoming the state’s tenants in what was officially “absentee property.” Jaffa as a whole was annexed to the municipality of Tel Aviv. When the city enacted a new town plan for Jaffa in the 1990s, it set rules that virtually forced gentrification. By finding Arab residents in breach of contract and evicting them, the state can sell the property at the new, high market value to developers who will sell to well-off Jews.

Land use, moreover, is part of a larger picture. In 2008, Palestinian citizens were 17 percent of the Israeli population, but only 6 percent of the civil service. The class size in Arab elementary schools was nearly one-fifth larger than in Jewish schools. The proportion of young Jews enrolled in Israeli universities was almost three times larger than the proportion of young Arabs. This is but a sampling of the effects of years of institutional and informal discrimination.

It’s also true that abolishing the military government was a milestone in a slow process of emancipation of Arab citizens. Accessible higher education paved the way for the rise of a new generation of Israeli-born Arab intellectuals, some of whom led a political transformation. The old client-patron relation with Jewish-dominated parties faded; the number of parties representing Israeli Palestinians grew, as did their total representation in the Knesset. Over time, as part of the growth of civil society, organizations defending Arab rights began using the courts to challenge discrimination.

The effect of the occupation on this picture is complicated. In some ways it actually seemed to enhance Israeli Arabs’ emancipation. Ultimately, though, it is sabotaging the process.

After June 1967, Arabs inside the Green Line could reconnect to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and to their own identity as Palestinians. Yet something else happened, which fit into political rhetoric less well: they noticed that they were different from those living across the invisible border. The Hebrew words in their Arabic marked them as Israelis. They were second-class citizens—but unlike Palestinians living in occupied territory, they were citizens. The new reality made them more Palestinian and more Israeli at the same time.

The first stage of planning of Israel’s security fence, in 2002, highlighted the difference in status and confidence between Israeli and West Bank Palestinians. Much of the route meandered through the West Bank. In one spot, though, it cut through Israeli territory—on the outskirts of the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, putting nearly 250 acres of local farmers’ fields on the West Bank side. The army’s planners preferred the topography of that route. Whether they would have drawn the same line on hillsides farmed by Jews is a separate question. A committee including the mayor and a local human rights lawyer, Tawfiq Jabareen, met with Defense Ministry officials and warned that townspeople would physically block the work. A Knesset member from the town, Hashem Mahameed, contacted Prime Minister Sharon and asked to change the route.

“They saw that Umm-al Fahm, like the settlers, is very strong . . . and politically mature,” attorney Jabareen told me afterward. The Defense Ministry sent officials to negotiate, and within a month the state agreed to a route that took only twelve acres of town land. Otherwise, the barrier ran just inside the West Bank, on land taken from West Bank Palestinian villages. In principle, Jabareen said, he opposed any fence, “but we must be realistic. We cannot defend all of the Palestinian people.” The campaign was pragmatic, forceful, and waged by people who felt that they were more than halfway inside the system. West Bank villagers who lost land to the barrier could only dream of such negotiations, or of their success.