09 April 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
A group of Jews and Arabs
are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as
“Israelis”, a nationality currently denied them, in a
case that officials fear may threaten the country’s
self-declared status as a Jewish state.
Israel
refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the
country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual
distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”.
Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel”,
the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish
nation”, meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews
but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.
Critics say the special
status of Jewish nationality has been a way to
undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in
Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are
Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege
Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights,
naturalisation, access to land and employment.
Arab leaders have also long
complained that indications of "Arab" nationality on
ID cards make it easy for police and government
officials to target Arab citizens for harsher
treatment.
The interior ministry has
adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for
Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or
ethnic terms, with “Jewish” and “Arab” being the main
categories.
The group’s
legal case is
being heard by the supreme court after a district
judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing
the state’s position that there is no Israeli nation.
The head of the campaign
for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired
linguistics professor, said: “It is absurd that
Israel, which recognises dozens of
different nationalities,
refuses to recognise the one nationality it is
supposed to represent.”
The government opposes the
case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to
“undermine the state’s infrastructure” -- a presumed
reference to laws and official institutions that
ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in
Israel.
Mr Ornan, 86, said that
denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin
of state-sanctioned discrimination against the Arab
population.
“There are even two laws --
the
Law of Return
for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs -- that
determine how you belong to the state,” he said. “What
kind of democracy divides its citizens into two
kinds?”
Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer
supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had
resorted to creating national groups with no legal
recognition outside Israel, such as “Arab” or
“unknown”, to avoid recognising an Israeli
nationality.
In official documents most
Israelis are classified as “Jewish” or “Arab”, but
immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the
Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000
arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically
registered according to their country of origin.
“Imagine the uproar in
Jewish communities in the United States,
Britain or
France, if the authorities there tried to classify
their citizens as “Jewish” or “Christian”,” said Mr
Ornan.
The professor, who lives
close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the
interior ministry refused to change his nationality to
“Israeli” in 2000. An online petition declaring “I am
an Israeli” has attracted several thousand
signatures.
Mr Ornan has been joined in
his action by 20 other public figures, including
former government minister
Shulamit Aloni.
Several members have been registered with unusual
nationalities such as “Russian”, “Buddhist”,
“Georgian” and “Burmese”.
Two Arabs are party to the
case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy
in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be
allowed to live in one of several hundred communities
in Israel open only to Jews.
Uri
Avnery,
a
peace activist
and former member of the parliament, said the current
nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far
greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab
citizens.
“The State of Israel cannot
recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state
of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of
Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these
consider themselves as belonging to the American,
Hungarian or Argentine nations.”
International Zionist
organisations representing the diaspora, such as the
Jewish National Fund
and the Jewish Agency, are given in Israeli law a
special, quasi-governmental role, especially in
relation to immigration and control over large areas
of Israeli territory for the settlement of Jews only.
Mr Ornan said the lack of a
common nationality violated Israel’s Declaration of
Independence, which says the state will “uphold the
full social and political equality of all its
citizens, without distinction of religion, race or
sex”.
Indications of nationality
on ID cards carried by Israelis made it easy for
officials to discriminate against Arab citizens, he
added.
The government has
countered that the nationality section on ID cards was
phased out from 2000 -- after the interior ministry,
which was run by a religious party at the time,
objected to a court order requiring it to identify
non-Orthodox Jews as “Jewish” on the cards.
However, Mr Ornan said any
official could instantly tell if he was looking at the
card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the
IDs of Jews was given according to the
Hebrew calendar.
In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included
the grandfather’s name.
“Flash your ID card and
whatever government clerk is sitting across from you
immediately knows which ‘clan’ you belong to, and can
refer you to those best suited to ‘handle your kind’,”
Mr Ornan said.
The distinction between
Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on
interior ministry records used to make important
decisions about personal status issues such as
marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on
entirely sectarian terms.
Only Israelis from the same
religious group, for example, are allowed to marry
inside Israel -- otherwise they are forced to wed
abroad – and cemeteries are separated according to
religious belonging.
Some of those who have
joined the campaign complain that it has damaged their
business interests. One
Druze member,
Carmel Wahaba, said he had lost the chance to
establish an import-export company in France because
officials there refused to accept documents stating
his nationality as “Druze” rather than “Israeli”.
The group also said it
hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that
intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli
citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli
nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign
border officials.
B Michael, a commentator
for Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s most popular
newspaper, has observed: “We are all Israeli nationals
-- but only abroad.”
The campaign, however, is
likely to face an uphill struggle in the courts.
A similar legal suit
brought by a
Tel Aviv psychologist,
George Tamrin, failed in 1970.
Shimon Agranat,
head of the supreme court at the time, ruled: “There
is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people.
… The Jewish people is composed not only of those
residing in Israel but also of diaspora Jewries.”
That view was echoed by the
district court in 2008 when it heard Mr Ornan’s case.
The judges in the supreme
court, which held the first appeal hearing last month,
indicated that they too were likely to be
unsympathetic. Justice Uzi Fogelman said: “The
question is whether or not the court is the right
place to solve this problem.”
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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