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23 December 2010 By
Jonathan Cook The pretty two-storey home with a
red-tiled roof built by Adel and Iman Kaadan looks no
different from the rows of other houses in Katzir, a
small hilltop community in
northern Israel close to the
West Bank. But, unlike the other residents
of Katzir, the Kaadans moved into their dream home
this month only after a 12-year battle through the
Israeli courts. The small victory for the Kaadans,
who belong to Israel's
Palestinian Arab minority, dealt
a big blow to a state policy that for decades has
reserved most of the country's land for Jews. Katzir is one of 695 so-called
"co-operative associations", communities mostly
established since Israel's creation in 1948, whose
chief purpose is to bar non-Jews from residency. In October, the Israeli
parliament moved to enshrine in law the right of these
associations, comprising nearly 70 per cent of all
communities in
Israel, to accept only Jews. The
Constitution,
Law and Justice Committee
approved a private members' bill that will uphold the
right of the communities' admissions committees to
continue excluding Arab citizens, who make up
one-fifth of the population. The bill is expected to
pass its final reading in the coming weeks. Commentators have compared the
legislation with South Africa's notorious apartheid
laws such as the
Group
Areas Act. A leading jurist,
Mordechai Kremnitzer, of Hebrew University in
Jerusalem,
said the bill gave off the "foul odour of racism". The legislation, both its
supporters and opponents are agreed, is a rearguard
action to prevent the possibility that other Arab
citizens might be inspired to follow the Kaadans'
example.
Israel Hasson, of the centrist Kadima
party, who was among the bill's formulators, said it
reflected "the state's commitment to the realisation
of the Zionist vision" in Israel. That vision is
embodied in a decades-old "Judaisation" programme to
settle as many Jews as possible in the heavily
Arab-populated north. Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the
Adalah legal centre for the Arab minority, said that
the long-standing practice of using admissions
committees to weed out applications from Arab citizens
was being given legal standing for the first time. "This legislation makes clear in
very blunt fashion that the thrust of policy in Israel
is towards maintaining segregation in housing between
Jewish and Arab citizens," she said. The question of control over
land, Ms Bishara said, was felt especially keenly by
the Arab minority, because the state had nationalised
93 per cent of all territory inside its recognised
borders. Co-operative associations, which
are limited to no more than 500 families each, have
jurisdiction over most of the country's habitable land
and are regarded by the authorities as a bulwark
against an Arab takeover, she said. Arab citizens, meanwhile, are
largely restricted to living in 124 towns and
villages, and control 2.5 per cent of Israel's
territory. Planning and building laws
confine the development and expansion of Arab
communities, leading to overcrowding. Tens of
thousands of Arab families, forced to build in
non-zoned areas, live in homes under demolition
orders. Mr Kaadan, 54, a hospital nurse,
said he had wanted to move to Katzir to improve his
family's quality of life. Baqa al Gharbiyya, an Arab
town 10km from Katzir where they previously lived, was
densely populated and lacked public services, while
the local schools for his five children were
underfunded and crumbling. Typically, Arab municipalities
receive only one third of the budget of Jewish
communities. Mr Kaadan said he had applied to
Katzir when he learnt that plots of land there for
house-building were heavily subsidised by the state,
selling for a fifth of the price demanded in Baqa al
Gharbiyya. The family's legal fight to win a
place in Katzir has been arduous. It took five years
for the
Supreme Court to rule on the
community's decision in 1995 to reject the Kaadans on
the grounds that they were Arab. Making "one of the most difficult
decisions in my life",
Aharon Barak, the court's
president, ordered Katzir's admissions committee to
consider the family's application, warning that it
could not reject them because of their ethnicity. Katzir, therefore, imposed a new
criterion for admission - "social suitability" - that
the Kaadans also failed. It was clear to everyone, Mr
Kaadan said, that "suitability" referred to the fact
that they were not Jews. When the Kaadans appealed to the
court again, the Lands Authority, a state body that
manages territory in Israel, relented and sold the
family a plot in 2007. However, the case has continued
to reverberate. Other exclusive Jewish
communities in the Galilee sought their own solution
to barring the entry of Arab families after Ahmed and
Fatina Zbeidat, from the Arab town of Sakhnin, applied
to the co-operative association of Rakafet in the
Misgav region. Rakafet's admissions committee
ruled in 2006 that the Zbeidats were unsuitable:
Fatina was too "individualistic", while her husband
lacked "knowledge of sophisticated interpersonal
relations". Like the Kaadans, the Zbeidats have
appealed to the Supreme Court. Several Jewish communities near
Rakafet hastily changed their bylaws last summer to
include a loyalty oath. Typical was Manof's, which
requires applicants to share "the values of the
Zionist movement,
Jewish heritage, settlement of the
Land
of Israel … and observance of
Jewish holidays". Ms Bishara, who represents the
Zbeidats, said the couple was seeking a ruling against
the use of admissions committees in the allocation of
land and housing. The judges ordered the government to
justify the practice at a hearing next month. The new legislation, known as the
Admissions Committee Bill, is designed to pre-empt any
ruling by the court.
Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group,
said it would petition the Supreme Court to strike
down the bill if, as expected, it becomes law in the
next few weeks. The liberal
Haaretz newspaper called the bill
an "outrageous" attempt to preserve "Jewish purity" in
communities such as Katzir and Rakafet. But the rightwing
Jerusalem Post
newspaper backed the legislation, saying Israeli Jews
"should have the right to live in a community where
they are not threatened by intermarriage or by
becoming a cultural or religious minority". 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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