'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Palestinian Israelis: Equality quest continues

Some 20% of Israel's citizens are ethnic Palestinians-- that is, Palestinians who in 1948 managed to remain (and are descendants of those who managed to remain) in or near their homeplaces in what became Israel while a majority of the Palestinians from those areas were ethnically cleansed from those areas during the Arab-Israeli war of that year.

The new State of Israel defined itself as a Jewish state, and has ever since given extraordinary benefits to any Jewish person from anywhere in the world, over and above those it offers to those of its citizens who happen not to be Jewish.

The many forms of discrimination to which these Palestinians are subjected is well documented by the advocacy organization Taayush (Coexistence).

So now, the Netanyahu government has formed a committee to promote the stronger representation of Palestinian Israelis in government jobs, given that they hold only 6.8% of government jobs at present.

But guess what. The eleven persons named to this committee include not a single Palestinian Israeli!

Clearly, the work of this committee is "too important" to be entrusted to someone who's not Jewish... (Irony alert.)

* A note on nomenclature: The Haaretz article refers to the discriminated-against group as "Arabs". Most Israeli sources prefer to use that term, which serves the purpose of making these "Israeli Arabs" sound as though they have nothing in common with the Palestinians who live in the West Bank, Gaza, or in the very extensive Palestinian diaspora. But that's nonsense. These people were Palestinians (i.e. citizens of the British-mandated State of Palestine) before they had "Israeliness" forced upon them. And the only difference between them and those of their brothers and cousins who ended up as refugees was a series of decisions made by family forebears in those very tense, fear-riven days of 1947-48 when the Jewish/Israeli forces put the ethnic cleansing plan ('Plan Dalet') into operation. So to describe them only as somehow deracinated Israeli "Arabs" rather than Palestinians is highly misleading...