Israel's PR that its citizens are all equal, etc. etc. is a myth - in fact, a lie. Nothing could be further from the facts, let alone the truth.
As Mondoweiss [almost compulsory reading] reports:
"It seems like the issue of Palestinian freedoms in Israel proper has come up a few times already today, and I finally want to publish a note that my friend the Queen of Sheba sent to a few friends a few weeks back. She is a European woman, half-Muslim, who worked in Haifa for an NGO. The issue is not whether Palestinian Arabs would prefer life in Israel to life in neighboring countries, a "specious" point Anees of Jerusalem has addressed here before. The point of this post is: What does it mean to be a second-class citizen?"
"My work here is very difficult. To be honest there isn’t a single day when I don’t leave work completely depressed, sometimes in tears. The amount of abuse is at a level that you cannot even imagine unless you live here.
The majority of my work is with Palestinians living in Israel. These people suffer the most outrageous discrimination within a country where they are meant to be equal citizens. There are little things- for example, when you get your dorms at university they are given based on a point system, and you get points if you serve in the military. Since the Palestinians don’t serve, they don’t get points and they live in the worst dorms. If you want to study medicine there is a minimum age of 21 for entry, which is how old the Jewish kids are after 3 yrs of the military, so Palestinian students need to just waste 3 years waiting if they want to do medicine and end up studying something else instead. [Palestinians are exempted from mandatory military service; though the IDF has many Druse members] And on top of this there is actually an exception to the rule and you can start at 18 IF you are endorsed by the military- so again only Jews. These are the small issues.
Then there is a place near me which is an Arab village and because the funding in Arab areas is so much less the government decided not to fund the public school anymore, and not to provide buses for the children to go to the nearest town to go to school so a few weeks ago a 5 year old girl was walking to school and the road passes train tracks- and the girl was hit and killed by a train. In another area- the Negev valley- where the Bedouins live- the government says that because they do not have the deeds to the land that they have been living on for centuries it will not recognize their towns and therefore no services are provided. There is one village which has an electricity pole right in the middle of it, but the village itself has no running water or electricity.
These are a few among hundreds of things; I could go on for pages, so if you are interested I can write more about it. The area where I live in Haifa is the most run-down because it is an Arab neighborhood; so the government does not repave the roads, fix the pipes, etc. The EU Commission actually has asked Adalah- my organization- to write a book using the articles in the Apartheid Convention to compare every aspect of the South African regime and the Israeli Government. I have been spending most of my time writing several chapters for that and the results are just so upsetting, I had not realized the full extent of the repressive policies here."
As Mondoweiss [almost compulsory reading] reports:
"It seems like the issue of Palestinian freedoms in Israel proper has come up a few times already today, and I finally want to publish a note that my friend the Queen of Sheba sent to a few friends a few weeks back. She is a European woman, half-Muslim, who worked in Haifa for an NGO. The issue is not whether Palestinian Arabs would prefer life in Israel to life in neighboring countries, a "specious" point Anees of Jerusalem has addressed here before. The point of this post is: What does it mean to be a second-class citizen?"
"My work here is very difficult. To be honest there isn’t a single day when I don’t leave work completely depressed, sometimes in tears. The amount of abuse is at a level that you cannot even imagine unless you live here.
The majority of my work is with Palestinians living in Israel. These people suffer the most outrageous discrimination within a country where they are meant to be equal citizens. There are little things- for example, when you get your dorms at university they are given based on a point system, and you get points if you serve in the military. Since the Palestinians don’t serve, they don’t get points and they live in the worst dorms. If you want to study medicine there is a minimum age of 21 for entry, which is how old the Jewish kids are after 3 yrs of the military, so Palestinian students need to just waste 3 years waiting if they want to do medicine and end up studying something else instead. [Palestinians are exempted from mandatory military service; though the IDF has many Druse members] And on top of this there is actually an exception to the rule and you can start at 18 IF you are endorsed by the military- so again only Jews. These are the small issues.
Then there is a place near me which is an Arab village and because the funding in Arab areas is so much less the government decided not to fund the public school anymore, and not to provide buses for the children to go to the nearest town to go to school so a few weeks ago a 5 year old girl was walking to school and the road passes train tracks- and the girl was hit and killed by a train. In another area- the Negev valley- where the Bedouins live- the government says that because they do not have the deeds to the land that they have been living on for centuries it will not recognize their towns and therefore no services are provided. There is one village which has an electricity pole right in the middle of it, but the village itself has no running water or electricity.
These are a few among hundreds of things; I could go on for pages, so if you are interested I can write more about it. The area where I live in Haifa is the most run-down because it is an Arab neighborhood; so the government does not repave the roads, fix the pipes, etc. The EU Commission actually has asked Adalah- my organization- to write a book using the articles in the Apartheid Convention to compare every aspect of the South African regime and the Israeli Government. I have been spending most of my time writing several chapters for that and the results are just so upsetting, I had not realized the full extent of the repressive policies here."
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