Palestinian citizens of Israel
JVL Introduction
“But Arabs in Israel have the vote – how can it be apartheid?”
Alya Zoabi is Legal and Parliamentary Coordinator of the Mossawa Center, advocating for the civil and democratic rights of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel in the Knesset and Israeli government.
Here she shows exactly how it can be apartheid.
There have always been discriminatory laws restricting the lives of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. Among the most destructive are the Nakba Law, the Citizenship Law, the Kaminiz Law (housing and planning). Recently, the highly discriminatory Nation-State Law has been added to these.
And the absence of a constitution in Israel makes it remarkably difficult to protect the rights of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, as there is no mechanism to grant nor ensure their entitlement to inalienable rights.
The discrimination is in fact rampant: legally, economically, and socially.
The Ministry of Finance, no less, has pointed to large gaps resulting from discrimination in education, vocational training, welfare, employment, cultural services, infrastructure, transportation, and housing. But nothing is done about it…
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Thu 10 Dec 2020. Read the original here.
Palestinian citizens of Israel
Human rights are understood to include civil, constitutional, individual, and collective rights. Palestinian citizens are deprived of all of these rights in the State of Israel.
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I’m no expert but I’m a bit surprised by what isn’t in this article. I thought I’d see something about all Jews being allowed to emigrate to Israel, but even Palestinians who were living their historically don’t have automatic rights. And whilst the Nation-State law is mentioned, it’s effects don’t seem to be explained.
Life within Israel for Palestinians is being deliberately made unfair.
This has been observed previously by various independent visitors.
Indigenous people are being held to lower standards of living within Israel than immigrant settlers who I believe are mostly coming from Europe.
Israel is also an Apartheid State because 85 percent of the Indigenous population were Ethnically Cleansed in !948. They have no Israeli passport, no vote and no home. If British Jews had been deprived of their British passports under similar circumstances , nobody would even think of calling Britain a democracy. We are constantly told that Israel wants to be judged by similar criteria to any other western democracy. So be it.