"Israel is a Democratic State ... We are Treated Just Like the Jews"

Here's one for the Israel-bashing Bowens, Knells and Donnisons of the BBC, as told to one of their colleagues:

"Israel is a democratic state. I have not seen any injustice there. We are treated just like the Jews".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkgDG8c-u_Y

To quote the translator and uploader, Memri.org:

'Sayyaf Sharif Daoud, a captured Israeli-Arab ISIS fighter who holds Israeli citizenship, said in a July 16, 2019 interview on BBC Arabic (U.K.) that he had joined ISIS instead of the Palestinian resistance because his experience of having lived through the Second Intifada and of having lived in the West Bank and in Israel had taught him that Israel "has not done one percent of what Bashar Al-Assad has done."

He explained that despite the fighting, Israel has never raped women or brutally killed people like the Assad regime has.

 Daoud also said that his father had warned him against joining Hamas and Fatah, and he expressed regret at having joined ISIS. 

He said he hopes that Israel will take him back so that his life can return to normal. Daoud added that Israel is a democracy in which he has not seen injustice and in which Arabs and Jews live together and are treated equally.'

"In Israel ... Whether You Are a Jew or an Arab You Are Free" (video)

"Share this!" suggests an Israel supporter on Facebook.  So although the video isn't brand new, but tell important truths, I am.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu-5xxZJxmA

More here

At Their Wits' End: Israeli Arab speaks up for Israel (video)

On the campus of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, a brave and articulate young Israeli Arab, Yahya of StandWithUs, speaks up for Israel, to the obvious ire of Wits Uni's BDS brigade:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAccNmG0Zb8

(Video: South African Union of Jewish Students)

"Your Future is Our Future": Bibi to the Arab citizens of Israel (plus more)

Meanwhile:

And, outside the Democratic National Convention, hate-filled ratbags screaming wretched slogans set the Israeli flag ablaze.

This must vex them:

Is Israel Really An Apartheid State? (video)

Here's an interesting video newly posted to YouTube:

According to a poll published this week:

An impressive vote of confidence in the "Apartheid State", eh?

The Old "Israel Looted Palestinian Books" Canard Rears Its Ugly Head Again

I see that no less a personage than Dr Nabil Al-Arabi, secretary-general of the Arab League, has claimed at an Arab League function in Cairo attended by representatives of the International Council on Archives as well as by the Palestinian and Egyptian ministers of culture and an array of Arab intellectuals and officials, that "Israel has stolen 80,000 Palestinian books and manuscripts and kept them in its national libraries since 1948".

It's reported that

"Al-Arabi called for efforts to be made to regain archives stolen by imperialist powers with the aim of hiding the Arabic identity and forging its history, mainly the Palestinian history. He stressed the importance of maintaining the Palestinian identity and its manuscripts

He added that some Arab countries, including Algeria, Libya and Iraq are working to regain their archives, which also contains its histories. The Arab League is working on this in cooperation with the ICA.

 Abu Amr [Palestinian Minister of Culture Mr Ziad Abu Amr]said: "The occupation's measures, which have been taking place since the Nakba in 1948 to damage Palestinian culture, information centres, universities and archives of Palestinian institutions, are part of the efforts to hide the Arabic identity of Palestine."...'

As I noted in a couple of years ago, the canard that Israel deliberately misappropriated books belonging to the Palestinian Arabs has been a weapon in the Israel-haters' cachement for some considerable time.

It has gone the rounds of the Israel-demonising propaganda network, appearing, for instance,  here / and here and here

But as that 2012 post of mine declares, in 1948, in an article entitled "Arabs in Israel," Norman Bentwich, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in regards to the work of the Ministry of Minorities, set up to safeguard the welfare of Arabs (and other non-Jews) in the newly-proclaimed Jewish State:

 'Perhaps the most striking work in the Ministry is its effort to develop cultural life, in the midst of the uneasy truce, for the Arab population. It has already established some fifty primary schools in the towns and villages, with free education. A former Jewish Inspector of the Mandatory Education Department is in charge of the schools; another, an Oriental Jew, with a thorough knowledge of Arabic, assists him. The Ministry has also established one or two Arab clubs for reading and recreation, and has promoted a daily Arabic newspaper, El Yom (The Day). This is the first Arabic daily to appear in Israel. Several of the staff are Arabs, who have full freedom of expression; and some educated Arabs write to the Palestine Post, the English[-language] daily, voicing grievances about rent and employment, and the like.

 A remarkable cultural enterprise is the establishment in Jaffa of an Arab library, which includes close on 100,000 books and periodicals salvaged from private houses that were deserted and broken into during the fighting. It includes, too, some Arab manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, which may have value for scholars. The books and manuscripts are being catalogued by a Jewish scholar of Baghdad. The library is housed in a private mansion of one of the richer Arabs of Jaffa, and there is a project of making it a cultural centre. The whole cost to the Government so far has been only a few hundred pounds.

In Jerusalem 30,000 books were similarly salvaged and handed over for safe-keeping to the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem. It is likely that the owners of the books will come to identify their property and collect it back; but the action of the Ministry will have prevented looting and destruction, and it has received the appreciation of the Arab population.'

Does that look like deliberate plunder to you?  No, not to me, either.

Read more of the Bentwich article here

Since this looted books story is already being used as anti-Israel propaganda by the usual suspects, it's as well to be reminded that in Hebron in 1929 Jewish manuscripts, including notable ancient documents, were looted from Jewish homes and synagogues. It's possible that some of this loot surfaced among  Jewish manuscripts shown by Arab dealers to the Rockefeller Museum.  Furthermore Jewish homes and synagogues/yeshivot were looted in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1929 and 1936-38; during the latter period, there was a pogrom in the south Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiyot, and at least one important Hebrew writer residing there had his books vandalised and looted. (Hat tip: E.)

"In Reality, Israel Is The Only Middle Eastern Entity That Is Not An Apartheid Regime"

In New York on 7 July, a participant in an anti-Israel rally proclaims her reason for supporting BDS.

It is as we know a commonly-expressed justification by BDSers for their hatred of and targeting of the tiny Jewish State, and it's based on a false premise, of course, depending for its origin and its circulation on the construction and consumption of a Big Lie.

The latest well-informed person in a position to be able to show it up for what it is does so in a substantial, scholarly, closely argued, fully footnoted article.

He's Steven Plaut, an academic in the Graduate School of Management at the University of Haifa, and his article is entitled "The Myth of Ethnic Inequality in Israel".

Here's a taste:

'It is commonplace to attribute much of Israel's domestic tensions to supposed Jewish discrimination against the country's Arab citizens. Nearly every Israeli Arab nongovernmental organization insists that such discrimination characterizes the Jewish state in general and its labor markets in particular. The Israeli media routinely interview Israeli Arabs (and non-Ashkenazi Jews) who claim to have been victims of discrimination. These allegations are echoed by Jewish Israeli academics, think tanks, and journalists, especially on the political Left, not to mention the international anti-Israel movement and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State has even joined the growing outcry concerning Israel's alleged racist discrimination against its Arab citizens. 

 Of course, in reality, Israel is the only Middle Eastern entity that is not an apartheid regime, and the apartheid slander holds no water whatsoever save in the minds of the Jewish state's enemies and defamers. Yet discrimination is a scientifically empirical question subject to testing and not a matter of subjective personal opinion. Stripping away the venomous anti-Israel rhetoric, the legitimate question remains whether and how much discrimination really exists in Israel....

 The most surprising conclusion from the econometric analysis of ethnic earnings disparities in Israel is how many of the stereotypical characterizations of Israel turn out to be false. Ethnicity in Israel simply does not play a large role in the labor market, in contrast with gender or schooling.

 While it is widely presumed that the Arab minority underperforms in the labor market of the Jewish state, either because of discrimination or other structural or cultural disadvantages, this turns out not to be so. That accusation is central to the claim that Israel is some sort of apartheid regime....

 The problem is not just in the media. The academic careers of many in Israel, particularly in sociology, have been constructed entirely upon unsubstantiated allegations of Israeli racism. Israeli sociologists in general tend to accept at face value the notion that any documented disparity in earnings or numerical representation between Israeli Jews and Arabs must be due to discrimination. Perhaps the most notorious example is that of Yehouda Shenhav, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University. Shenhav is father of the notion that "Oriental Jews" are in fact "Arabs of the Mosaic faith," and together with Arabs, share a victimhood imposed upon them by racist Ashkenazi Zionists.  Shenhav and those of similar ideological orientation operate the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, dedicated to liberating "Oriental Jews" from Ashkenazi bigotry and capitalism.

In Israel's media, it is considered common knowledge that Arabs, Mizrahim, and Ethiopians are victims of harsh discrimination.The accusations of apartheid may be malicious, disingenuous, and over-the-top—or so most Israeli commentators and sociologists would agree—but the presumption of an underlying widespread pattern of discrimination is, to their minds, undeniable. The extent to which some in Israel go to manufacture evidence of discrimination can be awe-inspiring. For example, the ordinarily prestigious Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a left-wing think tank, published a study in May 2013 that claimed to have discovered unambiguous proof of widespread discrimination in Israel against Arabs. Composed by IDI legal staffer Tanya Steiner under the supervision of Hebrew University professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, the study's evidence was the number of complaints about discrimination submitted to the Israeli Commission on Equal Opportunities in Employment. Yet while numerous complaints from women reached the commission, only 3 percent of the complaints it received were from Israeli Arabs, who represent about 18 percent of the labor force. Of these, only three of the complaints received in the entire 2011 year by the commission about alleged anti-Arab discrimination were deemed worthy of investigation. So instead of concluding that the evidence points to an absence of discrimination, the IDI's conclusion was that it all proves how badly discriminated Israeli Arabs are in Israel; after all, they are so victimized that they do not even file complaints about discrimination.

There is no evidence that points to ethnic discrimination against Israeli Arabs or Mizrahi Jews in Israeli labor markets. Recent immigrants appear to be the one group in the country at an earnings disadvantage. But it would be difficult to make a case that even their disadvantage is due to discrimination since immigrants in all societies are at a competitive disadvantage compared with natives...

The nearly complete absence of evidence of ethnic discrimination in Israeli labor markets does not, of course, preclude its existence in other markets or aspects of society. As was shown here, Arabs earn a higher return on education than Jews. But this does not rule out possible discrimination against Arabs in admissions to universities and colleges. It should be noted, however, that Israeli universities routinely implement affirmative action preferences in favor of Arabs and sometimes in favor of Mizrahim (and women). The only other documented university discrimination is that which grants some preferences to army veterans, a practice found in most countries.

There have also been allegations that Israel discriminates in its fiscal allocations and revenue sharing where Arab towns and villages are underfunded. But an empirical analysis of the question found just the opposite; if anything, the Arab local authorities were being over-funded.  Evidence regarding other alleged forms of discrimination by Israel tends to be just as skimpy. Some accusations are based upon Israel's granting automatic citizenship to Jews under its "Law of Return." But such citizenship entitlements are not unusual in the world and can be found in many other countries, such as Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, and are guaranteed under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  Another indictment of Israel concerns the discriminatory nature of its military conscription. Jews and Druse are conscripted into the Israeli military while Arabs may volunteer for service but are not conscripted. Again, this practice may indeed constitute discrimination but that discrimination is against Jews, not against Arabs.

None of this proves that discrimination never exists in Israel against Arabs, against Mizrahi Jews, or anyone else. But the very fact that empirical evidence of discrimination is so hard to discern or observe must itself serve as an important warning indicator about its magnitude or lack thereof.'

Read the entire article, with its supporting footnotes plus captioned illustrations, here

Canadian Campus Bigots Turn Deaf Ears To Arab Israelis Debunking The "Apartheid" Slur

Rabea Bader (who's on the extreme right of this photo from the article cited below), is a member of Israel's 125,000-strong Druze community.  He is one of eight young Israelis from various backgrounds who has participated in the WorldSwap scheme, organised by StandWithUsCanada, designed to help debunk the outrageous "Israeli Apartheid" myth which bedevils so many campuses and has (see my post here) caused the undergraduates of one Canadian university, Windsor in Ontario, to vote in favour of BDS.

As the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) reports:

'The WordSwap team travelled to the University of Toronto, York University, the University of Windsor, the University of Guelph, the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, where they held tabling sessions and engaged students in informal conversation, answered challenging questions and shared personal stories about their service in the Israel Defence Forces.'

Mr Bader, who studies computer science and economics at Tel Aviv University, told the CJN that

'he met a number of people at U of T who were shocked to learn that Arabs live in Israel. “I said, ‘I’m living proof,’” he said, going so far as to converse with them in Arabic to convince them further. “I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve been called [names] when they learn that I’m from Israel ... I see how Israel is misrepresented in the media… They’re accusing Israel of apartheid… and you know it’s not true, but if you don’t stand up and say it’s not true, a lot of people are going to believe these lies.”

 Muhamed Heeb, a young Bedouin postgraduate student at the University of Haifa (who participated in the scheme last year as well) told the paper:

“I wanted to meet the Canadian students and tell them the truth. Last year, I met a lot of students… I keep in touch with many of the students from last year, and this is one of my goals – to bring our image of Israel… Some did not know there are Arabs in Israel. A lot of people were surprised....

I asked them a lot of questions, but they didn’t answer any of them. They wanted to boycott Ben-Gurion University, so I said, ‘Listen guys, Ben-Gurion University has the most Arab girls, Bedouin girls, studying there, more than [schools in] Arab countries.’ I told them I was from the University of Haifa. I’m Arab. I’m doing my master’s, and my faculty would not be able to exchange the knowledge that we have. But they didn’t answer [me].”

 Indeed, according to Orit Tepper,  a co-organiser of the WorldSwap scheme,:

 'every time one of the WordSwap members took the microphone, organizers stopped recording. “They censored them. A member of our group said, ‘I’m an Israeli Arab, my grandparents have lived there, I’ve lived there, I have full rights, I’ve served in the IDF, I work in Tel Aviv, I don’t face discrimination, so how can you say that if you haven’t even been there?’”

 See more here

Meanwhile, across the herring pond, Kay Wilson, survivor of a dreadful Palestinian terror attack that left her with terrible wounds and her companion dead, has lent her support to the Sussex Friends of Israel's valiant campaign against BDS bigotry in Brighton:

She was there with the director of StandWithUsUK (to which organisation I owe the photo credit).

Good Lord!

The recent federal election results in Australia point to a slow political decline for the Greens, which is very welcome news for all who love Israel.   Like the Greens in Australia and in Britain (this photo of the latters' former leader Caroline Lucas MP speaks for itself), Britain's Liberal Democrats have many enemies of Israel in their ranks, typifying the  noxious "Israelis are the embodiment of evil/the Palestinians are blameless" mindset of the Leftist/Islamist nexus so well described here in this video by Professor Robert Wistrich.

So embedded is such demonisation of Israel in parties and opinion organs of the Left (and as Wistrich notes, not only the Far Left) that it's easy to overlook the fact, and good to be reminded,  that there's a staunch pro-Israel life peer among the Lib Dems.  Baron Palmer of Childs Hill, a former chairman of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel and a member of the Golders Green Synagogue, is a splendid antidote to  such inveterate and unsavoury critics of Israel as Baroness Tonge (pictured) and David Ward (see a summary of his odious stance here), to name but two of the most notorious among  a monstrous regiment of Israel-demonising Lib Dems.

Lord Palmer, who was born almost a year before the Second World War broke out, is a councillor in the London borough of Barnet, and was made a life peer in 2011.  The following video shows him being introduced into the House of Lords in the traditional ceremonial appropriate to such occasions:

In February this year, during a Lords' debate on the Middle East, Lord Palmer said:

'… Israel is an incredibly diverse country. While over 70 percent of Israelis are Jewish, they come from across the world. Approximately half of Israel’s citizens today were born outside the country. In addition, Israel is home to Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze and Samaritans, as well as other religious and ethnic minority groups. What other country in the region allows such diversity?

 .... Arab Israelis have served as elected representatives of the Knesset since Israel was founded and were elected in the recent election. They also serve on Israel’s powerful Supreme Court, which a noble Lord mentioned previously. However, despite equality in the law, socioeconomic gaps remain—an issue which the Government of Israel, together with numerous Israeli civil society organizations, are rightly seeking to tackle...."

The following month, during the infamous David Ward affair, Lord Palmer received a hectoring letter (by no means the first one: "I do not normally reply to Morley missives ...") from Elizabeth Morley, an Hungarian-born anti-Israel activist who happens to be of Jewish extraction, and is quoted here as once saying

"if I wanted, I could make Aliyah. But I believe it would be wrong to do so because non-Jews have been ethnically cleansed from Palestine to make way for people like me who have no family connections on that land".

Mrs Morley arrived in Britain with her mother shortly after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, she once told her local newspaper, writing elsewhere:

"My father ended up going to Palestine on his own after failing to persuade the mother of his under-age sweetheart (my mother) to let her and the baby go with him. I like to think that he learned from the Holocaust. I like to think that he did not kill or expel any Palestinians. I think that when David Ward made those comments he was thinking of people like my father, European Jews who went to Palestine immediately after the Holocaust."

Thus explained the woman who, as secretary, runs the Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch  in the little Welsh seaside resort and university town of Aberystwyth.

That remote branch, whose inner core consists of a trio of elderly women who meet weekly in a campus restaurant to plan their latest assaults on the Zionist Entity (here's a recent one, by the look of it), makes up in zeal what it lacks in numbers, as indicated by its secretary's numerous screeds hither and thither,  including this clumsy venture onto CiF Watch, her ludicrous letter to David Cameron, her risible e-petition asking David Cameron to apologise for the Balfour Declaration, and her badgering communication to the Board of Deputies of British Jews:

'She has also written to the Board of Deputies of British Jews expressing her concern about the way it exploits the memory of the Holocaust in order to gag criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. “I cannot find evidence of the board having ever issued its own criticism of Israel’s policies... Several of my relatives died in the concentration camps, but that has not made me insensitive to the suffering of the Palestinians, who have been made to pay the price for what the Christian world did to the Jews.”'

Then there's her recent insistence here that Gilad Atzmon, widely perceived as a Jewish antisemite,  is more sinned against than sinning:

"I have heard the same old tosh from several people, that Gilad is this, Gilad is that. When I ask them to point to the passages in his book which subsantiate the accusations, they can’t. Gilad is asking Zionists to take the painful journey of self-examination, discovery, realisation and admission of truths they have tried to avoid. Not many are capable of taking this journey, of incorporating the message into their psyches. So they try to shoot the messenger instead."

 What Mrs Morley wrote to Lord Palmer is unclear, but it was perhaps along the lines of what she wrote to others outraged by Ward's remarks, including Karen Pollock, CEO of the UK Holocaust Memorial Trust:

"[W]hat’s wrong with saying that the Jews in Israel commit atrocities in Palestine?  They do. Is one not allowed to use the word ‘Jew’ in any negative context? Is that it?

.... Holocaust Memorial Day should sear our consciences and, more to the point, it should inspire us to defend all who continue to suffer injustice and oppression. I believe that you should be supporting David Ward and, moreover, expressing your admiration for him.”

His Lordship responded: 

"David Ward made very inappropriate comments as he signed a Holocaust Memorial Book. Can anyone think of a more crass moment to say the JEWS should have learnt lesson from The Holocaust. Firstly he said Jews not Israelis which are not the same. Secondly to compare actions of Israel which he disapproves of with the Nazi death camps is responsible[sic] and offensive.

I lost a grandmother in the Holocaust. I lost an uncle as a British soldier in 1st World war. My late father served in British Army in 2nd World War. What does Ms Morley and others believe I should have learnt. I was deeply hurt by Mr Ward’s comments. I await his apology.

Ms Morley and others criticise Israel; that is their democratic right even if they are wrong. It would just seem less ‘anti-Jewish’ if they criticized killings and murders in other parts of the world...."

At the close of last year, during a Lords' debate on Arabs in Israel initiated by the Israel-criticising Bishop of Exeter, Lord Palmer reminded the House:

"Sadly, to be a Jew in most countries of the region is not comfortable or even possible in many places. Indeed, Christians such as the Copts of Egypt are under severe pressure.... 

The right reverend Prelate told mainly a story of a half-empty glass. I will try to tell a story of a half-full glass and how the Israeli Government, unlike their neighbours, are working hard to improve the situation of their minorities ....

As an example of a half-full glass, in 2010 Israel approved a $220 million five-year development plan for thirteen Arab cities and towns, including $30 million for the expansion of public transportation. The plan is actually being implemented by the Authority for the Economic Development for Arab, Druze and Circassian Sectors, based in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and is focused on twelve specific Arab and Druze localities, including Nazareth and Rahat... The Israeli Government are also allocating funds for thirteen industrial parks in Arab communities.

There are some real examples of action being taken. Prime Minister Netanyahu recognised the deficiencies in the workforce and stated earlier this year—I know it is only a statement but he said it—that:

 “The Arab sector is a main growth engine for the Israeli economy”

....In July 2012, the Israeli Government launched a new affirmative action campaign to encourage companies, especially in the high-tech sector, to employ Israeli Arabs, with the Government contributing 25 per cent of their salary. The hope is that this will encourage companies which are, as has been mentioned, reluctant to take on Arab employees to do so. Once this had been done, it will reduce discrimination in the workplace. In June 2012, the Israeli Government launched a public awareness campaign against prejudice and discrimination by Israeli companies against Arabs. That cannot be tolerated. Also in June 2012, Cisco chief executive officer John Chambers announced a four-year plan to create 12,000 new technology jobs for Israeli Arabs. He said:

“We have an opportunity to show the rest of the world what we can do together with a government that really gets it and with citizens who really get it”.

....This is all against a background of Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader, on his very recent visit to Gaza, referring to the liberation of Palestine in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa while the crowds yelled, “Hit, hit Tel Aviv”.

 This is also at a time when 40,000 have been killed in Syria without a demonstration in the UK. Nor were there Motions in this House when Hamas shot men accused of being Israeli spies without even the pretence of a trial. Their bodies were then dragged through the street behind motorcycles.

 I am not saying that there are not inequalities for Israeli Arabs—or Israeli Palestinians if you want—that need to be dealt with and are being dealt with, but perhaps we should also reflect on the bloody conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims, the hounding of the Christian Coptic community in Egypt, the unrest in a number of Middle Eastern states and the toppling of regimes.

In Israel, Arabs have served as elected representatives in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, since Israel’s first elections in 1949. There are currently 17 Israeli Arabs and Druze in the Knesset out of a Chamber of 120, although that is short of the 24 which under strict proportional terms would reflect the numbers of the Arab-Israeli population. There are many Israeli Arab judges.... They include Israeli Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran and George Kara—he has been mentioned—who presided in the Tel Aviv district court that convicted former Israeli President Katsav.

Israel’s first Muslim consul general was appointed in Atlanta in 1997; Israel’s first Muslim ambassador was appointed to Finland in 1995; Israel’s first Druze ambassador was appointed to Vietnam in 1999; in 2004 Bnei Sakhnin was the first Arab Israeli football team to win the State Cup; and—still on the soccer theme—the Arab Israeli football star Walid Badir is the captain of Hapoel Tel Aviv. The Arab-Israeli Mira Awad represented Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest; and the Arab Israeli Rana Raslan was Miss Israel.

Do noble Lords remember the amazing time—amazing to me and I am sure to everyone else—when Majalli Wahabi, a Druze, was the acting President of Israel? Noble Lords may have read the Bedouin Israeli diplomat Ishmael Khaldi’s book A Shepherd's Journey. In academia there are Bedouin professors and others whom I do not have enough time to relate.

Of course, if there was no problem, no action would be required. The reasons advanced

for the standard of living for Israeli Arabs being generally lower than the Jewish and Christian Israeli population are poorer participation in education and the failure of women to take up employment. I will tell your Lordships’ House the following sad statistics: twice as many Muslims leave school without qualification; three times as many are unemployed; three times as many live below the poverty line. I should add that these sad figures are not in Israel but in Britain. It is sad here and it is sad there.

The reasons for inequalities in Israel, Britain and elsewhere are generally due to education, employment and where you are in the food chain of life. The aim in Israel and the UK is to improve the conditions of all by improving opportunities for a better life.

Finally, it would be good if the right reverend Prelate could also acknowledge that 850,000 Jews have been forcibly displaced and exiled from Arab countries since 1948, and that justice for such Jewish refugees from Arab countries has been expunged from the peace and justice narrative for the past 65 years...."

Required Reading: The Karsh Reality About Israel & The Palestinian Arabs

A splendid academic article by Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, should be required reading for all who assume that early-mid twentieth-century aliya had a deleterious effect on the Arabs of Palestine and/or that the status of Israel's Arab minority is undesirable.

Writes Professor Karsh, inter alia:

 'The inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I revived Palestine's hitherto moribund condition. If prior to the war, some 2,500-3,000 Arabs, or one out of 200-250 inhabitants, emigrated from the country every year, this rate was slashed to about 800 per annum between 1920 and 1936 while Palestine's Arab population rose from about 600,000 to some 950,000 owing to the substantial improvement in socioeconomic conditions attending the development of the Jewish National Home. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a 1937 report by a commission of enquiry headed by Lord Peel:

 The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A comparison of the Census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase in Haifa was 86%, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 per cent.

Raising the standard of living of the Palestinian Arabs well above that in the neighbouring Arab states, the general fructifying effect of the import of Jewish capital into the country was not limited to the upper classes, or the effendis, who 'sold substantial pieces of land [to the Jews] at a figure far above the price it could have fetched before the War', but extended to the country's predominantly rural population, the fellaheen, who 'are on the whole better off than they were in 1920'. The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, Palestine's foremost export product, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew six-fold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled and that of vineyards increased threefold.

No less remarkable were the advances in Arab social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). Between 1927-29 and 1942-44, child mortality was reduced by 34% in the first year of age, by 31% in the second, by 57% in the third, by 64% in the fourth, and by 67% in the fifth. The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third (from 23.3 per 1000 people in 1922-25 to 30.7 in 1941-44) - well ahead of the natural increase (or of the total increase) of other Arab/Muslim populations.

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighbouring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to state revenues (in 1944-45, for example, the Jewish community paid 68% of Palestine's income tax compared with 15% by the twice larger Arab community). In addition, the extensive Jewish public health provision greatly benefited the country's Arab population. Jewish reclamation and anti-malaria work slashed the prevalence of this lethal disease (during the latter part of 1918, for example, 68 of 1000 people in the Beit Jibrin region died of malaria; in 1935 the number of malaria-related deaths in the whole of Palestine was 17), while health institutions, founded with Jewish funds primarily to serve the Jewish National Home, also served the Arab population. It is hardly surprising therefore that the greatest reductions in Arab mortality, as well as the rise in the quality and standard of living, occurred in localities in or near those in which Jewish enterprise had been most pronounced.

 Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to get on with their lives and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the growing Jewish presence in the country. Throughout the British Mandate era (1920-48), periods of peaceful coexistence were far longer than those violent eruptions and the latter were the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

But then, rather than follow the wishes of its constituents, the corrupt and extremist Palestinian Arab leadership, headed since the early 1920s by the Jerusalem Mufi Hajj Amin Husseini, embarked on a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, which culminated in the violent attempt, supported by the entire Arab world, to destroy the state of Israel at birth. In the mournful words of the Peel commission,

We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary… with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.'

Professor Karsh goes on to examine the status of Israel's Arabs since 1948, and to demonstrate, with impeccably sourced statistics, the beneficial effects of Israeli government policy upon their health, life-expectancy, education, and socio-economic status.

He further observes:

'Contrary to the standard image of cramped neighbourhoods and acute land shortages, population density in Arab localities is substantially lower on average than in equivalent Jewish locales. While Jewish neighbourhoods in central Israel, where most of the country's population lives, are hopelessly congested - 21,031 persons per square kilometre in Bene Brak, 16,329 in Giv'atayim, 15,913 in Bat Yam, and 9,759 in Holon, 7,947 in Tel Aviv, among other places - the urban Arab population in the same area enjoys a much more spacious existence: 1,958 persons per sq. km. in Taibe, 1,894 in Tire, 1,756 in Umm al-Fahm, and so on and so forth. Even the Galilean city of Nazareth, Israel's largest and most congested Arab locality has a population density of 5,113 - less than a quarter its Jewish equivalent.

As for income statistics, it is undeniable that, on average, Israeli Arabs still earn less than Jews. But to what is this attributable? For one thing, the average Muslim in Israel is ten years younger than his Jewish counterpart; all over the world, younger people earn less. Then, too, far fewer Arab women enter the labour market than do Jewish women: in 2008, for example, only 21% of Arab women, compared to 57% of Jewish women, worked outside their homes.'

And he observes that what he's demonstrated

'proves the attribution of the October 2000 riots to social and economic deprivation to be totally misconceived. If indeed the culprits were poverty and second-class status, why had there never been any disturbances remotely like the October 2000 riots among similarly situated segments of Jewish society in Israel, or, for that matter, among Israeli Arabs in the much worse-off 1950s and 1960s? Why, indeed, did Arab dissidence increase dramatically with improvements in the standard of living, and why did it escalate into an open uprising after a decade that saw government allocations to Arab municipalities grow by 550 per cent, and the number of Arab civil servants nearly treble?

The truth is that the growing defiance of the state, its policies, and its values was not rooted in socioeconomic deprivation but rather in the steady radicalization of the Israeli Arab community by its ever more militant leadership, not unlike their mandatory predecessors....'

Read all of Professor Karsh's long, important, fully documented, article here

"They Call This Apartheid?" Scenes From An Album

These photos were sent to me from Eretz Israel by Jean Vercors, who owns the copyright and provided the apt captions, and to whom I'm enormously grateful.

Properly speaking, then, this is a guest post by him.

The only further remark I will make is that it is a pity (nay, a scandal) that the BBC cannot be induced to show images such as these as representative of Israel, instead of those to which this recent article draws attention.

  

A Booty Of Arab Books?

According to this report the author of  a doctoral thesis to be submitted next month at Ben-Gurion University claims

 'that Israel destroyed the Palestinian books in the framework of its plan to "Judaize the country" and cut off its Arab residents from their nation and culture. 

.... IDF troops plundered the books from the homes of Palestinians expelled during the "Nakba" and handed them over to authorities. The State proceeded to establish a library in Jaffa and other towns for the books, he said.

....This was a cultural massacre undertaken in a manner that was worse than European colonialism, which safeguarded the items it stole in libraries and museums," the researcher charged.

He added that some books were sold at discounted prices to Arab schools, while the others were transferred to the Hebrew University's library in Jerusalem.

The researcher estimated that about 6,000 Palestinian books are currently available at the National Library at Hebrew University. However, he claimed that many other books in Arabic, English, and French were not recorded, charging that most of them are being held in the library's warehouses and cannot be accessed. '

However, in 1948, in an article entitled "Arabs in Israel," Norman Bentwich, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in regards to the work of the Ministry of Minorities, set up to safeguard the welfare of Arabs (and other non-Jews) in the newly-proclaimed Jewish State:

'Perhaps the most striking work in the Ministry is its effort to develop cultural life, in the midst of the uneasy truce, for the Arab population. It has already established some fifty primary schools in the towns and villages, with free education. A former Jewish Inspector of the Mandatory Education Department is in charge of the schools; another, an Oriental Jew, with a thorough knowledge of Arabic, assists him. The Ministry has also established one or two Arab clubs for reading and recreation, and has promoted a daily Arabic newspaper, El Yom (The Day). This is the first Arabic daily to appear in Israel. Several of the staff are Arabs, who have full freedom of expression; and some educated Arabs write to the Palestine Post, the English[-language] daily, voicing grievances about rent and employment, and the like.

A remarkable cultural enterprise is the establishment in Jaffa of an Arab library, which includes close on 100,000 books and periodicals salvaged from private houses that were deserted and broken into during the fighting. It includes, too, some Arab manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, which may have value for scholars. The books and manuscripts are being catalogued by a Jewish scholar of Baghdad. The library is housed in a private mansion of one of the richer Arabs of Jaffa, and there is a project of making it a cultural centre. The whole cost to the Government so far has been only a few hundred pounds.

In Jerusalem 30,000 books were similarly salvaged and handed over for safe-keeping to the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem. It is likely that the owners of the books will come to identify their property and collect it back; but the action of the Ministry will have prevented looting and destruction, and it has received the appreciation of the Arab population.'

Does that look like deliberate plunder to you?  No, not to me, either.
Read more of the Bentwich article here

Update Since this looted books story is already being used as anti-Israel propaganda by the usual suspects, it's as well to be reminded that in Hebron in 1929 Jewish manuscripts, including notable ancient documents, were looted from Jewish homes and synagogues. It's possible that some of this loot surfaced among  Jewish manuscripts shown by Arab dealers to the Rockefeller Museum.  Furthermore Jewish homes and synagogues/yeshivot were looted in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1929 and 1936-38; during the latter period, there was a pogrom in the south Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiyot, and at least one important Hebrew writer residing there had his books vandalised and looted. (Hat tip: E.)

Israel's Long-standing Concern for the Welfare of its Arab Minority

What those who shrilly and ignorantly denounce Zionism as "racism" and Israel as an "apartheid" state overlook is that Israel from the dawn of statehood strove for the welfare of minorities within its borders. They have full citizenship rights with Jews, and of course Israel was the first state in the Middle East in which Arab women had the vote. In 1948 sheikhs bore messages of goodwill towards the new state from Bedouin in the Negev; Druze joined the Israeli army; the local head of the Maronite Christians expressed his community's friendship. Responsibility for the welfare of the minorities was entrusted to Bechor (or Bekhor) Shitreet (sometimes transliterated Shitrit), who was born in Tiberias in 1897 to a long-settled Sephardi family of Moroccan background. A rabbi by training, he taught in the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Tiberias, joined the police in 1919, and became head of the Tel Aviv police force in 1927. A future Mapai Party member, he was a signatory to Israel's Proclamation of Independence, and from 1948 until 1966, the year before his death, he sat in successive Israeli Cabinets.

In the following article, entitled "Arabs in Israel", which appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle (31 December 1948) Norman Bentwich, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who worked tirelessly to bring relief to Arab victims of the war inflicted on Israel by its Arab neighbours, describes what was being done for the Arab minority in Israel.  Bentwich came from a well-known Jewish family (his father Herbert was a veteran British Zionist leader, and his Australian cousin Lizzie Bentwitch [sic] was the mistress of General Sir John Monash, the great Australian Jewish military commander during the First World War) and had been an official in Palestine during the early years of the Mandate. The Jewish Chronicle observed that his non-partisan "strictly factual account" was "a much needed corrective to the tendentious reports which the traducers of Jewry have so widely circulated". I reproduce it below without further comment (incidentally, the two watercolours were painted in 1947 by the American illustrator Dean Cornwell during a trip to the Holy Land):

‘The attention of the world has been drawn to the plight of the half-million Arab refugees from Israeli territory and from Jerusalem. But little attention has been paid to the treatment of the 70,000 (or, according to later reports, 100,000) Arabs who have remained in Israel or who have returned to their homes. Yet the story is worth telling. For the young Israeli Government is setting an example of care for its minorities. As soon as it was constituted, it set up a special Ministry of Minorities with the function of securing equal rights for all citizens and freedom of religion, language, education, and culture. The Minister is a native-born Jew from Tiberias, from an Oriental family; he was for many years an officer in the Palestine Administration, first in the Police, and then a magistrate. Mr Shitreet is at the moment also the Minister for Police, but he gives his heart and mind to his other portfolio.

Of the Arabs who are in Israeli territory, the majority are in the northern area. They live partly in towns: Haifa, 6,000; Acre, 4,000; Nazareth, 5,000; etc, and partly in the villages of the occupied territory of Western Galilee. In the south, three to four thousand are in Jaffa, a smaller number in Ramleh, and Lydda, which was captured in July, some thousands of Beduin [sic] in the Negev, who have given their promise of loyalty, and a few hundreds in the Jewish-controlled part of Jerusalem.

In the towns of mixed population and in places near the front line, the Arabs are restricted for security reasons to one area, and can only move outide it with a permit. In fact, they are still narrowly confined. In the villages they are much less restricted. The stress of war has led to the occupation of many Arab homes, which were quite deserted, and of whole quarters of outer Jerusalem. Those homes and quarters have been largely occupied by the new immigrants, who are entering the country with amazing rapidity. One of the tasks of the Conciliation Commission of the United Nations will be to aid in bringing about some settlement of the displaced persons of both nations.

The Ministry of Minorities is concerned with the well-being of the Arabs who dd not flee, or who returned from flight, and with the assurance of their political, economic, and cultural rights. The Arabs who registered in the census will be entitled to vote in elections for the Constituent Assembly, and may, if they wish, have their own candidates and their own electoral list. So far, only the combined two Communist parties have put forward Arabs as well as Jews. In one municipality, Haifa, the Arabs still remain members of the Municipal Commission with the Jews, and in Nazareth an Arab magistrate has been appointed. Arabs who are willing to work on the roads or in other public enterprises are employed by the State, and receive the same wage as a Jew doing that kind of labour. The simple labourer gets a wage of nearly thirty shillings a day, which is far higher than anything he had in the days of the British Administration, even allowing for the great rise of prices. A few Arabs who are regarded as trustworthy are in the Israeli Army. The Ministry has been concerned in the last months to bring Arab port workers from Acre to Jaffa, where they are needed; and also to organise the Arab cultivators (fellahin) for the gathering of the orange crop. It has, too, encouraged other fellahin to cultivate vegetables, of which there has been a great scarcity in the country.

The Health Ministry, working with the Minority Ministry, has established a clinic for Arabs in the southern and northern areas, and has carried out recently a vaccination of all the Arab population in order to check an epidemic of smallpox which threatened. A few Arab doctors who remained in the country are employed; and there is a demand that more shall be given the opportunity.

Perhaps the most striking work in the Ministry is its effort to develop cultural life, in the midst of the uneasy truce, for the Arab population. It has already established some fifty primary schools in the towns and villages, with free education. A former Jewish Inspector of the Mandatory Education Department is in charge of the schools; another, an Oriental Jew, with a thorough knowledge of Arabic, assists him. The Ministry has also established one or two Arab clubs for reading and recreation, and has promoted a daily Arabic newspaper, El Yom (The Day). This is the first Arabic daily to appear in Israel. Several of the staff are Arabs, who have full freedom of expression; and some educated Arabs write to the Palestine Post, the English daily, voicing grievances about rent and employment, and the like.

A remarkable cultural enterprise is the establishment in Jaffa of an Arab library, which includes close on 100,000 books and periodicals salvaged from private houses that were deserted and broken into during the fighting. It includes, too, some Arab manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, which may have value for scholars. The books and manuscripts are being catalogued by a Jewish scholar of Baghdad. The library is housed in a private mansion of one of the richer Arabs of Jaffa, and there is a project of making it a cultural centre. The whole cost to the Government so far has been only a few hundred pounds.

In Jerusalem 30,000 books were similarly salvaged and handed over for safe-keeping to the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem. It is likely that the owners of the books will come to identify their property and collect it back; but the action of the Ministry will have prevented looting and destruction, and it has received the appreciation of the Arab population.

It is notable that the proportion of Arabs to the total population of Israel (one-tenth) is about the same as the proportion of the Jews to the total population of Palestine in 1920, when the British Mandate was given. It is to be hoped that the protection and well-being of the minorities, which is inevitably conditioned by the circumstances of the war, will become more and more a constructive activity of the Government of Israel, and so prepare the way for happier relations. What is being done today is in striking contrast to the treatment of the Jewish minorities in Arab states.'