Britain's Duty To The Palestinian People

Since this article does say some important things, Raed Salah writes:

In June 2011 I came to Britain to begin a speaking tour to draw attention to the plight of my people, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The tour was meant to last 10 days. Instead I had to stay for 10 months in order to resist an attempt by the home secretary, Theresa May, to deport me – itself the result of a smear campaign against me and what I represent. I fought not just for my own sake, but for all who are smeared because they support the Palestinian cause.

Since 1990 I have visited the UK several times to speak publicly. On this occasion I was arrested, imprisoned, and told I was to be deported to Israel because my presence in the UK was "not conducive to the public good". A judge later ruled that I had been illegally detained, but bail conditions continued to severely restrict my freedom, making it impossible for me to speak as I had intended.

After a 10-month legal battle, I have now been cleared on "all grounds" by a senior immigration tribunal judge, who ruled that May's decision to deport me was "entirely unnecessary" and that she had been "misled". The evidence she relied on (which included a poem of mine which had been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. In reality, I reject any and every form of racism, including antisemitism.

I have no doubt that, despite this, Israel's cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.

My people – the Palestinians – are the longstanding victims of Israeli racism. Victims of racism, anywhere, should never condone or support the maltreatment of another people, as Israel does.

The suffering of the Palestinian citizens of Israel has been ignored for decades. But there is today a growing awareness of it, which partially explains this smear campaign against me. In December 2011, EU ambassadors in Israel raised serious concerns about Israeli discrimination, noting that "not only has the situation of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel not improved, but it has further deteriorated".

There are around 1.5 million Arabs in Israel. We make up 17% of the population, but we face a barrage of racist policies and discriminatory laws. We receive less than 5% of funds allocated by the government for development. Public spending on children in Arab municipalities is one-third lower than that of children in Jewish municipalities. The average hourly wage of Arab workers is about 70% of that of Jewish workers. Any Jew, from any country, is allowed under Israel's law of return to migrate to Israel; Palestinian refugees are not allowed to exercise their right of return. While a Jew can live anywhere in Israel, a Palestinian citizen cannot. Jews can marry whoever they wish and live with them in Israel, Palestinian citizens cannot.

In the criminal justice system, a 2011 study commissioned by Israel's courts administration and Israel bar association revealed that almost half of Arabs receive custodial sentences for certain crimes, compared to a third of Jews. While 63.5% of Arabs convicted of violent crimes were sentenced to prison, only 43.7% of similar Jewish offenders were.

Education is only one of several areas in which Palestinian citizens face discrimination in Israel. The Israeli government allocates less money per head for Arab children's education than it does for that of Jewish children. One devastating consequence is that the drop-out rate from schools is three times higher among Arabs than among Jews.

Nowhere is the injustice more striking than in the Negev. Living in poverty in "unrecognised" villages, the Arab Bedouin are ineligible for basic services such as water, electricity, and healthcare. The Negev village of al-Araqib has been demolished 35 times by the Israeli government; on every occasion it was rebuilt by its inhabitants.

Despite the Israeli policy of "transfer" – another term for ethnic cleansing – the Palestinians will not go away. The Israeli state can occupy our lands, demolish our homes, drill tunnels under the old city of Jerusalem – but we will not disappear. Instead, we now aspire to a directly elected leadership for Palestinians in Israel; one that would truly represent our interests. We seek only the legal rights guaranteed to us by international conventions and laws.

The Palestinian issue can only be resolved if Israel and its supporters in Britain abandon the dogmas of supremacy and truly adhere to the universal values of justice and fairness. Britain has a special responsibility in this, because it is uniquely responsible for our suffering: our national tragedy began with the Balfour Declaration.

While Britain enforced the first part of the declaration, which promised Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, but ignored the part that states: "It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." If there is any lesson to be learned from this sordid affair, it is that there is nothing to gain from putting false words into my mouth, or casting me out of the mainstream of public discourse.

Muhammad is now the single most common name for newborn boys within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. I was very pleased that Raed Salah was not allowed in my country, and I wish that he still were not, although I also wish that I could say the same about many, many others.

But what is he fighting for? Be born into certain ethnic minorities within Israel’s 1948 borders, and you are automatically subject to Sharia law. Far more people ought to know that than do. Waving his Menorah passport and with the name of that State in the name of his organisation, Salah obviously knows it very well indeed.

Israel’s Sharia courts are those of the State of Israel. Their rulings in relation to those born under their jurisdiction are the law of the land, and their judges are appointed and paid by that State. By contrast, although Israel treats family law rulings by entirely private Christian religious courts as a fait accompli, that is as far as any relationship goes. No wonder that Salah is such a proud and happy Israeli.

He is not the only one. He was previously the Mayor of Umm al-Fahm, a 100 per cent Arab and 99.7 per cent Muslim city which has been run by his Islamic Movement for many years and where 83 per cent of the population recently voted against transfer to Palestinian jurisdiction. If you want to be the Islamic Movement’s fiefdom, then Israel will let you be it, and will even pay your bills.

The Knesset includes Ibrahim Sarsur, who campaigns for Jerusalem to be made the capital of the Caliphate. His oath of office, an explicit pledge of allegiance to the State of Israel, clearly does not preclude the furtherance of that objective, which is inconceivable on the part of any member of a British, French, Dutch or other Parliament in Europe even now where either Jerusalem, or his or her own capital, was concerned.

But then, look at the governing coalition in Israel. If any other country had a government in which the party of the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister wished to denaturalise both the ancient indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, while others around the Cabinet table held that every ethnic group apart from their own had been created as beasts of burden, then that country would rightly be treated as a pariah.

As for the blood libel, what about the blood libel that all opposition to the Iraq War was anti-Semitic? That was said routinely at the time, and for a long time thereafter. They all did it. Every one of them. Certain British websites only stopped when I lately started making a fuss about it. It still crops up from time to time. The people loudest in berating Raed Salah for his blood libel put their own into print or onto the airwaves every single day for months, and regularly for years. They have never expressed one word of remorse, either for that or for their catastrophic war itself.

“The civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” were “not to be prejudiced”, according to the Balfour Declaration. The burning of the mosque at Tuba Zangaria, the inhabitants of which are Israeli citizens, certainly looks like the prejudicing of their civil and religious rights to me. As does the demolition of the villages of the Bedouin, the most ancient inhabitants, in the Negev by the Israeli Defence Force, acting as an agency of the highly controversial Jewish National Fund.

Not only is that demolition an act of State violence, but that burning, undoubtedly, was by supporters of parties within the present governing coalition. Is it conceivable that the arsonists acted without the approval, if not on the direct instruction, of senior figures within one or more governing parties?

The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and for that matter the East Bank, are all one or more other stories. But when it comes to Israel proper, why did we not do for those “existing non-Jewish communities” what we later did for the East African Asians? Is it still too late to do that, not with a view to flying them over here, but in order to create that possibility while making it clear that, while they remained where they were, then they enjoyed the full undertaking that we gave to them?

An undertaking given when they legally owned most of the land, rather than when their villages appeared on no official map, therefore enjoyed no amenities, and could look forward, either to being demolished by the State as such, or at the very least to having their places of worship and de facto community centres (churches as well as mosques) burnt down by the strongest supporters of the Government, if not by actual agents of the parties of government. We promised them that nothing like that would happen. We owe them. We owe them a very great deal. This would be just that: a very great deal.

If the Arab labouring class ever were to be evacuated to Britain or anywhere else, then the Israeli economy would simply collapse, as the South African one did when the black working class just stopped working. Let that possibility exist on a permanent basis.

If the Balfour Declaration gave us legal or moral obligations to the Jews in respect of Palestine, then it also gave us legal and moral obligations to the other inhabitants of that Mandated Territory. Those obligations still obtain. And if we are finally to make good Balfour’s promise to defend “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, then are we also finally to make good his promise to defend “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”? That status is now and increasingly no less “prejudiced”, and for the same reason.

Meanwhile, Israel needs to move to very extensive devolution to the very local level, Jewish or Arab, religious or secular, Muslim or Christian, and so forth. She needs three parliamentary chambers, each about one third of the size of the present one, with one for the ultra-Orthodox, one for the Arabs, and one for everyone else, the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab being already identified in law because of their arrangements in relation to military service.

All legislation would require the approval of all three chambers. Each chamber would elect a Co-President, all three of whom would have to approve all legislation and senior appointments, as well as performing ceremonial duties. Each chamber would be guaranteed a Minister in each department and at least a quarter of Cabinet posts.

Yiddish would be recognised as an official language, the quid pro quo for recognising all the many currently unrecognised villages in the Galilee and the Negev. The major festivals of Judaism, Islam and Christianity would all be public holidays, perhaps, in this post-Zionist dispensation, the only public holidays. The Arab chamber would include the head of each of the main Christian communities or his nominee, being an Israeli citizen.

The alliance necessary to pull this off would take an awful lot of effort. But two peoples facing nothing less than denaturalisation could very well be prepared to make that amount of effort. The other lot should have had more children, or bothered to move there from places like London and New York. But they did not.