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Building Palestinian Civil Society within Challenging Realities with Mossawa
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Edited Transcript of Remarks by Mr.
Jafar Farrah, Dr. Mary Totry and Dr. Khaled
Furani from Mossawa
Transcript No. 313 (12 May 2009)
Transcript No. 313 (12 May 2009)
Today, there are 1.4 million Palestinian citizens in Israel. However, since the establishment of the Jewish state 61 years ago, this minority continues to struggle for their civil rights and equal rights as citizens of the self-declared "only democracy in the Middle East." A delegation from The Mossawa Center, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, explained the challenges and the triumphs of the Palestinian citizens in Israel.
To view the video of this briefing online go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/5676/pid/3584.
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
23 April 2009
Mr. Jafar Farrah:
Thank you and good afternoon. I’m Jafar Farrah, and I want to start by explaining a little bit about [the] Mossawa Center and also the efforts that we have done as one player in building the Palestinian civil society in Israel. I think most of you know our history as Palestinians. We are the ones that stayed in our homeland. We were, in 1948 after the creation of Israel, about 150,000 people. We lost our families. We lost our connections to the region. We kept our language. We kept our identity. And we kept rebuilding ourselves from the disaster that we faced in ’48--to rebuild a community that will be able to contribute to humanity in general.
Today, we are about 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. We are Palestinians; we are Arabs; and we are citizens of the State of Israel. We think it’s not an identity crisis. We think it’s an added value. We have uniqueness, and we have added value that we have linguistic accessibilities and physical and mental accessibilities to our people in Palestine and to the refugees and also to the Jews. We can understand better than anybody the needs of the Palestinian people all over the world and the needs also of the Jewish population that we live with together. It’s not an easy mission to keep your identity and language and, in parallel, to build a future. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 until 1965, actually, we had been living under a military regime. To move from Haifa to Nazareth or from Nazareth to Acre, we needed permission from the military regime that was implemented on our community. But even after the tragedy of 1948, the Palestinian community remained an activist and kept its political activism. Mary can tell much more about the people that came back and stayed. And we are proud that they stayed and kept building our Palestinian community in our homeland.
There were initiatives to try to transfer us from our homeland in 1956. The Triangle area was annexed to Israel as part of the Rhodes Agreement that was signed between the Jordanians and the Israelis in 1949 as part of the ceasefire. And it’s a very important issue to be raised now because today somebody in this part of the world is dreaming about transferring the Palestinian community in Um el-Fahm and the Triangle. He has a dream to have less Arabs in this part of the area. We keep reminding him that actually the request to get this part of Palestine was an Israeli request, and the Triangle was annexed to the State of Israel as part of the Rhodes Agreement that was signed in 1949. As part of this agreement, the Israeli government committed itself to allow the Palestinians, 15,000 inhabitants at that time, to stay in the Triangle and to protect them.
In 1956, during the Sinai War, there was another initiative to try to transfer us by committing the Kafr Qasem massacre, and we lost 49 people in the Kafr Qasem massacre. In the 1970s, we started to recover from these initiatives. And as the title of our meeting today states, “Building Palestinian Civil Society in Israel,” in the 70s, actually, we started to recover. That came after an initiative in 1965 to create Al- Ard movement, a political movement and a civil society movement that Israel rejected and declared as an illegal organization. And the people that were active in 1965 and 1966 in the Al-Ard movement had been arrested and jailed. So, it wasn’t easy to rebuild institutions of the Palestinian community in Israel. And we start[ed] to gain some kind of trust immediately after the Land Day. Land Day in 1976 was the first time the Palestinian community confronted the land confiscation that had been taking place against our community since 1948.
You know, today, it’s a unique democracy. Israel is a very unique democracy. Israel controls today about 93 percent of the lands, which means that all land that has been confiscated from the Palestinian community, not only the refugees but also the citizens of the State of Israel, is state land. And it’s very relevant to the debate we have today with the Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National Fund, about access to these lands--our access to these lands and equal allocation of lands to the Palestinian community in Israel. But [in] our struggle in 1976 to prevent land confiscation [of] 21,000 dunums [5,250 acres], we lost six people in the demonstrations. They were killed, but we succeeded to keep these lands. And you have to come and visit this area. It’s called area No. 9. It’s green. And environmentalists can also come and visit and admire the struggle that people kept their land. And they keep planting this land and it’s green and people can eat fruits. We are proud this land stayed. So, it was a successful struggle to keep the people’s land. And it was 21,000 dunums [5,250 acres]. It’s not a small amount of land.
Later on in the 80s, I was the head of the Arab Students Union, and I remember The Jerusalem Fund giving scholarships to students to go for higher education. You know, we were coming from poverty families. I came from Wadi Nisnas. My father was an unemployed person, and my mother used to clean houses. And for all of us, it’s the same story. To fight to go for higher education wasn’t easy. But for us, we were lucky to get this support and to get higher education for a period. And as head of the Arab Students Union in a university, the first day you get arrested [is] the last day they throw you from the university. But we kept our positions, and we insisted that we will build our institutions. And until today, all Arab student organizations are not officially registered in any place. Actually, also the political leadership of the Palestinian community, which is called the “Follow-Up Committee for Our Citizens,” is the umbrella organization of the whole political parties. [It] is not officially registered because we still have the fear that we may be confiscated. They may close you down. You have to remember that in 1981 when the Arab community declared that we want to have the Arab Community Conference, Nazareth was closed off. And the conference declared by the Arab community was declared as an illegal event that can’t be implemented. They closed the whole area so people can’t come. So, instead of creating this conference of Arab population in 1981, we created what we call the “High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens,” which is actually the political representation of the Arab community which represents all political spectrums of the Palestinian community--the ones that are inside the crescent and the ones that are also outside the crescent.
Now, in the 90s, especially after the basic laws of human dignity and association and etc., more and more people started to register organizations. And Mossawa, which was registered in 1997, and others, all civil movements, that are registered officially in Israel is new. As you can see, we are a young generation, and we try to establish associations and organizations that will mainstream our civil and human rights. And since then, it wasn’t easy. Mossawa was registered after a court decision. Our application to register Mossawa as non-government organization was rejected. And in March 2000, we registered after a court decision. So, there are still limitations of freedom of association and etc., but we are there and we are proud also to tell you that we were brave enough to buy a building. You know, people think no, come on, buy a building? Yes, we have a building; it’s in cooperation between two organizations. We have students’ dormitories with our colleagues in other committees, and we have Mossawa and both organizations. We have been brave. I have to tell you that when I was the head of the Arab Students Union, we got some money to buy an office for the Arab Students Union. We didn’t get to register this office in the name of the Union. It was registered in someone’s name. Usually, we used to register institutions in the name of a Knesset member and like this we get immunity, parliamentarian immunity. But in any case, we dare today to buy a building, and we are proud to tell you that, as a Palestinian community inside Israel, we kept our identity. We kept our language. We are raising our kids and families to develop ourselves and contribute also for our people.
Lately, there was a debate about the American aid to the Palestinian territory. And we discovered there that our contribution, before the Palestinian intifada, to the Palestinian economy in the West Bank and Gaza is much more than all the American and EU aid that had been given. Simply, we go to the West Bank and we buy and we are shopping and we use hotels and institutions. So, we have a huge contribution that never had been measured. Today, one of the issues that we raise with the Quartet’s Special Envoy Tony Blair is to open the checkpoints for the Palestinians inside Israel to go to the markets of Jenin. It used to be open for us. But since the second intifada started, they blocked it and we don’t have access. Lately, since October 2008, we are using the Palestinian hotels in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We are using the markets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And by this, we are contributing also to the Palestinian economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And it’s in noncooperation with the international community and also with the Palestinian institutions. It’s not easy to act and to react.
We face two challenges. One, we want to stay in our homeland. We don’t want to go anywhere else. We don’t want to become refugees even in Qatar. We like it. We want to stay in Haifa and Jaffa and Acre. We don’t have any plans to throw anybody to the sea. This wasn’t ever the dream of any Palestinian. We always dream about living in prosperity. We haven’t been so tough actually. Today, there are suicide bombers. Our dream was to live in prosperity, in dignity, in peace. That was our dream as Palestinians. And unfortunately, we are not there today. We are very sad to see what happened in Gaza. What’s happening in Gaza is making us feel that this is the end of the dream. We are looking for a way that the Palestinian brothers, Hamas and Fateh, can sit together and rebuild the Palestinian democracy. So, we are part of this dream. We know that this dream will not be implemented with our presence because the two-state solution will mean actually that we will not be part of the Palestinian dream of statehood and etc. We accept our citizenship inside Israel.
The question and the challenge--this is the second issue-- is if they will accept us as full citizens with our civil and collective rights. Our collective rights are very important to us, not because we undermine civil rights but because the Jewish majority wants to have collective rights, even for the Jews that are living abroad. So, the self determination of the Jews should not undermine our existence as Palestinians, as a Palestinian minority, as a collective. Equality should be included in the values that the State will accept. Actually, the whole debate about equality--do you know that the eleven basic laws that exist in Israel and the whole debate about [the] constitution don’t include the value of equality? It was rejected. So, we may have in Israel constitution without equality. So, the Supreme Court ordered that equality should be guaranteed and etc. But equality will not be guaranteed if you will have 30 laws that discriminate or give privileges to one group and forget about the second group.
I want to tell you why we are here. We don’t have any branches in the country. We have one center in Haifa, and we don’t want to replace any other actors in the Palestinian community. So, the local councils, other NGOs and even the private sector, all of them are partners of the Mossawa Center because we are an advocacy center and we can give advocacy and lobbying tools and international advocacy and media tools, etc. So, we have expertise at the Mossawa Center that can serve local councils, NGOs and the private sector. This is our added value. We work with local councils, and we try to empower local councils. We are actually the ones to give the political leadership and other local councils professional expertise about the state budget, such as what are the economic needs of the Arab community in economic growth. So, our socioeconomic department is doing this job. Every year, we do analysis of legislation and the implications of legislation on the Arab community.
We have one office abroad in Brussels because we think that the implications of any international agreement that is signed between the international community and Israel have implications on the status of the Palestinian community. So, our office in Brussels does analysis of the action plan. Actually, Israel is doing much more business with Europe than with the U.S. The U.S. gives much more grants to Israel, especially the military ones, but believe me, there’s huge amounts of funding that is going to the Israeli government in research and education and also in different fields. So, we look at what are the implications of the EU policy in the Middle East, in the Euro-Med [Euro-Mediterranean Partnership] in general and specifically in Israel. This is the job of our office in Brussels.
We came here now to get something from you, and this is not money. We are coming to you because we feel that what happened here after the election can give us hope. And we hope that you share this vision with us. We feel that this is a moment that we should connect ourselves to a people whose dream they didn’t kill. They were dreaming once to become president and they are president and they are a minority. The black Americans actually are a minority here, and still there is a black American president. And [former U.S. President George W.] Bush is not here. We can be happy, a little bit. And I hope that I’m not insulting anybody that is Republican. I hope that through our work here with you, we’ll be able to try to convince also Republicans in the U.S. that justice and peace should take us in consideration. We are not the bridge that people will walk over. We are the ones that can normalize this area. And the ideas of transfer that had been promoted and the ideas of separation mentality is not the future of the Palestinians and the Jews in this part of the world.
Jews and Palestinians can live together without separation, and we have to take the people to lead and not to wait until people will be confused. Every two years we have an election in Israel, and the international community is waiting to know where the next Israeli government is leading this region. I think the American administration can lead for a new policy in the Middle East. The three of us left our families to try to look for ways to do professional work to try to help in designing the new American policy toward our region. Hopefully, it will be better than the old one. So, I think my colleagues Khaled and Mary with their expertise and research and teaching and after these four days can have much more deep insight from their personal experience and professional experience.
Dr. Mary Totry:
Good afternoon to everyone. Yesterday, we were invited to a Jewish community center to give a talk. I was not aware that I used the word Arabs in Israel and my two colleagues used the word Palestinians in Israel. One of the audience members, one person asked me, “Why [do] you have a different terminology?” And then, I told her that I teach a course in Oranim College called, and I decided on the title, “The Palestinian Minority in Israel: A Challenge for Democracy.” And somehow in the computer it showed this as “The Arab Minority in Israel: A Challenge for Democracy.” It went on and forth until only once they accepted the title of “The Arab-Palestinian Minority in Israel: A Challenge for Democracy.” For me, it is much easier to say, when I teach the course, the Arabs in Israel in order for people to understand that we are talking about the Palestinians in Israel rather than the Palestinians.
I would like to talk about this issue of collective identity and just explain the different trends that have been taught over the years and the relationship between Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian people in general and also with the State. And I would like to start with the first period. Up until 1968, no scholar in the Israeli academia took it really seriously to examine how Palestinians in Israel define themselves. Nobody thought that it was an important thing. Up until 1966, the Palestinian minority was under military administration, and up until 1967, we were separated from the outer world. We were disconnected from the Palestinian people and the Arab world. The result of the first research was that the vast majority of respondents defined themselves as Israeli Arabs. And one would say, “Israeli Arabs being under military administration--how come they define themselves so?” One reason I think [is] that when the researchers gave different categories, they did not put Palestinian identity as one of the categories.
My second explanation is that, at that time, pan-Arabism was very, very important; it was very, very strong. As such, most of the Palestinians did not define themselves as Palestinians, but they saw themselves as part of the Arab world. That’s why they defined themselves as Israeli Arabs. And also, because they’d been segregated from the other entire Arab world; so they were controlled by Israel. The funny thing is that even when they called or defined themselves as Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian and Arab world saw them as collaborators or being Judaized. For the State, the State looked at us as the fifth column. So, there is a saying in Arabic: La ma’ sitti bekhair wala ma’ cidi bekhair. Grandmother and grandfather do not see us in a good shape.
Most of the researchers say that the trend began after 1973--the October war and [late Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat’s visit to the United Nations that people started to see themselves as more Palestinian than Israeli Arabs. In the 80s, two-thirds of the people of the respondents defined themselves as Palestinians in Israel. But, I think that what happen in the 90s, during the Oslo process, this was a big clash in that sense that up until then the Israeli government, although it did not see us as full right citizens, they always told us that when the time comes you’re going to be the bridge with the Palestinian people and the bridge with the Arab world. And somehow, when the first accords were signed between the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and Israel, nobody thought about us. We were ignored totally. So during the Oslo period, the Palestinians felt that they were in double periphery. I mean, they are not Palestinians or Israelis. Now, you see that there is a category of people who define themselves in religious identity rather than national identity because it’s much easier to call yourself or to identify yourself as a Christian Arab or a Muslim Arab rather than in national terms. Nowadays, we really have a strong crisis of identity. Most of the people rather define themselves in religious components.
What I would like to say [is] today we are not even third rate citizens of Israel. Once they said that we are second rate citizens, but after the Ethiopian immigration came to Israel, we became third. Nowadays, with the new government, we wish to remain third rate citizens. Today, with the new government, we, the Arab minority or the Palestinian minority, is in danger of being transferred. We really face a threat of that. I’ll stop here, and if you have any questions, I’ll answer them. Thank you.
Dr. Khaled Furani:
I’m very pleased to be with you here this afternoon. I’m just recovering from a headache, and I’m trying to make sure you don’t regret coming to hear me. I was really debating what would be the best and most effective to talk to you about in this shift having spent the last four days talking to people on Capitol Hill. I thought of addressing two questions and giving you, let’s say slices of our daily life as a Palestinian minority in the Jewish state. And hopefully, this will raise some questions for you; make you think about certain questions. Then afterwards, I and my friends here will be happy to answer.
First, in the spirit of the title of this talk, the realities of civic work and NGO work within Israel and, specifically, I’ll address my comments to working as a Palestinian NGO. There seems to me a double edged sword in being a Palestinian NGO. Again, it’s a very long and complicated history that I can’t really begin to explain here. One, because I don’t fully understand it, but it struck me, having returned from the United States in 2005, how many Palestinian NGOs there are in Palestine. Jafar really has all the numbers and the statistics; I don’t. I simply joined Mossawa in 2000 because I share with Jafar a premium on equality and civil rights. But I ask myself why is it that Palestine or the Palestinian society that I left inside Israel when I left Israel in 1994 has changed dramatically?
We had in the 90s so many NGOs about so many subjects. Some of the answers that I come up with sometimes have signs of encouragement; sometimes not. It’s an ongoing debate. I try to bring it to discussions with board members so we could develop a more critical look at who we are and what we do in the framework of NGOs. It strikes me that it comes after a grassroots politics. It strikes me as something that comes after party politics. It signals viscerally, really for me, as though something has been broken; something that changed fundamentally that leads us to working in professional ways on causes of our daily lives. Again, I’m not an expert or scholar on NGOs, but that’s the sense I get. Whatever we face in our villages and our towns and cities, we are more prone these days to establish an NGO to deal with it. Why is that so? Again, I don’t fully understand. But I don’t think the reasons are always occasions to be encouraged by.
However, on the other hand, I am encouraged in the sense that it gives us a way to reach out to the world. Please bear in mind that for 18 years, since 1948 until 1966 as Mary has pointed out, we lived under military rule. I don’t think it’s lost on anyone. I doubt that it’s lost on anyone in this hall that for people outside Israel, certainly in the United States, some people find novelty to think of Palestinians inside Israel. Because not here, but certainly in the wider American consciousness, the sense is that Israel is the Jewish state, not only the consciousness but also the legal structure of the state. So, we come as sort of a shock almost to some people. What? The Palestinians also exist inside Israel? Isn’t there enough also in the West Bank and Gaza and the diaspora? So, NGOs what they do, because they work a lot with foundations and institutions outside the country, they’ve allowed us certain visibility. They’ve allowed us certain means of contacting and reaching out to bodies outside the State. And that I find encouraging. This is why we are here on this tour--to let the people of the United States know that we do exist and we face severe civil rights violations. We’re very encouraged, as you can imagine, by what just happened in the United States. But also, we are deeply disturbed by the change of events in Israel itself. And I’m specifically thinking of the way in which incitement, hate, racial bigotry has been sanctioned and become accepted and normalized. Again, I don’t want to impress upon you that it’s new, but it’s coming closer and closer to the center of language.
Where do I face that in my daily life? First, in the language, in our daily lives as Palestinian citizens of Israel. It’s very hard for the State itself, for the Jewish majority, for the rest of the world to see us as Palestinians. You see, there’s something threatening and unsettling to admit our “Palestinianism,” so to speak, because it’s much easier to call us Arabs. Once you admit that we’re Arabs, as far as the majority is concerned, then we could be from anywhere. The word Palestinian implies a certain non-rootedness that doesn’t sit well with the Zionist ideology. I think this is one source to understand the difficulty.
Another way is the space, not just language. In Haifa itself, a lot had to be obliterated for there to be a Jewish Haifa; I mean homes, streets and public buildings. Wadi El-Saleeb is only one example of such an act of architectural, spatial obliteration, which makes it for the younger generation of Israelis easier to think, to imagine that this country was inhabited only a few decades ago. It’s very shocking for my Jewish residents in the city sometimes to know that there was a society here before 1948. It had its own institutions, its own buildings and so forth.
Education--as a father of three kids, two of them going to school now, to elementary school--is yet another challenge. My two daughters, age ten and seven, Maysoun and Soukaina, go to a school called Hewar. Hewar in Arabic means dialogue. This school remains now maybe five years later unrecognized by the ministry of education in the only democracy in the Middle East. And this, I must emphasize, is a school that calls itself the school for alternative Arab democratic education. It’s not right to think that a school promoting democracy in Israel should face such legal challenges. It remains unrecognized for all sorts of reasons, but one stands out. We would like the parents to have a say in that school. We would like the parents to be involved in the establishment of the curriculum. And when parents get involved--I’m talking [about] other parents who are also highly educated and so forth--they want their children to know where they come from, the villages and towns that their grandparents used to live in. They want them to know that they, as a people, went through a tragedy. Yes, we do learn in public schools about the Jewish tragedy, the Nazi genocide. But we do not learn, as Palestinians, about whom we were, who we are. Actually, we don’t learn how to call ourselves Palestinians. We go, for instance, at Hewar to unrecognized villages as a way of commemorating the Nakba. This is the democracy that we’re trying to pursue there--that we, as parents, have a say in what our children learn. We would like to be part of choosing the textbooks as well. We would like there to be a dialogue between teachers and parents; and teachers and students; and teachers and the government. We would like to have a say, an agency in our children’s education the way here--there is a board of education, which is an elected body. There, it’s not an elected body. It’s a body that is alas, quite unfortunately in a democracy, mostly managed by the security services.
Finally, the last aspect I’d like to discuss and maybe still most acutely felt is, of course, what just happened in Gaza--the trauma, the shock, the horror that Gaza presented to me and undoubtedly many, many, many others. You know, I teach at Tel Aviv University. I’m a junior faculty there, and in this way, I happened to belong to 1.6 or 2 percent, whatever it is, of Palestinian faculty in Israeli universities. I had Jewish students in my class plead with me that they want to run away from their country; they are about to lose their sanity given the normalization of killing in that society. My one research assistant, for example, lost any practical contact with his parents because he could not condone, as they have done, the killing of children as they have done. And because of that, he’s facing serious financial struggles because he no longer gets their support. I guess what felt especially dark about the Gaza episode, of course, is that [Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman made sure that we don’t forget the impunity with which the killing of Arab citizens or non-citizens can occur and the inequality of human life. Our purpose really in Mossawa in many ways is basically to ensure that we all have equal rights to live. And when we live, we live it equally well. Clean water to all. Clean land to all. Simply, equal access to land and to clean air.
I’d like to stop here. I think I’ve given you many, many signs of where we stand, but we’d be happy to address more specific questions and to elaborate further. Thank you very much.
Mr. Jafar Farrah is Mossawa’s director and a founding member of the center.
Dr. Mary Totry is chair of the Civic Studies Department at Oranim College, Northern Israel.
Dr. Khaled Furani is a professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speakers' views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.