Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s six-state reality

By Khaled Diab

Netanyahu must dismantle the six states within a state Israel has created and grant every Arab and Jew full equality.

Thursday 21 January 2016

Tragedies are a time for soul-searching and deep reflection for some. For others, it is an opportunity to make political capital and to fan the flames of hatred.

Binyamin Netanyahu tends to fall squarely into the latter category. At a Tel Aviv bar where what authorities believe to be a terror attack took place leaving two dead and seven wounded, the Israeli prime minister took aim at the 21% of Israel's citizens who identify as Palestinian or Arab.

He demanded “loyalty to the state's laws from everyone”, claiming that Arab areas of Israel were crime-riddled, lawless and radicalised enclaves. While crime is a greater problem in Arab towns and villages than in Jewish ones, this is partly due to decades of neglect from the state, which has been more interested in the security threat Palestinians in Israel potentially pose than to the threats posed to them.

Although Netanyahu praised the swift Arab condemnation of the attack, he swiftly returned to his comfort zone when he said: “We all know that there is wild incitement of radical Islam against the state of Israel within the Muslim sector.”

While incitement does occur, what Netanyahu is wilfully ignoring is that the vast majority of Palestinians in Israel are peaceful and obey the laws of a state which increasingly discriminates against them and this despite being citizens of a country which erased their homeland and occupies their compatriots in the West Bank and Gaza.

More insidiously, while condemning incitement when committed by Palestinians, Netanyahu, in contrast to the moral courage displayed by President Reuven Rivlin, is silent about, excuses or even defends the Jewish inciters in Israel, many of whom are members of his party or coalition.

In some cases, he even promotes them. Take the firebrand of the far-right Jewish Home party, Ayelet Shaked. Despite her track record of incitement, including during the 2014 Gaza war, Netanyahu appointed her justice minister, without betraying a hint of irony. In this capacity, she has widened her net to include not only Palestinians, but also the Israeli supreme court and leftist NGOs.

Incitement also helped Netanyahu win the 2015 election, when he warned supporters that “the right-wing government is in danger” because “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves” as part of a sinister leftist plot involving “left-wing NGOs [who] are bringing them in buses.”

In fact, the smooth-tongued Bibi, as his supporters affectionately call him, has a long track record of dangerous incitement. Leah Rabin, for one, had no doubts that Netanyahu, along with other members of the hard right, was responsible for creating the toxic atmosphere of hate which facilitated the assassination of her husband, Yitzhak Rabin.

Despite his two decades at the wheel of the juggernaut driving Israel off a cliff, Netanyahu had the audacity to tell Arabs at the weekend: “Whoever wants to be Israeli must be Israeli all the way.”

Like far-right rhetoric elsewhere, his comments imply that citizenship for the majority is an inalienable birth right, no matter how much they undermine the state, while for marginalised minorities it is a favour which must be earned and for which they must constantly express gratitude.

“I will not accept two states within Israel,” Netanyahu insisted, suggesting that Palestinian-Israelis are a state within a state.

What Netanyahu's self-righteous rhetoric overlooks is that Israel, when you include all the territory it controls, is composed, according to my count, of at least half a dozen unequal states. At the top of the pyramid sit Israeli Jews, though they are also subdivided according to ethnicity and class.

Then there are the Palestinian and Arab citizens of Israel who theoretically have equality with their Jewish compatriots and enjoy it in the more enlightened corners of society. However, this is undermined by the legal system – which contains at least 50 laws which discriminate against Arabs, according to the legal centre Adalah – as well as other forms of racism and discrimination.

Although Jerusalem was annexed by Israel, its Palestinian inhabitants live under the precarious status of “permanent residents”, thereby turning natives into immigrants, and allowing the state to strip them of that status on the flimsiest of pretexts.

However, Jerusalemites do enjoy social security coverage, freedom of movement and the right to work in Israel. Their compatriots in the West Bank, on the other hand, face severe restrictions, live under martial law (except in Area A, where the PA possesses notional authority), reside behind walls, barriers and fences, and eek out an existence under the shadow of settlements.

In contrast, settlers occupy a legal grey zone, where they live on Palestinian land but enjoy the protection of Israeli law and the military. Ideological settlements are more akin to the lawlessness Netanyahu attributed to Arab towns in Israel, because of the Israeli authorities reluctance to bring violent settlers to justice which, in the words of Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, “creates impunity for hate crimes, and encourages assailants to continue”.

At the bottom of the pile lies Gaza, which is almost hermetically sealed by Israel and Egypt, and forgotten except in times of war. Israel controls Gaza's territory militarily, but without any boots on the ground, and takes no responsibility for this occupation.

If Netanyahu really wants everyone to be “Israeli all the way”, he needs to move beyond self-righteous posturing to a rights-based posture. He must dismantle the six states within a state that his country has created and grant every Israeli and Palestinian, every Arab and Jew, full equality before the law and full citizenship.

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This article first appeared on Al Jazeera on 6 January 2016.