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In Israel, it is very clear where you can and cannot live as a Palestinian

Palestine Monitor | October 22, 2011

With the legalizing of admissions committees and strict restrictions on building in Palestinian communities, Palestinians will soon have nowhere else to live in Israel.

After a six-year legal campaign, a Palestinian-Israeli couple has been granted the right to build a home in the communal settlement of Rakefet in the Misgav Regional Council, located in the southern Galilee. However, their victory does not portend the softening of ethnically divided communities in Israel, nor the broadening of living options available to Palestinians living inside Israel. In fact, their long-awaited acceptance may just be the last of its kind.  ­

Ahmed and Fatina Zabeidat are from Sakhnin, a Palestinian town close to Rakefet in the Lower Galilee. They applied for residency in the settlement in 2005. Both architects, the Zabeidats wanted the space to design and build their own home.

The Zabeidats chose Rakefet for its spacious and quiet environment. Sakhnin, like all Palestinian towns in Israel, suffers from overcrowding for several reasons. Firstly, residents of the town live on about 2,500 acres compared to its size of 25,000 acres in 1948. Secondly, the state continually fails to implement a master plan in the town and the Misgav council rarely issues building permits, which means there are many cases of illegal building and consequent demolition orders.

At Rakafet, anyone who wants to live in the community has to pass through an admissions process. Rakefet’s admissions committee rejected the Zabeidats application, citing grounds of “social unsuitability.”

Under the sanction of the Israel Land Administration, admissions committees have been allowed to filter new residents in the interest of preserving the character of small communities.

For decades, admissions committees have operated  in the Naqab and Galilee. Such committees exist in 695 communities, accounting for 68.5% of all towns and 85% of villages in Israel. Significantly, each includes a senior member of the Jewish Agency or the World Zionist Organization.

These groups have been pivotal in the state’s continuing settlement enterprise. The World Zionist Organization was founded in 1897 as an umbrella for the Zionists’ colonising project and today consists of pro-Israel groups spread throughout dozens of countries. The Jewish Agency was created in 1948 to manage the absorption of Jewish immigrants and has since succeeded in bringing around 3 million Jews to Israel.

But the right of these admission committees to preserve its community’s character—albeit defined nebulously—was codified in Israeli law last March.

The law, known as the Admissions Committee Law gave authority to these committees operating in communities with fewer than 400 families, to filter applicants based on their “social suitability,” a caveat widely suspected of legalizing the maintenance of a place’s ethnic homogeneity. In short this law is most likely used to keep towns Jewish.

While the explicit discrimination of applicants based on their national belonging is prohibited, Suhad Bishara of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights, argues that the requirements for entry are vague enough to facilitate the exclusion of marginalized groups, such as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In 2005, Rakefet’s admissions committee rejected the Zabeidats on the grounds that they were socially unsuitable. Fatina was “too individualistic,” the committee told Haaretz, while Ahmed “lacked interpersonal sophistication and has difficulty integrating naturally into society.” The committee also claimed that the Zabeidats  would not be sufficiently active members in their particularly small community.

But the Zabeidats believed they were rejected because they are Palestinians. So they approached Adalah and brought a petition to the Supreme Court against the decision in 2007.

“The committee claimed Fatina and Ahmed were motivated more by challenging the system than an honest intention to live in a small community,” explains Bishara, the Zabeidat’s attorney.

The Supreme Court ruled that Rafeket needed to assemble a new team on its admissions committee and reconsider their decision to reject the Zabeidat’s application; they also ruled that while the admissions committees were permitted to conduct interviews to assess the couple’s suitability, they could not use psychological testing—a practice widely used–in the application process to communal towns.

Again, the Zabeidat’s submitted an application to be reviewed by the new admissions committee and filed an appeal to the ILA, which has the authority to arbitrate in the dispute. But they were rejected a second time.

However, in a surprising turn of events, the ILA’s new general director, Ronen Cohen Schorr, decided independently—and to the chagrin of the ILA appeals committee—to grant the Zabeidats the land they desired.

He told Haaretz he was “convinced of the honest desire of the petitioners to blend into the life of the community and believes that their acceptance is not likely to damage the community.” The High Court confirmed his decision, giving Rakefet’s authorities 90 days to allot land to the Zabeidats.

Challenging the committees

The Zabeidats may have won this battle, but Adalah claims that the mere notion of being “incompatible” with a community is severely problematic.

In June, Adalah—with support from other rights groups—filed a petition in the High Court against the very principle of acceptance committees. The stipulation of “incompatibility,” they argued, is vague enough to be applied to any marginalized candidates, such as Palestinians, single parent families, gay couples, Mizrahi Jews and people with disabilities. In the past, all of these groups have been denied entrance to communal settlements.

For Bishara, the decision to cement acceptance committees in national law—in the form of the Admissions Committee Law—came as a means of blocking criticism of this often prejudicial selection process. Fortunately for the Zabeidets, Admissions Committee Law could not be applied retroactively. “The law is meant to bypass any potential court decision” that may curtail the practice, Bishara explains.

In 2000, the Supreme Court ordered the Jewish community of Katsir in the Wadi Ara region of central Israel to allow a Palestinian Israeli couple, Adel and Iman Kaadan, to buy a house in the town.

While critics slate the Admissions Committee Law as institutionalizing racism, supporters contend the law protects the particular character of these community settlements.

One sponsor of the law, David Rotem of the far right Yisrael Beiteinu party, explained in December 2009 that it would allow Jewish Israelis the power to “establish a place where everybody is an army veteran, a Yeshiva alumni, or something of that sort.”

Yisrael Hasson of the Kadima party noted in December 2010 how the law “reflects the Knesset’s commitment to work to preserve the … Zionist dream in practice in Israel” through “population dispersal.”

But Adalah argues that communal settlements no longer follow a collective way of life, as they once may have. Furthermore, Adalah contends that since Zionism is the dominant culture in Israel and has thus already been realized, there is no need to “preserve” it.

Admission committees frequently adopt criteria that specifically vets out Palestinians. In June 2009, the communities of Manof and Yuvalim changed their communal bylaws to make loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state a prerequisite to residency. Their example was replicated in other communities before the Loyalty Oath Bill was passed in October 2010.

Palestinian voices in Israel decry the segregation efforts. Though present in most fields of life, segregation is particularly blatant in housing policies. “The map is very clear where you can and cannot live as an Arab,” Bishara notes.

Many communal settlements were built in the Galilee and Naqab throughout the ’70s and ’80s, financed by the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency as part of the Judaization drive, which was concentrated in these Palestinian majority areas.

No new towns or villages have been built for Palestinians in Israel since the state was created. Governments refuse to license master plans for Palestinian communities to enable socio-economic development and improve standards of life.

Observers of Israeli society point to tensions emerging between Israel’s self-image as a democracy and the anti-democratic legislation of recent years, which are becoming increasingly awkward for Israel’s exponents to account for.

While the Zabeidets had the means and energy to wage a legal battle to make a home in Rafeket, undoubtedly most Palestinian Israelis have deferred to the de facto segregation of Jews and non-Jews. However, with the growing frequency of laws such as that governing acceptance to small towns this segregation may soon become de jure.

October 23, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism