"The Nation Demands Social Justice."
This slogan has been the trademark of the protests sweeping Israel since the first tents appeared on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv last month
The nation demands social justice. Loud and clear. But which nation? And exactly what justice?
As tents started to pop up in various cities around Israel, those concerned with Arab - Jewish relations in Israel were unsure what to expect. Would this be another movement in Israel that overlooks and excludes the Arab minority? Or perhaps the leaders of the current protest will realize that you cannot talk about social justice while casting aside 20% of the population? Will Arab citizens sit this one out? Or will they set up a tent and protest the social and economic hardships that they too suffer from?
During the first week the situation seemed grim, as protest demands seemed to be irrelevant to the needs of Arab citizens; but as the goals of the protest broadened, attitudes began to change. Protest tents were set up in the Arab cities of Nazareth, Taybe, Baka al-Garbiya, Sakhnin, Majd al-Krum and other Arab towns; bi-national tents were set up in Tel-Aviv and Jaffa; the mass protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Saturday nights saw many Arab protestors and signs in Arabic; and prominent Arab intellectuals such as Sayed Kashua and Uda Bashsarat spoke to the applause of tens of thousands of demonstrators in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
It turns out that the tent protest is historic not only because it is the widest social protest that Israel has witnessed in decades, but also because it is the most inclusive. When protest leaders say "the nation", it appears that they mean the Israeli nation; all the citizens of Israel – Arabs and Jews alike. In doing so they reverse the standard shorthand in Israel – "the nation" as the Jewish nation only, and recognize that Jews and Arabs in Israel today share many of the same problems – all are fighting an increased cost of living that make it harder and harder to make ends meet.
The importance of this subtle shift cannot be overstated. Relations between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, especially in the last decade, have been characterized by mutual fear and alienation.
Through the current social protest a young Jewish couple and a young Arab couple can look at each other and realize that they face similar problems: They both have a hard time finding an affordable apartment to rent and neither can even dream of buying their own home; they both work long hours for average salaries, shoulder a share of the tax burden that is disproportionate to their income, only to find that in the week since their last visit to the supermarket, prices for basic products have gone up. Again.
The main issues that made Israelis take to the streets – lack of land and affordable housing, constant increases in the cost of living and limited access to social welfare – are shared by both Jewish and Arab citizens.
But the similarities don't tell the whole story. The hardships suffered by Jews and Arabs may be similar but the underlying reasons are often different and are a result of decades of discrimination and exclusion of the Arab minority.
The lack of housing options is a good example. While for Jewish citizens the lack of reasonably priced apartments is an economic issue deriving from faulty planning policies; for Arab citizens, housing is a painful political issue. The Arab housing shortage begins with land confiscation policies and continues with discrimination in planning and zoning procedures. The intentional failure to develop master plans for Arab towns is designed to reduce their living space. So while the population has grown over the last 60 years, the jurisdiction of Israeli Arab localities has only diminished, resulting in illegal building and home demolitions. Not even one new Arab town has been built since the creation of the State of Israel (with the exception of the cities built in an attempt to urbanize the Bedouin population in the Negev thereby reducing their dispersion in the area).
Moreover, a young Arab couple that lacks the resources to build in their own community will have trouble renting in a Jewish community and not only because of the prices: the recently passed Admission Committees law establishes a legal mechanism for ethnic segregation in small communities, allowing them to refuse Arab candidates because they do not "match the socio-cultural fabric of the community", while in bigger cities many Jewish homeowners, inspired by leading rabbis, refuse to rent or sell their properties to Arabs. The recent law only formalized what was up until then de facto practice in most Jewish communities.
Differences in root-causes also exist in the issue of the cost of living. The price of a carton of milk or a can of Coca-Cola may be the same in both Jewish and Arab supermarkets, but when the average salary of an Arab citizen is only 70% of that of his Jewish counterpart, the price takes a larger bite out of the income of the average Arab family. Add to that that the unemployment rate among Arab citizens is almost two and a half times that of the Jewish community; and Arab women's participation in the workforce is less then half of that of Jewish women, and it is not surprising that more than 50% of the Arab minority lives below the poverty line – three times the proportion in the Jewish community.
In saying this I do not intend to diminish the common ground of the current protest. On the contrary, it aims to show that in order for there to be social justice in Israel, policy recommendations must include solutions for the social and economic disparities of the Arab minority and lead to an equal system of resource allocation. It seems that the leaders of the protest and the protesters at large, both Jews and Arabs understand this basic truth. Despite some voices calling for housing solutions for army veterans only and other mechanisms that exclude Arabs, the general tone of the protest has mostly been inclusive. The protesters seek to set an entirely new socio-economic agenda for Israel and not settle for old discriminatory solutions.
The government, as always, is the last to grasp the new civil solidarity. Not a single Arab was initially included in the team that the Prime Minister appointed to develop recommendations for socio-economic change. It took a petition to the High Court of Justice by a dozen women’s and civil society organizations to have an Arab woman appointed to the team. The lack of Arab members not only sends the message that the goals the government set for fair representation of Arab citizens are merely lip-service, but it also makes it impossible for the committee to tackle the different root causes of the hardships of Arab and Jewish citizens.
This is not the first time that the Arab sector has been left outside the frame of reference of the Israeli government. One of the main goals of The Abraham Fund Initiatives' public advocacy work is to raise the awareness of the government to the needs of the Arab minority and to the benefits of social inclusion and economic integration of the Arab population. A milestone in this important work was the publication of a comprehensive information manual on Arab society in Israel, which the Heinrich Boell Stiftung helped distribute to all of the Israeli Knesset members and many other government clerks and officials.
Putting the government's blind spot aside and looking to the streets once more, it is clear that the most vibrant, dynamic and participatory democracy in the history of Israel is happening in tent camps all over the country, where people of all population groups are discussing their future on a daily basis and are taking responsibility for shaping their society. In this fascinating process, there is a real opportunity to build a shared Jewish-Arab vision for the future of the country. This opportunity is already being actualized and we can only hope that it will continue in the coming weeks, months and years.
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Mohammad Darawshe is the Co-Executive Director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives.