About a month ago, while living on a kibbutz at the northern tip of Israel’s Negev desert, I had my first frightening encounter with Israeli racism. It was only a matter of time.
It started when my friends and I met a group of Israeli Arabs staying on the kibbutz while they butchered meat in an area slaughterhouse for the upcoming Jewish holidays. Israeli Arabs are citizens of the state who live within Israeli territory, primarily in segregated villages where infrastructure and educational needs are bureaucratically ignored by the Israeli government. Theoretically, Israeli Arabs possess full and equal rights, though this is not the case in practice.
Having assumed that the kibbutz would be completely segregated, we were surprised to find the workers living nearby and decided to make friends. Many of them were around our age and were extremely welcoming. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes in their room, speaking in Hebrew about Nazareth, Israeli women, etc. For a bunch of inexperienced young American Jews, this was an interesting and unexpected social interaction.
Our third visit, however, wrought significant drama. After leaving the workers’ room, one of my friends realized that she had left her cell phone inside. When she tried to retrieve it, they denied that the phone was there and refused to return it. When another friend tried calling the vmissing cell phone, no one heard a ring as it had apparently been shut off and hidden.
Though only a petty theft, the aftermath of this incident embodied some of the volatile tensions in Israeli society. My friend–extremely irritated–reported the stolen phone to the kibbutz manager, a college-educated young woman who responded with alarming fury. Such a theft was intolerable; she insisted that the entire group of a dozen or so workers be kicked off the kibbutz and their employer never again house butchers there. She sanctimoniously informed us that this is what we get for befriending the workers because this is what Arabs do: They lie and cheat and steal. She apologized for not calling the group Israelis, but to her, “They are only Israelis on paper, they are not real Israelis.”
Fearing lost wages if kicked off the kibbutz, our more familiar acquaintances quickly spoke up and offered to cover the cost of the phone. It became clear through our conversation that one individual was primarily responsible for the theft, and that forcing the entire group off the kibbutz was an unfair collective punishment.
Ultimately, their employer fired the responsible worker so that the rest of the group could stay through the duration of their employment. Yet the whole saga remains profoundly unsettling. The irrational rage that the kibbutz manager unleashed reflects an Israeli social order that breeds fear and hatred and refuses to acknowledge, among its Arab neighbors, the legitimacy of working for one’s livelihood. She instantaneously labeled every Arab guest as guilty, reflecting the hypocritical application of judicial ethics: Any principle of due process applies only to Jews.
Furthermore, my friends and I spontaneously came to possess an absurd amount of power over the lives of people we knew absolutely nothing about. As a group of privileged American post-graduates spending a year abroad for our own edification, we found several much older men–laboring for their own and their families’ subsistence–begging us to allow them to stay. As guests of the Israeli kibbutzniks, we were allied with the authoritative party, so should we have persisted in our outrage, the kibbutz manager would have kicked out the entire group. Since we were tepid with our blame, she decided to be lenient.
The overall lesson is a depressing one: It is practically impossible for Jewish Israelis to integrate Arab Israelis into their midst with any shard of equality. The workers were on the kibbutz to fill a labor void and to bring revenue to the kibbutz; they were allowed to stay only out of paranoid and reluctant pragmatism. When the tiniest of crises reared its head, the response of the Israeli woman in charge was pathological. As her guest, she expected us to adopt such a tic ourselves. •
Sidebar:
Israeli demographics
According to the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook) the total Israeli population is 6,352,117. 74.6% (approximately 4.74 million) of the population is Jewish, 23.6% (1.5 million) Arab. Some segments of the Jewish population live in areas that the international community does not recognize as Israeli territory: about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on the Syrian border, and about 177,000 in East Jerusalem.
The Arab population can be divided into three categories: Israelis with citizenship (above), residents of Israeli territory that do not have citizenship, and citizens of territory governed by the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It is not clear how Arab residents of Israel who do not hold citizenship are counted in these statistics. Territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority: 1,428,757 Arab Muslims in Gaza, and 2,460,492 in the West Bank.
----
Kibbutzim
The kibbutz (plural: kibbutzim) is an important installation in Israeli society. Kibbutzim were founded around the time of Israeli independence in the 1940s and 1950s as experimental socialist farms, driven by an ideology of Jews connecting with their land through manual labor. In the decades since their founding, kibbutzim have become progressively privatized and now employ many foreign laborers, primarily Thai, as well as Israeli Arabs, to perform the more undesirable labor. Currently, approximately 3 percent of the Israeli population lives on kibbutzim.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment