Providence Journal - printed July 15, 2002

Israeli abuse of Arabs

In his July 7 column, "Democracy: Palestinians to win," Col. Theodore L. Gatchel arrogantly lectures the Palestinians on the failings of their leaders without the slightest mention of the deficiencies of the Israeli state.

Let's take a look. What the world regards as Israel is a state where 92 percent of the land is reserved by law for Jews. There's more than a million Palestinians who have an Israeli passport, but almost all the land in the country is barred to them. Large areas of cities like Haifa and Jaffa are reserved for Jews only. Kibbutzim, which were once socialist collective farms, are not open for membership to any non-Jew.

Though Israeli Palestinians can vote, no Israeli government would dream of including their Arab parties in the government. No Arab party has ever been included in an Israeli government. Whole industries, such as electronics, are barred to Arabs. Almost all Palestinian Israelis are kept out of the army, and this disqualifies them for a whole range of public benefits. Thousands of Israeli Palestinians are internal refugees, that is they fled their villages in 1948 for another part of Israel, but were never allowed to return to their homes. Scores of Israeli Palestinian villages are simply unrecognized and receive no government services, no water, no electricity.

In the land Israel took in 1967, the Palestinians are treated far worse. They live in towns and villages and refugee camps whose roads have been plowed up or blocked. They must go through humiliating checkpoints to get from one town to another. A desperately sick Palestinian cannot take an ambulance from his home to a hospital. He must first be unloaded onto a stretcher, carried through checkpoints (sometimes for kilometers) and then put on another ambulance. It is routine for hundreds of thousands of people to be put under curfew for days or weeks at a time. At the same time Jewish Israelis are allowed to live in those territories in segregated settlements connected by roads for Jews alone.