Jamal Zahalka leads an Israeli Arab party, Balad (Nation), also known as the National Democratic Alliance. A prominent Israeli Arab who spent two years in jail, he was first elected in 2003 and re-elected thrice since. I spoke to him when he addressed a Canadian Palestinian group in Mississauga last weekend and a more mixed gathering in Toronto on Monday.
Arab-Israeli peace talks remain suspended over Israeli refusal to freeze construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, where the settler population has swelled to 350,000. Barack Obama, too, had made that demand but has given up since, as he made clear during a recent visit to Israel.
Zahalka said frustration is building among Palestinians, whose first intifadah was in 1987-93 and the second in 2000-05.
“They will do something to remind the world we are still here. We exist. Don’t forget us.
“I’m quite sure there’s going to be a third intifadah. I can’t say when. But I think one is on the way. The Palestinian leadership wants it to be peaceful.”
He said Benjamin Netanyahu leads “the most pro-settler government ever,” committed to settlement expansion and showing little interest in peacemaking.
“They want to negotiate about a cake that they are eating all the time, and they want me to negotiate about what remains, and what remains is getting smaller all the time.”
Netanyahu’s policy is “not crisis resolution but crisis management. He is killing the option of a two-state solution. Palestinians have no Israeli partner for a two-state solution.”
Zahalka echoes liberal Jewish critics of prolonged occupation and settler expansion. But he also argued that the problem goes deeper.
“Israel (is) a democracy for Jews, not Arabs. It is not an exact copy of the old South African apartheid state but it’s from the same family.
“The Israeli state has several branches. One is a democracy for its Jewish population. Another treats Israeli Arabs, a fifth of the population, as second-class citizens. Another runs an apartheid-like regime over the West Bank. Another works on the Judaization of Jerusalem. Another one acts as the prison guard of Gaza (controlling its border, sea and air). Another supervises the occupation of the Golan Heights. You cannot separate Israel’s democratic part from its other parts.”
Israel being both democratic and Jewish has long been debated in Israel, ever since its founding.
“How can you logically have a Jewish democracy?” asked Zahalka. “Either you have an apartheid regime run by a minority controlling the majority or you create a Jewish majority by expelling the indigenous non-Jewish people from their homeland. No transfer, no democracy. This democracy was built by changing the demography of the place to create a new artificial majority .”
Since then, Israel has pursued anti-Arab measures.
The Law of Return grants special privileges to Jews who settle in Israel. “A Jewish man in Brooklyn has more rights than me.”
Laws are “democratic in that they were passed by the Knesset after open debate. But the way land laws have been implemented for the last 60 years, it’s in one direction only — Palestinian land for Jews.”
Another law empowers committees governing villages not to accept new residents deemed not suitable. “Translation: No Arabs.”
Another policy affects Palestinian family unification. “If you marry outside the Green Line, your spouse cannot live with you in Israel. There are about 5,000 families like that, living on both sides of the Green Line, in the West Bank and in Israel. There’s no Green Line in love. Yet the law prohibits them from living together.”
What’s the way out?
“Unlike Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu is weak. He’ll surrender to pressure. What’s required is to build pressure through struggle on the ground and from abroad,” including from Jews opposed to prolonged occupation and settlement expansion.
Another hope, he said, lies in indirect talks. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, suggested so to Obama when the two met last month in Ramallah.
Abbas would not drop his condition of freezing settlement activity. But he’d go along if some of the 4,400 prisoners in Israeli jails are released. He gave Obama a list of 120 names. It included Marwan Barghouti, who led the first and second intifadah, and is widely assumed, among others by Israel, as the eventual successor to Abbas.
“That was the first time Abbas demanded Barghouti’s release as part of the deal” to get the two sides talking, Zahalka said.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Haroon Siddiqui
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