It was an unprecedented event that occurred in the last week of April, in New York and Washington, as a newsmaker member of the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, took to the stage blasting Israel’s concept of “democracy”.
The speaker was a young woman who identified herself as Palestinian Arab and incidentally comes from my hometown, Nazareth. She is now a member of the Israeli Knesset, despite an unsuccessful attempt by the Israeli Central Elections Committee to disqualify her from running on March 17 when the national elections took place.
But thanks to a decision issued by the Israeli High Court, the committee’s bid was rejected and Haneen Zoabi is once again a member of the Knesset.
Philip Weiss, co-editor of Mondoweiss.net wrote in his column last week that “for years I have known that no understanding of the [Palestinian-Israeli] conflict would be complete without seeing the Palestinian politician Haneen Zoabi in action, but it was not [until] last Friday [April 29], when the embattled member of the Israeli Knesset came to New York University and spoke to a room of 300 people as a guest of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, that I had that privilege”.
He continued: “[Haneen’s] performance was staggering. She is now on tour in the US and if you have any chance to see and hear her, you should. In fact, as [Haneen] spoke — a woman of small stature but majestic spirit and political intelligence, exercising complete control over the crowd, even over her opponents holding the Israeli flag at the back of the room and over Theodore, the student from Stuyvesant High School in the third row who rose to challenge her — I kept wondering why the New York Times has not run a huge profile of this woman, why my president and congress people are not meeting her, why she does not have the status that she ought to have in our discourse as a global justice figure, along the lines of a Havel, a Walesa, a Martin Luther King, a John Lewis, an Aung San Suu Kyi. And the answer of course is: Because she is Palestinian.”
Haneen’s last appearance in the US was at the Palestine Centre, which is part of the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, and here again the media neglected the event, which was scheduled for 30 minutes but lasted one hour since she did not leave any stone unturned.
The Knesset member complained that Palestinians inside Israel have become the “forgotten people” since Israel has “treated us as an internal issue”.
Crimes against humanity, expanding colonies
Haneen emphasised that “although we don’t have full rights, Israel discriminates against us ... We don’t talk about those who continued to live in their homeland, their houses, their villages, their cities. [The focus] is all about the occupation, crimes against humanity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, killing our people, expanding [colonies], and violence in [colonies], violence of the Israeli army against our people. The Palestinian issue did not start in 1967 [when the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were occupied] ... it started as a refugee issue in 1948.”
She went on: “The 1.2 million Palestinians who stayed in the homeland are the test of whether Israel is a democracy ... if [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu can come to the US and speak so proudly about how democratic Israel is and have everyone applaud him 32 times. I think it is because no one knows that in Israel there are 50 racist laws… there are apartheid laws which create two different systems towards two ethnicities, nationalities inside Israel: One for Jews, one for Palestinians.”
Israel has confiscated 86 per cent of Palestinian land, Haneen pointed out, and “there is an Israeli law which prevents me from living in 700 communities ... [in] my homeland, this means we cannot live in over 60 per cent of the land of Israel”.
She underlined that this is a law that “was not passed in 1948 ... but was passed in 2011.”
Moreover, she added that this law had established an Acceptance Committee, which has the power to “reject anyone from residing within these communities and denying [them] the ability to appeal to the courts”.
She cited the case of an Arab family that was mentioned in a news article last month in Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily. In other words, she emphasised that “land is still the most conflicted issue between us and the state”.
Haneen told her stunned audience: “So I want you to understand, Israel cannot easily claim to be a democracy, unless Israel is a black hole and no one must talk about what’s going on there and claim full ignorance. Israel is a racist state.”
Credit: George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
