Sunday, October 25, 2009

Former Israeli minister: "I oversaw discrimination of Arabs"

Why are Jewish towns in Israel clean and well-cared-for, while Arab towns are dirty and have open-air sewers? Because Arabs don't pay the municipal tax. If they behaved like the civilized world and accepted that they've got to give away a small fraction of their monthly wages to get services in return, their towns would look as neat as Jewish ones.

Anyway, that's the story Zionists have been telling you all along.

Repentant Israeli politician Ophir Paz-Pines, however, begs to differ -- and seems qualified to. As the interior minister in Ariel Sharon's government in 2005, he oversaw policies that were openly discriminatory of Arabs. Paz-Pines as reported by The Jerusalem Post:

"The Arab minority in Israel is structurally discriminated against and has been since the day the state was founded. I say this with great sorrow, I think it is one of Israel's biggest historical mistakes," he said.

"I think it harms the state as a whole, not only the Arabs. It harms us as Israelis. It harms integration and it harms the ability to work together. I also think it hurts the efforts for peace and harms Israel's image in the eyes of the world. But it is a fact," he said.

"The aspiration is to have a Jewish and democratic state with elements of full equality on the civil and social level. In practice we are far from it," said Paz-Pines.

He gave as an example the equalization grants worth billions of shekels that are given to local authorities according to a complicated equation that determines how much each local authority should receive.

"I quickly learned that if you took an Arab village and a Jewish village with roughly the same amount of people, you'd see that Jewish towns would usually receive more. When I examined why this happened, it turned out that the equation held a number of components that don't apply to Arab villages, for example, points given for immigrant absorption," Paz-Pines said.

Note how this debunks the Zionist discourse that the Law of Return is the sole exception to full equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel. In fact, the law itself is the top of an iceberg with myriad ramifications beneath whereby those "eligible for citizenship under the Law of Return" enjoy far more rights than the untouchables, sorry, ineligibles, often through Kafkaesque mechanisms reminiscent of a Communist dictatorship.

Thus, using names that sound neutral, the State applies the Law of Return to further discriminate against the native population. The State does not favor Jews; it favors immigrants -- which sounds very egalitarian, except that all immigrants are Jewish.

It's good that someone from that establishment is blowing the whistle. Paz-Pines is a politician to follow, although from a distance, lest you get burned by the flaming that will be undoubtedly directed against him.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful blog. I look forward to going over the backlogs and learning something.

Ta said...

oh the ignorance!!

Yitzchak Goodman said...

Are you sure he's a "repentant" whistle-blower and not just somebody expressing long-held political views? Israeli governments involve coalitions.

Gert said...

Related:

Beating Arabs is not a crime unless it causes major injury

Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf said...

Are you sure he's a "repentant" whistle-blower and not just somebody expressing long-held political views?

No, I'm not actually sure, but if he said nothing while he was discriminating against Arabs and now he denounces such discrimination, that's as close to repentance as one can have.