False Dichotomies

חג שמח to those who are celebrating….Falsedi is taking Pesach off; I’ll be back on the 16th April with a big piece on Iran. Watch out now…

In last week’s Haaretz, Carl Perkal, the director of resource development for Sikkuy (The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel), argued that the Israeli health-care system was the model for removing inequality between Jews and Arabs in other spheres, such as housing, education, welfare, land allocation, and job access. Citing the 1994 national health insurance scheme, he notes that the law “made no distinction between Jews and Arabs (or any other groups), and in this it ended the inherent discrimination of the previous system, by which many Arab citizens found themselves unable to pay the monthly instalments to the various kupot holim (HMOs), and the HMOs avoided making investments in health facilities in the country’s Arab towns and villages.”

He’s right to note that the health-care system is far less susceptible to de facto discrimination than other areas. He’s also quick to acknowledge that we’re still far from where we need to be. While there are plenty of Israeli-Arab doctors, one often hears complaints that medical schools overtly discriminate in favour of those who have done army service, and that the psychometric tests inherently discriminate against Arabs, who have generally had a far lower standard of schooling than Jews. are harder for Arab students as a result of poor schooling. Because of this situation, you often hear of Arab students travelling abroad to study medicine in little-known European universities.

This brings me to the site of this week’s catastrophic earthquake, the Italian city of L’Aquilla.  Between 40 and 70 Israeli-Arab students study medicine and other related professions at the city’s university. Today’s Yediot Ahranot, eternally looking for the local angle, devoted a whole page to their story. Strikingly, they were described as Israelis, and not Israeli-Arabs. To know their ethnicity, you had to know a bit about the difference between Jewish and Arab names, or – failing that – the geography of Zion.

I know, I know. There’s nothing interesting about describing them as Israelis. After all, that’s how it should be. They are Israelis just like anyone else privileged to carry the blue ID cards. But Israeli-Arabs aren’t routinely described as Israelis in the national press. If the story relates to internal issues, such as the recent far-right march in Umm-el-Fahm, they will be described as Israeli-Arabs. If the earthquake is to be taken as precedent, it seems that the shared citizenship (albeit of a de facto devalued status) of Israeli-Arabs only becomes apparent when they step out of the country’s borders. In this regard, then, the quote from the embassy in Rome suddenly becomes a whole lot more poignant: “It’s our obligation to take care of our citizens.”

Then a wonderful irony. Avigdor Lieberman, currently alternative his first week as Foreign Minister between winding up the Americans and being interrogated by the police over fraud allegations, managed to find some time yesterday (he’s announced that he’ll be working 15 hour days, by the way, in case you were wondering) to stop in at the Foreign Ministry’s Situation Room, in order to help direct the efforts to evacuate Israelis caught up in the tragedy. There was no word, as yet, over whether the Israeli-Arabs in L’Aquilla would have to swear an oath of allegiance before boarding the plane.

At the time of writing, one Israeli, Hussein Hamada, from the Galilee village of Kabul, is still missing. I hope he will be found safe and well. In the meantime, let the ironies and nuances of the story speak for themselves…