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The Haaretz article (read here) shows that Israeli authorities are escalating their discrimination and segregation policies against Indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens.
Israeli authorities have been enforcing discriminatory land practices since 1948 inside Israel against its nearly 2 million Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens who represent 21 percent of the country’s population.
Christian and Muslim Palestinians citizens of Israel currently represent 53 percent of Galilee’s population and 25 percent of the Negev’s population. The Galilee and Negev regions comprise two-thirds of the land in Israel.
The Haaretz article states Israeli authorities are taking major steps to further ‘Judaize’ the Galilee and the Negev by intensifying discriminatory land practices and housing policy, mainly by expanding the Admissions Committee Law so that it applies to communities with up to 1,000 households..
The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of the governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The JNF owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.” them.
Currently, Israeli law permits towns in the Galilee and Negev with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being “not suitable for the social life of the community” or for incompatibility with the “social-cultural fabric.”
This authority effectively permits the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Palestinians from small Jewish towns, which Adalah, a human rights group based in Haifa, estimated in 2014 make up 43 percent of all towns in Israel, albeit a smaller percentage of the country’s population. In a 2015 study, Yosef Jabareen, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, found that there are more than 900 small Jewish towns, including kibbutzim, across Israel that can restrict who can live there and have no Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens living in them.
By expanding the Admissions Committee Law so that it applies to communities with up to 1,000 households, Israel would be preventing the 2 million indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens from residing in 900 communities that would be inhabited by around 3 million Jewish Israelis.
Canada must condemn these discriminatory and racist policies that violate the human rights of 2 million Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens, and everything enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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Khaled Mouammar is a Christian Palestinian Canadian who was forced to flee his hometown Nazareth in 1948. He is one of the founders of the Canadian Arab Federation and a former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. He received the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Award from the Governor General of Canada in 1977.
