Our Way to Fight: Peace-Work Under Siege in Israel-Palestine

• Published in: Labour Vol. 71; no. 71; pp. 300 - 302
• Main Author: Haiven, Judy
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Committee on Canadian Labour History and AU Press 01.04.2013; Canadian Committee on Labour History
• Subjects: Amusement parks; Arab people; Archaeology; Grass roots movement; International law; Jewish people; Land settlement; Middle Eastern history; Military service; Nonfiction; Palestinian people; Peace; Politics; REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS; Riordon, Michael; Segregation; Palestinian territory; Israel
• ISSN: 0700-3862; 1911-4842

[Dorothy Naor] drives author [Michael Riordon] across the Green Line to visit several Palestinians, including a farmer Hani Amer, and a journalist, Issa Souf. Amer's house had been demolished to make way for another illegal Israeli settlement. After bulldozing his house, the Israeli Defence Forces (idf) destroyed his plant nursery, chicken coop, and goat shed - crushing his ability to earn a livelihood. Israel's "security wall" snakes through Amer's farmland, which (due to idf checkpoints) takes him nearly two hours to get to rather than the 20-minute drive it took before the wall. A constant worry for Amer is the shortage of water: as Riordon notes, "According to a 2009 study by the World Bank, Israel controls all the water sources but allocates to Palestinians only 20 per cent of the water. It is forbidden for Palestinians to drill new wells." (12) While much has been written about the Palestinians who live under occu- pation in the West Bank, less is noted about the more than eighteen per cent of Israelis who are Arabs. Called Arab Israelis, they are citizens of Israel but with fewer rights than the Jewish ma- jority. In Nazareth, known as the "Arab capital of Israel," Riordon interviews Yousef Jabareen, director of Dirasat, the Arab Center for Law and Policy. Barely 40 years old, Jabareen attended school in Nazareth, and then studied law at Hebrew University. He twice won scholarships to study in the US, eventually earning a PhD in law, policy and minority rights from George Washington University, in Washington, DC. He explains that the Arab Israelis have been virtually air- brushed out of the history curriculum in all Israeli schools. There is nothing about the Palestinians' heritage, their history, or culture. Jabareen contends, "Sometimes you would think our history ended in 1948, and after that it's a blank." From 2006 to 2008, the number of Arab Israelis who passed their high school matriculation exams fell by 20 per cent. Their high school drop out rate is twice that of Jewish students. Israel allocates $1,000 US per Jewish student for educa- tion, and only $200 US for Arab students. While Arab-Israelis comprise 18 per cent of Israel's population, they own only 3.5 per cent of the land; in 2005, 94.5 per cent of Israel's civil servants were Jewish and only 5 per cent were Arab. Dr. Jabareen and Dirasat collect data, write reports, and bring unequivocal proof to bolster their arguments in the hope of chang- ing Israeli government policy toward the Arabs inside Israel. He says he takes heart from the civil rights struggles in the US: "After so many years of slavery and then segregation, with a very oppressive regime to enforce it, now 50 years later the segregation laws are gone - that's a big change... And in 2008, an African American was elected president." (84)