In the Middle East's "only democracy" discrimination is a way of life for a sizeable portion of its population. Israel's Arab sector has faced inequity since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 but recently racism has been on the rise, say Arab and Palestinian residents.
Israel's Jewish community increasingly supports the discrimination and even deportation of Arabs, say Palestinian human rights activists in Israel. "Anywhere you go in Israel you will not find Arabs represented or integrated. And this holds for all aspects of life, from basic representation on the street to that of public institutions," Jafar Farah, director of the Haifa-based Mossawa Advocacy Center, told AlArabiya.net.
Israel's more than one million Arab citizens make up 18 percent of the population. While 90 percent of the Arab community lives in the entirely Arab towns and villages of Galilee, Triangle and Negev, some 10 percent live in mixed Arab-Jewish cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Acre.
Despite having a distinct national, ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic character, Arab Israelis are treated as second-class citizens.
"Discrimination is regularly apparent in state resource allocations in every field, and Palestinian Arabs continue to be excluded from the centers of power and underrepresented in decision-making public institutions, and in the general public sphere," Yousef Jabareen, law lecturer at Haifa University and director of the Nazareth-based Arab Center for Law and Policy told AlArabiya.net |