"A history of discrimination,"

By Yitzhak Laor

Every year since Israel's independence, cinema newsreels, and later television news, have reported to the public on "the heads of Muslim, Christian and Druze communities congratulating the president in honor of Independence Day." It was the age of patriotic innocence, coupled with national blindness.

Over those years, Independence Day has been foisted in various ways on the Palestinians who remained in their land.

Military governors would allow their subjects to leave their enclaves for picnics on the remnants of their villages, if those were not already inhabited by new Jewish immigrants. That which was prohibited all year was allowed for one day, so they could be allowed to celebrates on their own ruins.

Behind the blindness always lurked cynicism: We will discriminate against them in every possible field - education, health, water, infrastructure, employment - and they in turn will kiss the national flag across their 200 villages and towns.

If they protest against discrimination, we'll cry "disorder."

With the state's founding, three percent of its land was allocated to Arabs, of which only two percent was slated for housing, and only after the major expropriations of the 1950s and a series of convoluted land and property laws essentially prohibiting Arabs from acquiring land.

"Natural growth" was never used as justification for expanding their villages outside their borders, drawn up when their total population numbered 150,000, and erecting new settlements was, of course, out of the question.

Today, a million people have become locked in villages and towns described by their young generation as ghettos.

Only one not familiar with the Arab minority's hardships - growing poverty, growing racism around them, quotas in mixed cities, and municipally-encouraged religious and yuppie Jewish settlement in Jaffa despite the protestations of the Arab poor - can fail to understand that such "patriotic" proposals as a bill banning Nakba Day commemorations, even if not enforced, is a pretext for more incitement towards Arabs and interference in their political and cultural lives.

The 1952 Nationality Law not only granted conditions to new immigrants far more favorable than to the remaining Arab inhabitants, but also hastily (perhaps too hastily) granted electoral rights to an enormous proportion of the population - without requiring residence (as required in every country in which electoral privileges are universal), or even checking the background of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.

The state was consumed with settling a single score: what was "ours," and what was not - namely, a demographic majority and land.

Avigdor Lieberman - the strong man cut down to his natural size the moment the Israeli agenda changed from electoral propaganda to the Egypt-Israel and U.S.-Israel diplomatic tracks - is again looking for his way, and may even be planning his resignation from the government, in order to serve as a fighting opposition through resorting to the well-worn tactic of "The homeland is in danger, beat the Arabs."

But Lieberman is not alone, and his Russian immigrant electorate will not be enough to reach power. He speaks to the fundamental Israeli racism, according to which "we are the landlords, and you are short-term guests."

This abomination is important to Israeli democracy, but whoever deludes himself that it will be possible to cover up the reality of Arabs in Israel through prolonged silence is doing the groundwork for a thug to come and "restore order."

For that, of course, we will need draconian legislation and "disorder."