More on the Bedouin Place in Israel
A friend emailed to criticize the impression in my last entry that Israelis would be happier if all the Bedouin left the country and moved to Jordan. Many Jewish Israelis, I’m reminded, work to help the Bedouin confront their many problems and avoid cultural disintegration.
I know this is accurate. When writing my previous comment, I had in mind government officials and bureaucrats who create and maintain policies toward Bedouin communities and individuals, not individual Israelis who vary among themselves across the full spectrum of opinion. Organizations of Israeli Jews work with and for Bedouin, and other Israelis do so in their professional and political work. And I do believe many want the Bedouin to stay as equal citizens. What I don’t know is how common this perspective is among the larger Israeli public.
Bedouin and other Israeli Palestinians routinely face discrimination, as do racial and religious minorities worldwide. And as commonly occurs elsewhere, this discrimination moves beyond individual actions motivated by personal prejudice to institutionalized discrimination built in to government policy, sometimes required or tolerated by law. This institutionalized racism is unusually obvious in Israel where government officials and other community leaders openly talk without embarrassment about “the demographic problem” posed by too many Arabs having too many babies and where many government policies and practices are best interpreted as designed to make life miserable for non-Jews. Politicians who publicly advocate the “transfer” of Arabs out of Israel to preserve a Jewish majority are met not just by denunciations as racist — as they should be — but also by too many signs of agreement.
Another issue my friend’s email brings to mind is the distinction between two goals — Bedouin legal equality and Bedouin community power. It’s one thing to advocate and work toward ending discrimination and improving services so that individual Bedouin have the same options and protections as Jewish Israelis. It’s another thing to create conditions whereby Bedouin communities control their own institutions.
Clearly I don’t know a lot about what happens here. I’m in Israel for a short time, and miss a lot of what goes on, and no doubt sometimes my generalizations are superficial and inaccurate. Still, it remains my impression that a primary focus of many helping professionals who work with Bedouin (social workers, teachers, and so on) is to ease their condition, partly by helping them adapt to Israeli life, rather than to help them attain political self-determination. Will Bedouin become fully equal only when their culture is indistinguishable from that of Jewish Israelis and they accept Israel’s Jewish-State fundamentals? That would not be surprising — Bedouin would not be the world’s only minority group for whom the price of equality is loss of identity.
As I’ve noted previously, trends toward urbanization and modernization are escalating in any case. Assimilation to the corporatized global lifestyle may be complete in another generation. Maybe at that point everyone here will have equal rights, when equality no longer brings the risk of difference.