Should we consider a boycott of Israeli academic institutions? Yes

I must take issue with Dr Ehud Schwammenthal's assertion that
.."Israeli citizens who are Arabs not only enjoy equal rights in a formal
constitutional manner...", because it is at the heart of the conflict
between Israel and the Palestinian people and is quite relevant to the
current debate.

I am a Dutchman. My country has a constitution of which article 1
reads: "All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal
circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief,
political opinion, race or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall
not be permitted."

Contrary to what Dr Schwammenthal suggests Israel has no
constitution. Instead it has 11 Basic Laws, none of which guarantees
freedom of speech, freedom of religion or, most importantly, equality. The
Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, passed in 1992 and the nearest
thing Israel has to a Bill of Rights, fails to include equality among the
rights it enumerates, instead emphasising the values of the state as
"Jewish and democratic".

Despite a pledge in the Declaration of Independence of May 1948 to
produce a constitution within six months of the establishment of Israel as
a State, no document has yet been drawn up. One of the insuperable
obstacles facing the drafters has been how to embody the ethnic and
religious values of a Jewish state without resorting to clearly
discriminatory language.

Israel is no ordinary state of its citizens, like the Netherlands or
the UK. It defines itself as a Jewish state, including potentially
millions of Jews who do not live in Israel. These can 'return' any time
whilst the indigenous Palestinian population is excluded from it all.

The murkiness of Israel's self-definition is underscored by the
privileged status various international Zionist organisations, including
the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, enjoy in Israeli law. They
have semi-governmental status, including owning vast tracts of Israeli
land (expropriated from Palestinan refugees), even though their charters
require them to act exclusively in the interest of world Jewry.

As a consequency, Arab citizens' exclusion from the Israeli and
Jewish nation has very concrete effects both on their social position in
Israel and the possibility of developing a civic identity.

There are some 137 possible nationalities that can be recorded on
Israeli identity cards: from Jew, Georgian, Russian and Hebrew through to
Arab, Druze, Abkhazi, Assyrian and Samaritan. Everything, in fact, apart
from Israeli. This is because the state refuses to acknowledge that the
Israeli nation can be separated from the Jewish nation.

The strength of this conviction could be seen when an Israeli Jew
petitioned the Supreme Court back in 1971 to have his nationality changed
from Jewish to Israeli in public records. His application was rejected.

Over the years the Palestinian Israeli's, i.e. those Palestinians who
managed to stay put in 1948 and now form a sizeable majority of between 20
and 25% of the population, have become more vocal in insisting on equal
civil rights. The right to vote cannot hide the fact that Palestinian
Israeli's or all non-Jews for that matter, are basically second class
citizens.

This became quite clear again last week, when a large majority of
Knesseth members voted in favour of a law, which excludes non-Jews from
leasing the large areas of state land owned by the Jewish National Fund.

The law on family reunification also denies Palestinian Israeli's who
marry a Palestinian from the Occupied Territories, the right to have their
spouse living with them in Israel. The only choice they have is to move to
the Occupied Territories.
Much of the inequality is cleverly hidden in quasi-legal language.

As I have argued elsewhere, Israel's 40 year occupation has resulted
in practically irreversible facts, which makes a physically and
economically viable State of Palestine all but impossible.
The reality on the ground is that the Arab and Jewish communities live
next to each other, but in a relationship of separateness and unequality.

More and more Palestinians are giving up on the two state solution
and their demand to be treated as equal citizens in a bi-national state
will grow and not go away. In this respect there are clear parallels
between Israel and the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

My thanks goes to journalist Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, and
his excellent book "Blood and Religion", which was a source of information
for this reply.

Competing interests:
I have worked as a health worker in Palestinian refugee communities and would love to make a contribution in teaching general practice to the students of the Palestine medical school in Jerusalem/Nablus