Paz-Pines said that as interior minister in Ariel Sharon's government in 2005, he oversaw policies and practices that were overtly discriminatory.
"The Arab minority in Israel is structurally discriminated against and has been since the day the state was founded. I say this with great sorrow, I think it is one of Israel's biggest historical mistakes," he said.
"I think it harms the state as a whole, not only the Arabs. It harms us as Israelis. It harms integration and it harms the ability to work together. I also think it hurts the efforts for peace and harms Israel's image in the eyes of the world. But it is a fact," he said.
"The aspiration is to have a Jewish and democratic state with elements of full equality on the civil and social level. In practice we are far from it," said Paz-Pines.
...
"I quickly learned that if you took an Arab village and a Jewish village with roughly the same amount of people, you'd see that Jewish towns would usually receive more. When I examined why this happened, it turned out that the equation held a number of components that don't apply to Arab villages, for example, points given for immigrant absorption," Paz-Pines said.
"It's a collection of little things, but it doesn't take much for big gaps to grow when you're talking about such huge sums," he said.
"It is also important to note that alongside the aspiration for equal rights, there should also be equality of duties. I am a strong supporter of mandatory civil service for all Arab Israelis and think that the Arab leadership's refusal is misguided." ...
NAZARETH : A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.
The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate – and little discussed – initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.
In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.
Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel’s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state’s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.
Since the state’s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.
Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.
In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple’s return.
Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was “too small to be studied”. “Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.”
The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva. ....
After the latest Israeli Gaza Massacre in Israel’s Gaza Concentration Camp (ultimately about 1,500 were killed by 22 days of merciless bombardment and invasion in retaliation for zero Israeli deaths from Gaza rockets in the previous year), these particular crimes of racist Zionist (RZ)-run Apartheid Israel are now as well known as the Zionist complicit crimes of the German Nazis against Jewish people in World War 2 (5-6 million Jews killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation).
1. Post-invasion (i.e. post-1967) Occupied Palestinian non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million.
2. Post-invasion Occupied Palestinian violent deaths total about 11,000.
3. Post-invasion Occupied Palestinian under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million.
4. Palestinian refugees total 7 million.
5. 50% of Palestinians live outside their Homeland, forbidden to return by war criminals zionists in contravention of International Law.
6. 85% of West Bank Christian Palestinians have been forced to flee the Holy Land.
7. 1.5 million Arab Israelis live as second class citizens subject to Nazi-style race laws demanding Apartheid-style, race-based ID and affecting property rights, employment, and marriage.
8. 4 million Indigenous Palestinians live under an illegal, brutal, genocidal, 42 year duration Occupation that has been formally condemned by both General Assembly and UN Security Council Resolutions.
9. 2 .5 million West Bank Occupied Palestinians live in Zionist-encircled “Bantustans” in a territory being illegally whittled away by military camps, military check points, race-based settlements and Jews-only highways and roads.
10. 1.5 million Occupied Palestinians live in what the Catholic Church has described as the Gaza Concentration Camp which is policed not by Israeli police but by Israeli air force, army and naval shelling, bombing and shooting.
11. In 1880 there were 500,000 Indigenous Arab Palestinians and 25,000 Jews (50% immigrants) in the Holy Land – today there are 5.5 million Indigenous Palestinians in the Holy Land and some 5.5 million Palestinian refugees elsewhere and excluded from their Homeland, which is occupied by 5.5 million Jewish Israelis backed by the US, UK, Canada, the EU and racist Australia.
12. In the 2006 Occupied Palestinian elections conducted under Occupier guns, Hamas won 76 seats out of 132 but these Hamas MPs are now overwhelmingly either dead, imprisoned or hiding in the Gaza Concentration Camp and regarded as “terrorists” by the “democratic Nazi” US, UK, Canada, the EU and Australia.
13. UN data reveal that each year Israel is responsible for 3,600 Occupied Palestinian under-5 year old avoidable deaths, 5,700 Occupied Palestinian non-violent avoidable deaths and about 800 violent Occupied Palestinian deaths.
14. The Palestinian Genocide continues despite numerous UN General Assembly and UN Security Council Resolutions, notably UN Security Council Resolution 252 prohibiting land and property seizure, notably in Jerusalem. ...
