Monday 26 April 2010


Driving cautiously though the narrow and unmended streets of Nazareth, there could be no doubt that we were in a Third World city.

Like the other Arab towns in Israel, its cramped houses are jumbled and squeezed together on the rising hillsides, unmitigated by urban greenery.

The contrast with the wide, well-kept boulevards and the spacious, neatly trimmed parks of Jewish Israel is shocking.

The reason? The Arab municipalities receive only a fraction of the funding per person that the Jewish areas are allocated, and furthermore the Israeli state bans the Arab districts from expanding to meet the housing and social needs of their populations, while the Jewish districts are provided with ample land for development.

This is only one aspect of the policy of discrimination by the state of Israel against its indigenous inhabitants, who refer to themselves as the "1948 Palestinians."

Mohammad Barakeh puts it more forcefully.

"It's a policy of aggression."

Accompanied by my student colleague Ariadna Petri and my guide and translator Grace Abdo, I met Barakeh in a cafe in Nazareth city centre.

Barakeh is the chairman of the left-wing Hadash movement and is one of its four representatives in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

He is currently on trial by the Israeli state for his political activities.

I ask Barakeh about the situation of the Palestinians living in Israel today.

"On March 30 we had the 34th commemoration of Land Day. On that day, all the issues that face the Palestinians of '48 are brought to the fore.

"And this time the major thing was the house demolitions that the Israeli government is carrying out in the Triangle, in the Negev and in Galilee.

"This is the new suffering after land confiscation. Before 1948 the Palestinians owned 75 per cent of the land.

"Now we own 3.5 per cent of the land on the area of Israel and we are living on 2 per cent of the land - and we are 20 per cent of the population.

"If you want to listen to some data, 23 per cent of the Israeli population live under the poverty line and 32 per cent of the children in Israel live under this line.

"But if you take the Arab population, 52 per cent of the Arab population is under the poverty line and 64 per cent of our children, the Arab children, live under the poverty line.

"Another example is the question of education," he says.

"The Israeli government invests every year 3,500 sheckels per Jewish student and 823 per Arab student.

"I think these numbers say everything. In the last few years, the Knesset enacted a lot of racist laws against the Arab population," says Barakeh.

"For example, the law of citizenship, by which an Arab Palestinian citizen of Israel cannot marry an Arab Palestinian from the West Bank.

"Or another example, the new Israeli law that prevents us from recognising the Nakba Day as part of our narrative and memory.

"If for 60 years Israel has fought against the material parts of our existence, now they fight against our consciousness.

"They are now trying to establish a new Arab-Israeli citizen of Israel, one that is without a narrative, without a national background, without any connection with the suffering of our people in the refugee camps and in the West Bank and Gaza and so on," he says.

The Nakba, which the Israeli state is attempting to erase from historical memory, was the ethnic cleansing in 1948 of the majority of the Palestinian inhabitants from the territory which became Israel, accompanied by massacres of Palestinians by the zionist forces and the theft of the indigenous population's land and houses.

"How we can give our children the memory and so on?" Barakeh asks.

"Through our parties, our associations, our struggle. If you were in Sakhnin on Land Day, around 70,000 people marched there and most of them were young people.

"Of course we need to take our schools and our education to the places that we want. But if the Israeli Ministry of Education prevents us from using the word of Nakba, we can and we have to establish another way. And we do it."

Ariadna asks about the difference in perceptions between Jewish and Arab young people.

Barakeh explains: "I think that the zionist movement brainwashes young people.

"The rule of the ultimate victim is the main thinking that they are trying to put in the brain of young Jewish people.

"Our people, because of this policy of racism, of discrimination, most of our young people are more involved in politics and so on.

"In some cases we have co-operation, but it's few Jewish people that co-operate with Arab people. For example, in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, in Bili'in also, with these demonstrations every Friday.

"But the majority of young Jewish people take their thoughts from the speech of the Israeli zionist system.

"They occupied our people, our land, they make a siege in Gaza, they take the land for settlement and at the same time they want to appear in the world as victims.

"I am afraid to say that I think that the moment of opening of the eyes will be after a big tragedy."

The discussion moves on to the subject of the Israeli state's prosecution of Barakeh, and he addresses some of the complexities.

"It would be very simple to say that it's a political trial, but that's not all there is to it.," Barakeh says.

"I can say that the list of charges against me includes four points. All of them are political activities, all of them.

"I was on two demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the war in Lebanon, one demonstration in Bili'in in the West Bank against the racist wall and the fourth demonstration was here in Nazareth when I demonstrated with the families of our victims [of an Israeli massacre of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000].

"In the four demonstrations, what is called the security forces, the police or army, attacked the demonstrators.

"And as a member of the parliament and as one of the people, of course all the time I was in the front. But I am sure that this trial is not against the person that is called Mohammed Barakeh, I think it is a message for our people.

"My name is in the title, of course, the State of Israel against Mohammed Barakeh, but they want to send the message to our people that if your leaders can be put on trial and we can do this with them - so be careful.

"A few days ago, the Israeli army arrested one of the leaders of the Fatah movement in Bethlehem, Abbas Zaki.

"I think that also, it is not against Abbas Zaki. They don't want this type of leader, who are down in the street with the struggle and the demonstrations.

"You can speak on the Knesset stage, speak with journalists, but not on the ground.

"I myself I am proud of that, of course, that I have maybe the biggest number of participations in demonstrations. I think that the people who are in leadership positions have to examine this leadership on the ground."

Barakeh predicts that the trial is likely to last for many months and he states emphatically that he will refuse any proposal by the Israeli state to make a deal "somewhere in the middle."

Instead, he will fight the charges point by point.

"And who is being violent? It's not the people on the demonstrations but the security forces. That's what I'm going to say.

"I am going to walk along this until the end and if I have to pay for that I will, but I'm not going to do a deal."

Is the Israeli state taking a political risk by putting him on trial?

"They don't really care if there is a risk. There are a million in Gaza under the siege and they don't really care about that.

"The International Parliamentary Union are taking the issue of this trial internationally and now it's being discussed in Bangkok at its conference.

"A representative of the EU was present at the first trial hearing. Whether they thought of the risk or not, whatever it is, they will regret it in the end."

Does this international involvement give a guarantee of the impartiality of the trial?

"No. The guarantee is that I am facing this provocation, and with our people. At the first trial hearing there were loads of people, the public, inside and outside the court, Arab leaders, my colleagues from the Jewish supporters of peace.

"We are fighting from the inside. We need of course international solidarity, and that can exercise some influence, but at the same time we have our campaign here in Israel as well, by Arabs and Jews, by public means and also legal means."

There was a last question which had to be asked - is there a prospect, in the short or medium term, for a just solution?

"I don't know if in the short or medium term, but I know for sure that the occupation will be removed.

"If we look at the historical experience of humanity, I know that other people suffered from worse occupations.

"And where is the great empire of England? Mafish [nothing].

"We saw the destiny of the British empire, so why should the destiny of the empire of Israel be any different? This is not emotional talk, but this is the terms of the struggle.

"An army can be defeated by another army, but the people cannot be defeated by the army - the people won't be defeated and they won't disappear."

Barakeh illustrates this with a striking example. "The nazis exterminated six million Jews and they were not a state, they were not one community. Their struggle came with some results that we know now, but you cannot demolish a whole people.

"Palestinians struggle in very hard conditions and we are know that there are interests for America in this area, in the Middle East, and they have special interests in Israel.

"But the Palestinians are standing and struggling. We say it like this - that the Palestinians are not better than any other people in the world, but there is no better people than the Palestinians."