Video and Edited Transcript
Haneen Al Zoubi
Transcript No. 432 (27 April 2015)
Zeina Azzam: We are so delighted and honored to have Haneen Al Zoubi with us today. A big welcome to you! Ahlan wa sahlan! And welcome also to our audiences here at the Palestine Center and online, through our livestream platform.
I’d like to thank Abed Awad and the Palestinian American Community Center of New Jersey and New York for organizing her lecture tour and including the Palestine Center.
As you all know, there are 1.2 million Palestinians living as citizens of Israel. They represent a full 20 percent of the population. They experience deep-seated racism and discrimination every day, on all levels of life in Israel. As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and a newly re-elected Member of the Knesset, Haneen Al Zoubi has been a tireless advocate for the civil and human rights of this marginalized minority. Her party – Balad, or hizb al-tajammu’ al-watani al-dimuqrati – is now part of the Unified List, which garnered 13 Knesset seats in the most recent Israeli election.
Haneen Al Zoubi has paid a high price for her activism. The Israeli right has targeted her for many years, trying to revoke her citizenship and to disqualify her from reelection. The Knesset Ethics Committee suspended her for six months based on her political views, and the Israeli High Court affirmed this suspension. The Israeli Election Committee refused to qualify Haneen Al Zoubi as a candidate for reelection in 2013 and again in 2015, but they lost this campaign to silence her. But she has now won elections in 2009, 2013, and 2015.
Haneen Al Zoubi is the first Palestinian woman elected to the Knesset on a Palestinian political party list. She was born and educated in Nazareth. She has a BA from the University of Haifa and an MA in Media Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We have asked her to talk to us for about thirty minutes, after which we will take questions from our live and online audiences.
Please help me welcome Haneen Al Zoubi.
Haneen Al Zoubi: Shukran, sabah el-kheir and good morning. I expected a very informal meeting with five, maybe six people – and I [now] have this very formal meeting, but it’s my pleasure.
I think it is very important as Palestinians, as indigenous people, that we continue to live in our homeland, which Israel didn’t succeed in expelling us from in 1948, although we [Palestinian citizens] are the forgotten side of the story, we are the forgotten side of our people, of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel has treated us as an “internal issue”. Although we don’t have full rights, she discriminates against us. I will talk in detail about this, but when we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, we don’t talk about those who continue to live in their homeland, their houses, their villages, their cities – it’s all about the occupation, crimes against humanity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, killing our people, expanding settlements, and violence in settlements, violence of the Israeli army against our people. But still, the Palestinian issue didn’t start in 1967 – the Palestinian issue started as a refugee issue in 1948.
We cannot talk about peace, talk about justice (which is the aim of peace) if we forget that it is a refugee issue starting in 1948. We are talking about a creation of a state at the expense of the Palestinian people. We cannot talk about justice or peace unless we talk about the reason for the occupation, the definition of the state and aim of Israel, and the way it treats Palestinians wherever they are. The defense of Israel is “I am a democracy” but Israel is bombing Gaza, killing civilians in Gaza, stealing land of the Palestinians in the West Bank, trying to control 60 percent of the sea in the West Bank, building a wall inside the West Bank (not on the Green Line) in order to confiscate more land. [Israel] is Judaizing Jerusalem, selling property of the refugees (although [Israel] signed Oslo saying [they are] committed to not steal the property of the refugees until there is a peace process and signed an agreement with PLO regarding the refugees). Israel started to sell the property in an intensive way in 2007. From 2007-2014, Israel has sold 800 properties from refugees with total silence from the Palestinians.
After all these actions, Israel will claim “we are a democracy, and we defend ourselves from Hamas, from terrorists.” But Israel can’t attack Hamas without killing 500 children in Gaza, 400 children in the West Bank, and they say “we are democracy defending itself”. The Palestinian in Ramallah, in Jenin cannot criticize this claim of democracy because he is not a citizen. A democracy is [when there is] equality between citizens and aimed toward its citizens – and Palestinians in the West Bank, Ramallah, Jenin, Gaza, are not citizens. But I am a citizen – the 1.2 million who stayed in the homeland are the test of whether Israel is a democracy or not. If Netanyahu or any Prime Minister can come to the U.S. and speak so proudly about how democratic Israel is and have everyone applaud him thirty-two times, I think it’s because no one knows that in Israel there are fifty racist laws. I’m talking about the Israeli legal system, not occupation, [not] Hamas. I’m not talking about Palestinians who are terrorists – I’m talking about the Israeli legal system. This is the test of democracy. So let’s for once talk about Israel itself. Let’s for once face the Israelis, face the ministers, face the MKs, face the Israeli media, face all those who claim that we are anti-Semitic whenever we criticize Israel. It is not about how Israel treats the Palestinians, but how Israel treats itself – its citizens. What about the political and legal system?
We didn’t, as Palestinians, ask Israel to give us citizenship; it was the UN which asked Israel to give us citizenship in order for us to accept Israel as a member of the UN in 1948-1949. We are treating our citizenship in a serious way. I am in the Knesset and every Israeli would say to you, “Haneen is an indication of Israeli democracy”. But it’s hard to talk about me as an indication of Israeli democracy after incitement and [my] disqualification [from the Knesset], so they may use more comfortable examples to show Israeli democracy. But as a citizen, let me explain the legal system that we face:
[Of the] fifty racist laws in Israel [there exist] apartheid laws which create two different systems toward two ethnicities/nationalities inside Israel: one for Jews, one for Palestinians. I will give you an example and I will also give you the name of the website to get this information. Israel has confiscated 86 percent of our land until now and there is an Israeli law which prevents me from living in 700 communities which are paved, of course, on my land. By law, [this means] I cannot live in over 60 percent of the land of Israel. It is a law that was not passed in 1948, or the 1950s or 60s when Israel felt weak and needed to control everything; this is a new law. This is the law of the Israeli law books, (because it has no constitution). It was passed in 2011! Of course the law doesn’t mention Palestinians; the law mentions that the [community’s] Acceptance Committee can reject anyone [from residing within the community] without the ability for me to appeal to the court. Before this law, I could appeal to the court. But now I can’t appeal and can be rejected – why? Because there is no social or cultural compatibility. Under social compatibility, we as Palestinians are rejected. You can find in Haaretz during the last month [a story] of an Arab family that was rejected. What is this if not apartheid? Can you imagine the U.S. having a law like this for African Americans; an Acceptance Committee law regarding social ethnic groups that make up 20 percent of society? Can you imagine in Europe if a law were passed against Jews or another group? Land is still the most conflicted issue between us and the state. Judaizing the land at the expense of the Palestinians, the slogan “the most amount of land with the least amount of Palestinians” – this is the summary of zionism. It is still the main relation between citizens and the state after almost seventy years: controlling the land. When we in the Knesset talk about the 30,000 Palestinians who Israel wants to expel now, today in 2015 – [we ask ourselves] why? In order to build five Jewish villages. The Negev – 12 million dunams – is half of Palestine. You can build for the Jews anywhere you want, but within these 12 million dunams, they want to evacuate [Palestinians] and gather them in a small area to control the land.
This is not even discrimination. Discrimination is to give “A” less than “B”. In Israel, to discriminate against us would mean to give us less than the Jews but no, [Israel] is taking from “A” and giving to “B” – [Israel is] stealing from us, everything. It is the treatment of not even the enemy – we are the obstacle of the Jewish state and their aim is to develop the Negev. What does that mean? We don’t exist. This is the real treatment, this is why we don’t accept the word “discrimination” – we don’t exist. [Israel] plans as if we are not there. Judaizing the Negev and using the word “develop” takes for granted that there are Palestinians. If they are there, [Israel] will throw them away – no problem. There is a special ministry for developing the Galilee and the Negev. Why? Because they are not satisfied with the demographic percentage of the Palestinians in the Galilee (50 percent), they need a majority everywhere in every region – not just overall. In every region. So Israel creates a ministry to “develop” – because if the Palestinians are above 50 percent, this means that the Galilee is underdeveloped and there must be efforts to have a Jewish majority. At least the ministries are honest! In the Knesset they say “we are a Jewish state, and you are invaders.” You can find it in the protocol of the Knesset when a minister answered to me, “you are invaders, and the new crusaders”, a formal answer from an Israeli minister in 2013, yet Israel talks about how it is a democracy. Can any prime minister in the world talk like this to his citizens? “Invaders”? And still talk about itself as a democracy? No one would treat him as a democracy or as a defender from terrorists. Israel is confiscating our land, and has developed 1,000 cities and villages since 1948. Zero for the Palestinians. We are now living above 30 percent and we cannot even use this 30 percent that we still own – we cannot have a license to build houses. Israel demolished a house two weeks ago after the election – we have strikes because of destroyed houses. Houses which we built.
Fifty-one Palestinians have been killed since 2000 – none were Hamas. I thought the problem was Hamas? From the fifty-one who were killed, just one Israeli police officer went to jail for twenty-four months. This is a violent system: it is legitimate to discriminate against us. In order to be a Jewish state, you cannot be a democracy. We are not just like the African Americans who struggle for democracy, we are also the indigenous people. We cannot struggle for civil rights within the existing definition of the state as a Jewish state, while African Americans can. They can struggle for civil rights within the definition of the American state, because America is a state for the citizens. In Israel, the state is for part of the citizenry – it is not for me. I am an obstacle. If they want to plan anything, they can move me – like a lego. It is not just confiscation of land, it is also confiscation of my history.
Leen (in audience) is a Palestinian. But Haneen cannot be a Palestinian. According to Israel, Leen can identify herself as Palestinian, but the minute Haneen defines herself as Palestinian, then I am disloyal. So the meaning of citizenship is to be disloyal to my own people and my history. It is not just confiscating land, but confiscating my history, my connection to my people, my identity. So the meaning of citizenship in Israel is somehow bargaining between my rights and ability to stay in my homeland and identity. The whole idea of citizenship is something awful and something disempowering and a way of colonizing my identity. [Israel is] giving me my citizenship on one condition: to lose myself, to have nothing to do with my people or my history, and logically I must thank [Israel] every day because they did not expel me. This is why in Israel there is a special group of loyalty laws. [Israel is] oppressing me and wants me to be loyal to it, even to admire it and to say “thank you for not expelling me in 1948.” Palestinians in the West Bank have had their lives destroyed and 90 percent of Gaza factories are destroyed. The education system in Jerusalem is destroyed. I remember reading in fourth grade, [translated from Arabic] “we build your schools and we pave your streets” so I’m primitive, and Israel came to develop my country and I must be so grateful.
But [Israel] didn’t teach me that [the] Jaffa, that [Israel] destroyed, was the most important seaport from Alexandria to Turkey. Jaffa used to export two million orange boxes to the entire world. And Um Kulthum had a theater there for festivals. In Jaffa there were seven sports clubs that [Israel] destroyed and there were seven daily newspapers printed in an Arab printing press. Now, in Israel we only have one daily newspaper that is not printed in an Arab printing press, but in a Jewish one, which closes for Jewish holidays. [Israel] is talking about how they developed me. Israel destroyed my civilization in the Nakba, [Israel] destroyed my society and expects the wealthy, elite and educated (and me) to have an inferior perception about [ourselves] as Palestinians. This has been an effect of occupation, [Israel] has treated us as invaders – [there is] a colonialist psychology toward us; destroying our national pride and national identity in a more oppressive way than Barghouti. Palestinians are living in West Bank and Gaza – why? Because they are confiscating the history – it’s not just confiscating land, but they are confiscating my homeland’s history – renaming the geography, renaming the bridges, streets, cities, trying to change the landscape in order for us to not recognize our homeland, our history. [Israel] has deleted everything.
Israel needs one thing: legitimacy from its victim. Israel needs to be recognized as a Jewish state in order to ignore everything I say. Of course, though, we are not allowed to study our history. We pay taxes, we are citizens – I pay taxes, and I must study zionist history. I must study Hayim Nahman Bialik but not Mahmoud Darwish. We must learn how primitive we were and internalize our inferiority. The education system has pulled every textbook which has the word “nakba” because this is the [Palestinian] “narrative” and Netanyahu’s ministry two to three years ago gave the direction to omit it from textbooks.
These insane laws – the Acceptance Committee Laws, omitting the word “nakba” – took place over the last six or seven years, not the beginning of Israel when it was weak and needed to be aggressive. Israel does not treat itself as a “normal state”. This very aggressive and colonialist attitude took place over the past six years – not the first six years. There is a law forbidding every individual or institution from commemorating the nakba. What does this mean? Individual commemoration – if I talk to my friends will I be arrested? [Israel’s] Independence Day is our catastrophe. Yet, the Ministry of Finance, by law, can freeze the budget of any institution which acknowledges the nakba. A Jewish professor at a university asked, “If we want to have an academic panel about the nakba – is this commemorating? Would our budget be frozen?”
So I want you to understand, Israel cannot easily claim to be a democracy. Unless Israel is a black hole and no one must talk about what’s going on there and claim full ignorance, Israel is a racist state. I’m not talking about the right-wing or Lieberman. Lieberman has not contributed to these racist laws at all. We are talking about the “left wing”, the Labor Party. These are the Labor Party and Likud’s laws – not the right wing, as if the problem is a few extremists. The problem is the system itself. The definition of the state itself! If there are fifty rabbis who published a letter saying “We should not rent houses to Arabs”, it is an outcome of a racist state. Can fifty Muslims or Christians in America dare to think to publish a letter not to rent houses to African Americans or Jews? If they did, what would the world say? But this is so easy and Israel continues to say “I am the only democracy and you must defend me because we give equal rights and we give [Arabs] representation in the parliament.” Yes, they do – because it’s an indication of [its] strength and not [its] democracy. [Israel] is giving us these positions because our scream makes no difference. [Israel] steals my land, doesn’t permit me to study my identity, express my identity, struggle for democracy, calls me a terrorist – and then says, “Okay, scream.” [This is] a racist democracy. [Israel] uses a racist majority to justify racism. Israel doesn’t understand anything from democracy except the tyranny of the majority. How is there even a majority? Ethnic cleansing. Democracy was forced by ethnic cleansing – the “majority rule” was reached by ethnic cleansing. During the forty-seven years of occupation in Jerusalem, Israel has withdrawn the identity of 176,000 Palestinians. Imagine these numbers. It is a continuous ethnic cleansing – not just a nakba, or the past that we are now trying to rebuild from. It is continuous: stealing land, land confiscation, oppression, Judaizing every single region, and Israeli intelligence still appoints teachers in the education systems.
Our message is to, first of all, hold Israel accountable. [Israel] cannot hold meetings all over the world where no one asks her [about these actions]. All these [American] senators should know these laws. Okay, you want to support Israel – but now you are supporting Israel in spite of [these laws]. We don’t want the world to love the Palestinians, we don’t need love. It is Israel who needs love in order to forget about her crimes. We need justice. We are asking Americans to not be a part of this racist policy. It is your taxes – it is American taxes – it is your regime. You cannot be neutral, so please be aware you are a part of this oppression. You are part of the oppression, and it is not Hamas. I am not Hamas.
I am a feminist, liberal woman. We want equality between men and women, not just Israelis and Palestinians or Jews and Arabs inside my homeland. Israel wants Arabs inside the Knesset – it wants zionists Arabs to be a part of the system. It doesn’t want the voice of the victim. Israel wants the “good Arabs”. They don’t represent us. In every society there are those who feel inferior and want to identify with the oppressors. Many say I don’t represent them either, of course! It would be a catastrophe if I represented [zionist Arabs]. So Israel wants good Arabs.
We must talk about public opinion – according to the Israeli Democratic Institution in 2012 (which makes a democracy index every year), fifty-five percent of Israelis don’t agree with full equality with Palestinians. I’m not even talking about the national struggle for independence, just equality. How can this society claim she wants peace when she doesn’t even want equality for her citizens? To shock you more, thirty percent of society agrees (www.idi.co.il) to put Palestinian citizens into reservations if there is a war between Israel and the Arab world in order for Palestinians to not collaborate. It is like the Japanese internment camps in World War II – thirty percent. It is legitimate to be racist, it is a part of the definition and political culture. Regarding the occupation and Gaza, it’s not just the murder and bombing Gaza of every two years and killing children – ninety-five percent of the water in Gaza is polluted. The settlements have grown during the last ten years three times since the negotiations in 2002. According to Israeli researchers, Israel expanded settlements during negotiations more than they expanded during the time of no negotiations. If you ask any Israeli “what’s your opinion about peace?” (if he answers honestly) he will say, “Palestinians are terrorists, they don’t want peace so we don’t need peace.” But this is the question: when peace is needed, will you pay the price of your occupation? They don’t pay.
Palestinian citizens don’t exist, we are obstacles. In the history curriculum, we don’t exist. When we want to live in ‘this’ area or ‘that’ area, we don’t exist. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli culture does not view Palestinians as “behind the wall”, they are “behind the ocean.” Israel doesn’t pay the price, they are economic friends with the U.S. When the world says “we will punish you” the minister [Netanyahu] comes to us and says, “Be calm, no one will punish you, we have a very good relation with everyone, and an even better relation with the U.S.” and we say, “You are right, we are wrong.” Israel does not pay the price. It will not reconsider its policies. We cannot wait for the salvation inside Israel, and it is not related to internal dynamics. So when people ask about the left wing, we say “fifty-five percent [of the general population] doesn’t agree with equality, it is not about the left wing!” Mertez supported the war in Gaza for the first two weeks – the extremist left party in the Knesset.
At Camp David in 1998, since there was “no partner for peace” the whole [Israeli] society has shifted its strategy toward a one-sided solution: since no Palestinian will accept our dictations and the maximum we give is less than the minimum Palestinians will accept, [Israel] will solve it by ourselves. And they did. They did it by building the wall and the siege of Gaza we forget about. Israel says there is no occupation – when they control the sea, borders, travel, taxes, electricity, destroy schools, bomb everything, destroy society, put two million people in jail. Yet they say, “Israel is not occupying. There is no need to solve the struggle, just a need to maintain and manage it.” And they are managing it very well. Israel is able to strengthen its economy and everything is okay – they don’t pay the price. If anyone criticizes Israel, then [they are labeled as] anti-Semitic and Israel will mention the Holocaust. But Israel cannot mention it as it does not represent the victims of the Holocaust. The whole message of the Holocaust is “Don’t kill and don’t be racist.” Well, [Israel] kills and is racist. We are the victims! We, the Palestinians, can represent the victims of the Holocaust – not Israel. It is humiliating for the victims of the Holocaust every time [Israel] mentions them while being racist and killing Palestinians. We are respecting the Holocaust as a tragedy – Israel is using [the Holocaust] to justify their crimes against humanity – their war crimes and oppression of Palestinians.
We are representing a vision of justice: to live together in equality. We don’t want to throw the Jews or Israelis into the sea – we don’t. But there is no possibility [of equality] within a racist [state]. We demand the right to return. We demand total withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We demand East Jerusalem, and we demand a state for all of its citizens. We cannot live in peace and justice with a zionist and a Jewish state – it is a racist state. I don’t care if it’s one-state or two-states. I find that to be an academic argument – the problem now is the [ongoing] suffering and the violence.
Thank you.
Haneen Al Zoubi is a Palestinian lawmaker and Member of the Israeli Knesset. She has faced humiliating treatment by Israeli lawmakers, who regularly attack her personally and politically. The Israeli right has targeted MK Al Zoubi for many years, trying to revoke her citizenship and to disqualify her from reelection. The Knesset Ethics Committee suspended her for six months based on her political views and the Israeli High Court affirmed the suspension. Shortly thereafter, the Israeli Election Committee refused to qualify her as a candidate but upon review by an Israeli court, MK Al Zoubi was permitted to run for
reelection. The Israeli Election Committee attempted to prevent MK Al Zoubi from running in the 2013 election as well. Despite this massive campaign to silence MK Al Zoubi, she easily won re-election this past March. Her Balad party is now part of the Joint List, a coalition of four Arab parties that garnered thirteen Knesset seats in the March 2015 election.
reelection. The Israeli Election Committee attempted to prevent MK Al Zoubi from running in the 2013 election as well. Despite this massive campaign to silence MK Al Zoubi, she easily won re-election this past March. Her Balad party is now part of the Joint List, a coalition of four Arab parties that garnered thirteen Knesset seats in the March 2015 election.
