(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-08 11:22

Affirmative action

The Israeli government acknowledges the gap between the Israeli Jews and Arabs and says it is taking affirmative action to boost the number of Arab civil servants to 10 percent by 2012, particularly in high-ranking posts.

"Israeli Arabs enjoy more freedom, more civil rights that any of their compatriots across the borders," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, said.

But some rights groups, including ACRI, say Israel has also been using the law to cement the state's Jewish character.

Such draft bills, approved by parliament in 2007, include banning Arabs from buying land controlled by the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental group that was founded before the state of Israel to buy and develop land in Palestine and later oversaw land distribution in the Jewish state.

The JNF also controls land owned by Palestinians before they fled or were driven from their homes when Israel was founded.

Another bill makes eligibility for national insurance benefits dependent on completing military service. Few Arabs serve in the army: unlike for Jews, service is not compulsory.

"The Palestinians inside Israel are being discriminated against in all spheres except for one: the right to vote," Mohammad Barakeh, a member of Israeli parliament, said.

Olmert's spokesman Regev said the bills did not reflect racist attitudes against Arabs, rather "legitimate differences of opinions."

Licence to kill?

About 1.5 million Arabs reside in Israel with 5.5 million Jews, but 3.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

US President George W. Bush is hoping for an agreement this year to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside Israel.

To Israelis, the government justifies holding talks about creating a Palestinian state by saying the alternative is a single state where Arabs would soon outnumber Jews.

A recent poll by Israel's parliamentary TV station showed 76 percent of Jewish Israelis give some degree of support to transferring Palestinians living inside Israel to a future state -- an option most Arab citizens strongly reject.

"The Jews are the ones who immigrated to our homeland and took our land. We did not immigrate to their land so we cannot leave," said Jamal Zahalka, an Arab lawmaker.

The outbreak of the latest Palestinian intifada marked a turning-point in the way Israel treats its Arab citizens, many say, especially after 13 unarmed Israeli Arabs were killed in October 2000 when police used live ammunition to disperse protests in support of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

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