Co-existence in the Children’s Ward

Debra Kamin September 11, 2014,

http://www.timesofisrael.com/co-existence-in-the-childrens-ward/

 

At Rambam Hospital in Haifa, kids from Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are studying together in between treatments

Hodaya is 8 years old and her favorite color is pink. She is small for her age, and over her tiny, pale face she wears a green paper surgical mask.

Hodaya would have loved to join the millions of Israeli students who went back to school on September 1, but she couldn’t. That’s because Hodaya is suffering from an aggressive form of bone cancer, and like dozens of other children at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital, she can’t leave the building.

Instead, Hodaya goes to school for a few hours a day inside of the hospital building. And while she doesn’t have the shiny new backpack, the gleaming locker or the pages upon pages of homework that other students in Israel have, she has something that none of them can even dream of: friends from Gaza and the West Bank, who are hospitalized alongside her and learning in the same classroom.

At Rambam, which is the largest medical center in the country’s north and one of Israel’s most renowned, pediatric education follows the same model as it does in hospitals across the country: the Education Ministry oversees curriculum and coursework, and sets mandates for the number of hours each day that hospitalized children must attend class.

But when you have 5-year-olds on dialysis and 11-year-olds undergoing chemotherapy, nothing, not even math homework, is normal. And at Rambam, where on average half of the beds in the pediatric wing are filled by children from Gaza and the West Bank, the banalities of reading, writing and arithmetic become even more surreal.

 

Dima Chamra, an Arab art therapist at Rambam, greets

17-year-old Sana Charoob, a patient from Jenin (left),

while Amtaz Manfor, a Druze teacher at Rambam, stands

behind 8-year-old patient Simdosh Chansan Jamal, also

from Jenin (right). (photo credit: Ofer Golan)

“We try to make them feel as normal as possible, even though it’s not a normal thing to be hospitalized,” says Ilana Levy, who manages all of the hospital education centers in Haifa, including that of Rambam. “We don’t care where you are from. We have Jews here, Christians, Arabs. We have children from Gaza. During the war, while there was fighting every day, we had children from Gaza sitting next to religious Jews in class. It doesn’t matter. We love all the children here and want to keep their lives as normal as possible.”

Classes at Israel’s hospitals ramped up on the first day of September, just as they did at schools around the country. Classrooms, which are divided by age group, all have an Arab-speaking teacher and a Hebrew-speaking teacher, and several have special assistants like art therapists or volunteers doing their national service. Classes generally run from 8:45 a.m. until 2 p.m., as they do in schoolhouses throughout Israel, but students come and go depending on their treatment schedules and how they are feeling each day.

“They come and they learn, and we really get attached to them,” says Lila Yahiach, one of the teachers in the oncology unit. Yahiach is Muslim, and she shares her classroom with Yehudit Levy, a religious Jew, as well as a Jewish national service volunteer named Hodaya Toledanu (no relation to the patient). Yahiach speaks in Arabic to the Arabic-speaking students, Levy speaks in Hebrew to the Jewish students — but both insist they feel the same connection, and the same responsibility, for everyone in their classroom.

Shilat Levy, a five-year-old patient at Rambam, is

Jewish and from Haifa. (photo credit: Ofer Golan)

Asked if she believes the students inside of Rambam can sometimes learn more about the outside world than their peers in Jewish-only or Muslim-only schools in the region, Yahiach immediately says yes. “Some of the students come here, and they speak only Arabic, but, it’s like anywhere – they make friends,” she says. “So they also want to learn Hebrew. And they start to, so they can talk with each other. They are kids. Of course they want to talk to each other.”

The ratio of Jewish to Muslim students is always in flux, although hospital officials say it generally sits at an even split. This week, as the school year opens, there are four students from Gaza, all of them hospitalized full-time. Some of them have been at the hospital for years, living there with their families while they undergo intensive treatment. There are 12 students from the Palestinian Authority, including five from Jenin. In the past the hospital also housed a number of Syrian children who were brought across the border for treatment. (The Gaza and PA kids’ treatments are paid for by the Palestinian Authority and they come to the hospital as medical tourists. The education costs are covered by the hospital and the Education Ministry, which stipulates that all kids in Israeli hospitals get schooling regardless of where they live.)

One of those students from the West Bank, Muhammad, is 12 years old. He shares a classroom with Hodaya in the surgery department, and while Hodaya practices writing the Hebrew alphabet with her Hebrew-speaking teacher, he sits alongside his instructor, a Druze teacher named Amtaz Manfor, and together they practice reading and writing English.

“English is the language of the world,” Muhammad, who also wears a mask to protect himself from contamination in the classroom, says. “So I like learning it. And my teacher likes speaking it.”

Manfor, who wears the traditional white veil of Druze women, hugs Muhammad and laughs. “I do like English,” she says. “And he is a good student.”
Also in the classroom are two girls from Gaza, who are gluing multi-colored sequins onto pieces of white paper with Dima Chamra, a Christian Arab who is a trained art therapist.

“It’s stressful here,” she says in English before giving a direction to the girls in Arabic. “The art is really helpful for them. It gives them an outlet. Some of them are here for a very long time.”

Dr. Rafael Beyar, Rambam’s director general, says that inside of a hospital, there is no place for politics.

 “This is really a way for us to show that coexistence can happen,” he says of the classrooms in the pediatric wing. “We have Jewish and Muslim kids, Arab kids, kids from Gaza, kids with cancer, kids with kidney diseases, kids that stay here for a very long time. The hospital becomes their home. And whn you live together and you also learn together.”

Rambam has recently undergone a series of massive renovations and reconstructions, including the unveiling of a cutting-edge hybrid parking garage/underground hospital facility that is fully fortified. The shimmering Ruth Rappaport Children’s Hospital, a cheerful, light-filled new pediatric building, had its soft opening this summer. The children interviewed for this story are still being housed in the old building, but Beyar says that once all the pediatric cases have been moved to the new unit, classes will be larger and offer more chances for children from across the region to learn alongside each other and even become friends.

“A life is a life,” Beyar says. “It doesn’t matter where the patient comes from or what his religion or opinions are. We are care for patients, we educate the children who live here at the hospital, and we stay out of political arguments.”

Israeli Arabs more satisfied with life in Israel

A survey conducted by Professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University shows that the acceptance of Israel by Israeli Arabs increased markedly between 2012 and 2013.

The research shows that between 2012 and 2013 there was an increase in the percentage of Israeli Arabs recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority. Similarly, the percentage of Arabs who define themselves as “Israeli Arabs” without a Palestinian identity has increased.

Among the specific results reported were that :-

a) the percentage of Israeli Arabs who accepted Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state rose to 52.8% from 47.4% the year before. 

b) there was a more pronounced rise in the percentage of Israeli Arabs who believe that Israel can exist as a Jewish majority state to 43.1% up  from 29.6% a year earlier. 

c) the number of Israeli-Arabs who accept their identity as such without identifying as Palestinians increased from 32.5% in 2012 to 42.5% in 2013. 

d) in 2013, 63.5% of Israeli Arabs consider Israel to be a good place to live up from 58.5% in 2012.

The poll measuring attitudes in Jewish-Arab relations was conducted by Smooha, who won the Israel Prize for sociology in 2008, among 700 Jews and 700 Arabs, Druze and Bedouin.

Let’s Get the Facts Right on Refugees.

(With thanks to Charles Abelsohn who did the research)

Many people blindly following a predetermined agenda argue “that there is no evidence of widespread calls from neighbouring Arab states for the people to flee – if anything, there were calls to stay”. By quoting directly from Arab and objective sources at the time before revisionists attempted to change history. The calls to stay were – by the Jews!!!

"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. The most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit. It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."                 The London weekly Economist, October 2, 1948

"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."     Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949

"The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city...By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa." Time, May 3, 1948, p. 25

The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.    Falastin (Jordanian newspaper), February 19, 1949

We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.         Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, quoted in Sir Am Nakbah ("The Secret Behind the Disaster") by Nimr el Hawari, Nazareth, 1952

"The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."               from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa, September 6, 1954

"The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war."    General Glubb Pasha, in the London Daily Mail on August 12, 1948

"The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated  description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews"  Yunes Ahmed Assad, refugee from the town of Deir Yassin, in Al Urdun, April 9, 1953

"The Arabs of Haifa fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel."  Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, according to Rev. Karl Baehr, Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949; and, yes, no less than the Times of London , reporting events of 22.4.48  "...the Jewish hagana asked (using loudspeakers) Arabs to remain at their homes but the most of the Arab population followed their leaders who asked them to leave the country."

So the evidence is, that the Jews asked the Arabs to stay and the Arabs forced other Arabs to leave. This is the evidence not of historians but of Arabs themselves and journalists on the spot is that there was no ethnic cleansing and no wanton destruction but simply abandonment of property, no different from any other war.

Actually, one has to admit that there was some wanton destruction of property and some ethnic cleansing. The illegal Jordanian occupiers of Jerusalem destroyed 57 of the 58 synagogues in Jerusalem`s Old City and expelled its 20,000 plus inhabitants.

There is a bona fide dispute about the number of Arabs who left Israel in 1948. The UN figure based on Arab census figures is about 539,000. Many who left were part of the huge illegal immigrants doing as immigrants do today: leaving poverty struck Arab countries and following the prosperity. It seems that by the 1930s the standard of living of Palestinian Arabs was approximately twice that of Arabs in surrounding countries, whereas in Ottoman Turkish times it was lower than in surrounding countries. The number of 750,000 Arab refugees is often referred to yet there were only about 696,000 Arabs within the Armistice lines prior to the commencement of fighting! The UN figure is thus definitely on the high side but is still less than the 850,000 Jews expelled by Arab countries whose confiscated properties in today’s currency amount to $100 billion dollars. There was a population exchange similar to the 1948 Indian – Pakistan population exchange. 

Coexistence in an Ice-Cream Cone

A Jewish Israeli and a Muslim Arab Israeli open an ice cream parlor together in the Western Galilee
(By Sarah Carnvek)

Bouza Ice Cream

Tourists to the Western Galilee are usually drawn to the twin villages of Jewish Ma’alot and Arab Tarshiha for the beautiful views and an example of peaceful coexistence. But lately, people have been stopping by Ma’alot Tarshiha for the ice cream.
In an old Arab house overlooking the Tarshiha shuk (market), the double town's first ice cream parlor opened its doors in July 2012. It didn't take long before Jewish, Christian and Muslim residents from the surrounding area made a pilgrimage to the site.
"Our ice cream is made in the Italian style but influenced by the whole Galilee region. We're not just a novelty of being an Arab-Jewish coexistence ice cream store," says Adam Ziv, co-owner of the new parlor. "We make ice cream that people like."
Ziv, a Kibbutz Sasa resident, opened the spacious store with Alaa Sawitat, a Tarshiha native and owner of a popular local bistro. They called it Bouza – “ice cream” in Arabic.

Though most people would associate a chic ice cream parlor with bustling Tel Aviv, the 27-year-old Ziv says he purposely chose the periphery for his first business venture.
"The feeling in Tel Aviv is that life is normal because people get up in the morning and eat ice cream and go hear a concert − so why not do the same things in the periphery? And besides, I like living in the mountains,” he told Haaretz.

Secrets of the trade

Ziv learned the secrets of how to make ice cream and gelato during his travels around the Canary Islands, Italy, Cape Verde Islands and the United Kingdom. He helped fund his trip by working along the way at a small gelato parlor in Pisa, an ice cream store in the Canaries and a family gelato business in Tuscany.
He returned to Kibbutz Sasa in the spring of 2011 and announced that he wanted to open a place of his own. He turned to Tarshiha native Sawitat for ideas of where to set up a store. Quickly, the two became business partners and opened Bouza together.
While Ziv likes to explore new flavors, the bestsellers at Bouza are the nut varieties.

"Anything with nuts – hazelnuts, pine nuts, pistachio – these are our big sellers," says Ziv, who is in charge of making the cold dessert. "We’re trying some Middle Eastern mixes like pomegranate and lemongrass or chocolate and spearmint. We're still working on a kanafeh [sweet Middle Eastern cheese pastry] flavored ice cream but haven't found the right recipe yet. I don't want to be too snooty about the flavors. Our motto is 'simply ice cream' – and that's what we do. We make great ice cream for our general clientele."

Ice cream all year round

In Israel, where the weather is great nearly all year round, eating ice cream is a 365-day pastime. The average Israeli eats about 10 liters of ice cream per year, compared to 6.2 liters per capita in Italy, home of gelato.

Upmarket ice cream parlors can be found all over the country. So, with the Christian-Muslim town of Tarshiha now being dubbed an up-and-coming destination, Bouza's location seems a prime fit. Ziv says Israelis also like the idea of Jewish and Muslim co-owners.
"Israelis like to tell a story about a place where they ate. Just like they talk about the best hummus joint or the best place to eat kanafeh, that's how they talk about Bouza. They say, 'We found this place in Tarshiha market.' It's all part of an outing to the Galilee region," says Ziv.

Clientele at Bouza is a mix of tourists and people from neighboring villages, cities and ibbutzim. In the afternoons, the place is packed with schoolchildren as Bouza sells its creamy treats for just NIS 5 ($1.25) for anyone in school uniform. The ice cream is sold by portion size and not by scoop -- NIS 9, NIS 13 and NIS 17.

Asked what he hopes his customers will think about after eating his ice cream, Ziv says: "I want them to remember the way back." 

The Apartheid Bus Blitz

by David Ha'Ivri
The new trending topic on the anti-Israel network is “Apartheid Buses.” According the narrative, Israel has now launched Arab-only bus lines as a new means of oppressing the local Arab population.

In fact, however, the truth behind this story is a special service that this Israeli bus company has begun to provide for Palestinian Arab workers from the security checkpoint they pass though to the work areas they want to reach in central Israel.

To draw this in a negative light, propagandists have spiced up the story by reporting that the new service was launched after Jewish Israelis complained about the workers traveling on their regular buses. As usual, the propagandists do not allow small details - like the facts - to get in the way of the twisted picture they wish to project about Israel.

Tens of thousands of non-Israeli Palestinian Arabs are permitted to work in Israel every day. Those who receive these work permits consider themselves lucky, because the economy in the Palestinian Authority areas is so bad that work places there are hard to find and pay very poorly. Those holding work permits are allowed to enter only at designated security crossings. This is a rule determined by the government security agencies, and has nothing to do with the preferences of the Jewish commuters.

After this blitz grew wings and became the center of media attention, Israel journalist Chaim Levenson of Haaretz wrote on his Facebook page that he was going to meet with the Arab workers on the new bus line at 4:30 AM leaving the Eyal crossing. Many workers are headed for early starts at building jobs, where they need to be on site by 6 or so. Obviously, these buses have been provided as a special service, at the time and place that suit the needs of the worker population from that area. Does someone suggest that they wait for the first bus leaving Ariel at 5:30am, and be late for work?

Arab-only bus lines owned by Arabs and travelling throughout Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are nothing new. There are Arab-owned lines running between Shechem (Nablus), Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hevron. You will never see them stop for a Jew waiting at a bus stop on the way. There is an Arab-only bus station in the American Colony in Jerusalem. Don't expect to see Jewish people walking around there or getting on that bus. Why, you might ask? It’s because the Jews feel threatened there, and, correctly, fear for their safety.

On the other hand, Israeli-owned public transportation in all of these places is used by Jews and non-Jews alike. The same bus company, Afikim, which is being accused of running special bus lines - actually tailored to the needs of Palestinian Arab workers - as also launched special bus lines that suit the needs of the students at the university in Ariel. 80% of the university's 14,000 students are commuting from Israel's more central areas, and need more buses coming in during the morning hours, and more leaving at the end of the day. The university’s Arab students enjoy those buses just as Jewish students do.

The rumor that Jewish residents were involved in the new bus arrangement was thrown in by some propagandist to make the story more sensational. It is an obnoxious distortion of the facts. The Jewish commuters have nothing to do with security regulations.

In fact, the new buses are set to save the Palestinian Arab commuters a lot of money, as their previous alternative was to pay for expensive private taxis to their workplace destinations.

This is racism?

The Arabs in Israel

By MORDECHAI KEDAR - 02/28/2013

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=304871  

There is almost no Arab community that has lived in its homeland for dozens of years in a truly democratic state.

Israeli-Arab man casts his vote [file photo]
Photo: Ammar Awad / Reuters

The topic of the Arab sector in Israel is politically charged and represents contradicting narratives – one Jewish, the other Arab. Just as there are differences of opinion within the Jewish sector, there are variances in the Arab sector, and attitudes toward the Jewish sector, the state and its institutions can often even represent polar opposites.

To start with, there is no such thing in Israel as one “Arab sector”; rather, there are several Middle Eastern populations, some of which are not Arab, and they differ from one another in religion, culture, ethnic origin and histori- cal background.

WITHIN THE Arab sector here, there are a number of ethnic groups that differ from each other in language, history and culture: Arabs, Africans, Armenians, Circassians and Bosnians. These groups usually do not mingle, and live in separate villages or in separate neighborhoods where a particular family predominates.

a) the Circassians in Israel are the descendants of people who came from the Caucasus to serve as officers in the Ottoman army. Despite their being Muslim, the young people do not usually marry Arabs.

b) The Africans are mainly from Sudan. Some of them live as a large group in Jisr e-Zarka and some live in family groups within Beduin settlements in the South. They are called “Abid,” from the Arabic word for “slaves.”

c) The Bosnians live in family groups in Arab villages.

d) The Armenians came mainly to escape the persecution that they suffered in Turkey in the days of World War I, which culminated in the Armenian genocide of 1915.

IN GENERAL, the Arab sector is divided culturally into three main groups: urban, rural, Beduin. Each group has its own cultural characteristics: lifestyle, status of a given clan, education, occupation, level of income, number of children, and matters connected to women – for example, polygamy, age of marriage, matchmaking or dating customs, and dress.

The residents of cities – and to a great extent also the villagers – see the Beduin as primitive, while the Beduin see themselves as the only genuine Arabs; in their opinion, the villagers and city folk have lost their Arab character. The Arabic language expresses this matter well: The meaning of the word “ Arabi ” is “Beduin,” and some of the Beduin tribes are called “Arab” – for example, Arab al- Heib and Arab al-Shibli in the North.

The Beduin of the Negev classify themselves according to the color of their skin, into hamar (red) and sud (black). Beduin would never marry their daughters to a man darker than she is, because they do not want their grand- children to be dark-skinned. Racist? Perhaps.

Another division that exists in the Negev is between tribes that have a Beduin origin, and tribes whose livelihood is agriculture (fellahin), who have low status. A large tribe has a higher standing than a small tribe.

THE ARAB sector in Israel is divided into

- Muslims, subdivided into Sufis, Salafi

- Christians, subdivided into – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant

- Druse, the religion of the Druse is different from Islam, and Muslims consider the Druse heretics. Because of this, the Druse are supposed to keep their religion secret.

- Alawites. the Alawites in Israel live in the village of Ghajar, in the foothills of Mount Hermon, and some live over the border in Lebanon. They are also considered heretics in Islam, and their religion is a blend (syncretism) of Shi’ite Islam, Eastern Christianity and ancient religions that existed in the Middle East thousands of years ago.
     

The meaning of the word “Ghajar” in Arabic is “Gypsy,” meaning foreign nomads with a different religion. According to Islam, they not have the right to rule, being a minority, but also right to live, being idol worshipers.

SOME PARTS of the Arab sector are communities that have lived in the land now called the State of Israel for hundreds of years, but a significant part is the offspring of immigrants who migrated here mainly in the first half of the 20th century to work in the Jewish farming communities.

Many migrated from Egypt even earlier, to escape being impressed into forced labor as the Suez Canal was being dug. This is how the al-Masri, Masarwa and Fiumi families, as well as many others, came here, with names testifying to their Egyptian source. Other families have Jordanian names (Zarkawi and Karaki, for example), Syrian ones (al-Hourani, Halabi), Lebanese (Surani, Sidawi, Tra- bulsi) and Iraqi (al-Iraqi).

The Arabic dialect that most of the Beduin in the Negev speak is a Saudi-Jordanian dialect, and because of their familial ties to tribes living in Jordan, when the Beduin become involved in matters of blood-vengeance, they escape to family members in Jordan.

The connection between Arab families in Israel and groups in neighboring countries should not be surprising, because until 1948 the borders of Israel were not hermeti- cally sealed, and many Arabs of “Sham” (Greater Syria) wandered almost totally unimpeded, following their flocks and the expanding employment opportunities.

THE DIVISION between traditional and modern outlooks exists in each group, meaning that in each group there is a subdivision: those who are more connected to the tradition of the group and those who are less connected. Among the young, one sees more openness and less adherence to group tradition, and it can be assumed that the youth of the next generation will generally adhere even less to the group’s traditions. This is obvious among the Beduin groups, because among the young there are more than a few who challenge the Beduin’s socially accepted ways.

Education also plays an important role in the changing attitude toward tradition, because Arab academics are usually less linked to social tradition and the framework of the clan, and live more within the framework of nuclear families (father, mother and children). They also tend to move to more open areas, such as mixed cities like Acre, Ramle and Lod, and even to Jewish cities such as Beersheba, Karmiel and Upper Nazareth, where they adopt a modern lifestyle.

The shift to the city is also connected to a change in the source of livelihood. There are more in the independent professions and fewer in agriculture – a change due partly to the confiscation of the lands of absentees after the War of Independence.

BEYOND THE religious dividing line that differentiates Jews and non-Jews, another basic division exists between the country’s Jewish and Arab sectors in their general approach to the state.

For most of the groups within the Jewish sector, the State of Israel fulfills two roles. One is the political and governmental embodiment of the Jews’ aspirations to return to themselves and to regain the independence and sovereignty over the land of their fathers that was stolen from them after the Second Temple’s destruction.

The symbols of the state are Jewish: the national anthem, which includes the words “the Jewish soul yearns”; the flag, which represents the prayer shawl; the Star of David; and the seven-branched menorah. Hebrew is the official language of the state, and on Jewish holidays, the governmental institutions are closed.

The second role of the state in the eyes of most Jews is functional: to provide its citizens with security, employ- ment, livelihood, health, education, roads, bridges and social services.

For the Arab sector, the first role does not exist. The State of Israel is not the embodiment of their diplomatic and political dreams. The national anthem is not their hymn, the symbols of the state are not their symbols, and our Independence Day is their Nakba (disaster). The second role as well, the functional, is only partly fulfilled in matters of education, planning, roads and infrastructure. One may argue about the causes and reasons, but the facts are clear: How many Arab members are there on government companies’ boards of directors? How may Arab judges are there in the High Court? What is the proportion of Arabs in the academic staff of universities? That said, one cannot ignore the phenomenon of reverse discrimination, either. Laws of planning and building that are observed almost fully within the Jewish sector are very loosely observed within the Arab sector, especially in the Beduin sector in the Negev. How many thousands of buildings have gone up in the Negev without building permits, on land that does not belong to Beduin? How is it that there are no sidewalks in Umm el-Fahm, and the distance between the buildings is about the width of the cars? Another example of reverse discrimination exists in the area of marriage. If a Jew dares to marry a woman before he has completed the process of divorce from his present wife, he will find himself behind bars. But if an Arab mar- ries a second, third or fourth wife, the state pays a monthly children’s allowance for each wife separately and without asking too many questions.

Another case of discrimination in favor of Arabs exists in the area of housing. About 90 percent of the Jewish sector lives in apartments, and about 10% in private houses. In the Arab sector the picture is the reverse.

But the characteristic that most unites the country’s Arab sector is the environment in which they live. All the Arabs in the world live in one of two situations: in dicta- torships in their homeland, or in dictatorships in the diaspora. There is almost no Arab community that has lived in its homeland for dozens of years in a truly democratic state. The Arab citizens of Israel are the only Arab group that lives on its land (especially if you ignore the lands from which they originated) in a democratic regime that honors human rights and political freedoms. This is the reason Arabs outside Israel envy Israel’s Arab citizens and call them “ Arab al-Zibda ” – “butter Arabs.”