Jonathan Cook
Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews. If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence. Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools. Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens – whom Israelis dismissively calls "Israeli Arabs" – has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice. Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever providing them with. There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state. Palestinian educational leaders – "Israeli Aabs" – have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach. And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in qualifying tests make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel. There are many other problems in education. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition. Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids. Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school. The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through Israel's conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality. None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel. This is an extract from my latest article Israel is an apartheid state – and its weird marriage laws show us how. Find a link to the full article in the reply post ⬇️