Arab citizens excluded from Independence Day torch-lighting

Mya Guarnieri Jaradat By Mya Guarnieri Jaradat March 29, 2012 | Edit

The Knesset committee in charge of organizing the torch-lighting ceremony for Independence Day has come up with this year’s list of participants–and it doesn’t include any Arabs. While Knesset members criticized the exclusion of minorities, the move reflects reality of life in Israel.

According to Ynet, a Knesset committee’s exclusion of Palestinian citizens of the state from the torch-lighting ceremony that takes place on Jerusalem’s Har Herzl and marks Israel’s independence drew sharp criticism from a number of Knesset members.

Reuven Rivlin, Speaker of the Knesset and a member of the Likud party, remarked:

In Israel, there are groups that tied their fates and their lives to Israeli society and they joined fully in the Zionist work and in the defense of the existence of Israel. It can’t be that in the central national ceremony in which we’re celebrating our independence we’re not giving this any expression. It’s not just a symbolic thing, but a reality which we can’t deny.

He also appealed to the committee to change its decision and to include representatives of the country’s minority populations.

MK Yitzhak Herzog (Labor) called the exclusion of Arabs from the ceremony a “failure of the government.”

In previous years, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been included in the ceremony.

This year, in a touch of unintentional irony, perhaps, the ceremony is called “Water is the source of life.” In the occupied Golan Heights, Arab residents receive far less water than their Jewish neighbors, as is the case in the West Bank, where settlers receive a disproportionate amount of water compared with Palestinians.

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First, there’s the question of whether or not Palestinian citizens of the state want to be represented in a ceremony that marks Israel’s independence – an event that lead to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and turned those who remained here into second class citizens. If I was a Palestinian citizen of the state, I don’t think I would want to participate in the torch-lighting. I would also find the inclusion of Arabs to be dishonest, a way of whitewashing the reality of life here as a minority.

The choice to exclude Arabs from the ceremony – and the discussion surrounding this decision – brings up some other issues.

First, imagine what this country would be like if MKs got so upset about all of the inequalities Palestinian citizens of the state experience. Imagine if they appealed to the prime minister about, say, the gulf between Arab and Jewish schools or the Prawer Plan, which will see tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens forced from their villages to make way for Jewish development or the occupation.

No, it’s the torch-lighting that really gets those MKs going.

The MKs concern is less about the issue of equality and more about public relations—their handwringing reeks of “how will it look if we don’t include a few token Arabs?”

To borrow from Rivlin’s words, the exclusion of Palestinian citizens of the state points to the “reality which we can’t deny” – that Israel is racist and discriminatory and is increasingly comfortable being openly so. That independence and freedom here means independence and freedom for Jews.

Mya Guarnieri Jaradat

Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a writer and independent journalist based in South Florida after almost a decade in Israel/Palestine. Her book, The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel's New Others (Pluto Press) was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize. Her reportage and commentary has been published in The Nation, The NY Times, Haaretz, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian and many other outlets. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Slate, Guernica, the Jewish Quarterly, Narrative, and The Kenyon Review. She is currently working on a memoir.