Israel Seeks To Ban Arab Tours

A new Israeli law in the name of national security.

The Israeli Right is having a field day year. In the Israeli elections of early last year, the right-wing Likud took hold of the government and the far-right, neo-fascist, Russian immigrant party led by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel Is Our Home, took the third largest share of the vote.

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Lieberman ran on an explicitly racist platform: attacking Israel's 1.3million Palestinian citizens as fifth column, an "internal" enemy, that needed to be brought to heal further through a series of loyalty oaths.

Lieberman's party proposes numerous pieces of legislation. The first on their list is making all citizens of the state (though the law is only aimed for Arabs) to sign a loyalty oath to Jewish supremacy or face lose of citizenship. Lieberman, who immigrated to Israel in his 20s, wants a Zionist state which is not only content to dominate the native Palestinians but sees to it that a Jewish immigrant is able to make native Arabs sign a loyalty oath pledging their subjugation to a new arriver.

Second on the list is banning, with jail sentence as punishment, any mention to the Nakba, the Palestinian term to describe the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias and terrorist organizations in order to establish a Jewish majority on Arab land. Israelis mark this as their "Independence". The Palestinians are now being told that they cannot even discuss their unassailable dispossession and history.

Lieberman's party has had to compromise on these legislative measures, as they currently do not have the votes to pass them in original form. But they have made it clear that such compromises are only a preliminary step toward full enactment. And the trend in Israeli politics is on their side.

So what are these compromises? Instead of a loyalty oath for existing citizens, the Israeli cabinet recently endorsed a law which will ask any Arabs, and only Arabs, who marry an Israeli Arab citizen and applies for citizenship to sign a loyalty pledge to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state - in that order. The democratic last bit is a farce. The law's explicitly racist demand that only Arabs would have to sign such a fascist pledge has lead the Israeli government to sign modify it and Jews who marry Israeli Jews will not have to sign it as well. But this is, again, just the first step toward making all existing Arab citizens to sign a loyalty oath or lose citizenship. Loyalty, oath, Jewish supremacy, and citizenship - it's all there in this initial bill. Lieberman and his folk are bidding time.

And instead of currently outright banning any mention of the Palestinian narrative, which is, of course, a negation of free speech the current compromise is banning any institution which receives state funding from mentioning the Nakba. Even schools. But the intention behind the law - banning Palestinian history - is present and will eventually be crafted into law. If one could call it law.

And this is a long-standing Israeli effort to ban the Palestinian narrative. And now it is descending even to tourism tours. Israel likes it tourism tours to be propaganda tours: omitting any mention of the occupation, the dispossession of Palestinians and any Palestine and instead paint a Zionist myth of a nice Jewish state "making the desert bloom". So we can't have East Jerusalem Palestinians guiding tours:

A proposal for a new law has been submitted to the Israeli parliament which states that only Israeli citizens would be permitted to serve as tour guides in Israel (does “Israel” includes the occupied territories? That’s not clear from the law), when the tour involves non-Israeli citizens. In essence, this law would put hundreds of East Jerusalemite tour guides out of work. The sponsors of the law explained their motivation and I think it speaks for itself:

“….Israel is investing a great effort in order to improve it’s image as a modern, western, democratic and free country… it is therefore important to assure that in order to avoid a damage to this investment, only those that had gone through an appropriate training and got license would be allowed to serve as guide tours.”

Apparently, according to the parliament members who introduced the law, Israeli citizenship is a necessary part of the training a person should go through in order to be qualified for this position.

The explanation goes on:

“There are numerous touristic sites in Israel… often there is a dispute on the way they should be presented in terms of history, religious, culture and more. The city of Jerusalem is an example for a site on which such a dispute exists. Some people that are Israeli residents, such as the residents of East Jerusalem, have many times a “double loyalty”, due to the fact that they vote for the Palestinian Authority. Those residents present some times anti-Israelis views to tourist. In order to assure that those foreign tourists would be exposed to the Israeli national views, it is suggested that the organizations that arrange tours will make sure that those tours would be accompanied by a guide tour who is an Israeli citizen, that has loyalty to the state of Israel. The need to protect the national interest of presenting Israel in an appropriate way is more important than (protecting) other interests.”

Thus, it seems that presenting Israeli as a Western democracy is more important to the law’s initiators, than actually making it one. Moreover, nobody seems to care or even to notice the sharp irony. In fact it looks like Israelis want to eat the cake and still keep it full: occupy the West bank, banish the Palestinians from their land, continue building in the West Bank, expel Palestinians that are Israeli citizens, define Israel as a Jewish state, and demolish the freedom of speech; but still be perceived as acting out of self defense, still be called a democracy, still continue the “peace talks” with the Palestinians, and still be part of the Western world.

This is Israel.