We are a support base trying to develop strategies for how they can do this.” Hoenlein concurred. “We don’t want to define the identity of Israelis,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, cautioned. Brian Lurie, president of the Fromm Fund, said the agency would try to avoid politics, but other task force members questioned how exactly to pursue their agenda. Looking in from the outside, American Jews wonder what role they should assume on a difficult issue. “We will not be at peace externally unless we have security internally,” he told the symposium. “You’re enabling a bad situation to get worse.” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, underscored that point. “It’s kind of like if you have someone on drugs and you don’t get them to rehab,” he continued. “We can’t just look at this as an academic issue, or even a social issue,” said Alan Slifka, who founded The Abraham Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting coexistence between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. When the intifada began, Israeli Arabs staged massive riots in solidarity, and Israeli Arabs were involved in a number of terrorist attacks during the five-year uprising, using their freedom of movement as Israeli citizens to aid Palestinian suicide bombers. Opinion polls show that Israeli Arabs increasingly are identifying as Palestinian rather than Israeli and - led by political leaders who often seem to go out of their way to provoke the Jewish majority - the community is seen as increasingly radical.
“But they are a totally separate collective with a separate agenda and needs.”ěut recent history has shown that the issue is not so simple. “In Israeli Jewish minds, sometimes - oftentimes - Israeli Arabs are connected with Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and they are being blamed for what’s going on there,” said Shuli Dichter, co-executive director of Sikkuy. The hostility toward Israeli Arabs stems in part from a tendency for Israeli Jews to question the loyalty of their Arab neighbors, Sikkuy officials said. The study also showed that 40 percent of Israeli Jews believe the state should encourage Arabs to emigrate, and 34 percent believe Arab culture is inferior to Jewish culture. Nearly 63 percent of Israeli Jews say they view the Arab population as a security threat, according to a report issued in March by the Israel-based Center for Combating Racism. In addition to socioeconomic strain, Israeli Arabs face attitudinal biases on the part of their Jewish counterparts. They also face political, medical and educational inequities, the center said. Leaders of the new Interagency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues told participants at a New York City symposium last week that they can no longer ignore the demographic realities of the Israeli Arab situation.Ěccording to data from Sikkuy - The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, Arabs, who make up roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population, have a poverty rate three times higher than that of Israel’s Jewish population.
It represents a major push on an issue that had been on the American Jewish community’s list of priorities several years ago, but was then eclipsed by the intifada. The coalition includes the Anti-Defamation League, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, New Israel Fund, UJA-Federation of New York, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies and the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Fund. Raya’s son has Jewish friends sleep over during the holy month of Ramadan, Garfunkel’s kid had a row of Arab students at his bar mitzvah, and both men claim a new understanding for those on “the other side.”Ě new task force on Israeli Arabs, founded by a broad coalition of American Jewish groups, hopes this type of exchange can become the norm rather than the exception in Israel. Now, eight years later, the two men are in frequent contact. Intrigued by the concept, Garfunkel and Raya took a chance and signed up their children. Teachers pledged to teach Arab and Jewish kids under the same roof, emphasizing values of coexistence and democratic engagement. Then a new school opened in town, thanks to an Arab-Jewish coeducational organization called Hand in Hand. As a Jew and an Arab, both Israeli citizens, their paths seldom crossed. NEW YORK, May 2 (JTA) - They live just a mile apart, but odds are Eldad Garfunkel and Kasim Abu Raya would not ordinarily have met.
0 kommentar(er)
