Sidelined lawmaker watches Arabs, Jews drift apart

A few months ago, Nadia Hilou was an Arab lawmaker in a predominantly Jewish party, an adept political mover and a pragmatic voice for Arab-Jewish coexistence.

Since then, a general election has given rise to politicians who view Israeli Arabs like her as a potential threat to the state. With her center-left party, Labor, badly beaten in the vote, Hilou sits sidelined in a half-built office building far from the halls of power in Jerusalem, overlooking an old cemetery and the Mediterranean Sea.

The scene, with its overtones of disappointment and lost opportunity, aptly captures this fraught moment between the two peoples that uncomfortably share the state of Israel. Right now, voices like Hilou's are silent.

Israeli Arabs, subject to decades of discrimination, and Israeli Jews, mistrustful of an alienated minority with ties to their enemies, are becoming increasingly suspicious of each other as they grow further apart.

Last month, newly empowered hard-liners in parliament introduced three pieces of legislation aimed at Israel's Arab minority, about one-fifth of the country's 7 million people.

The bills proposed linking citizenship to a loyalty oath, outlawing any public questioning of Israel's Jewish nature, and banning public grieving over the Arab defeat and exile at the time of Israel's independence in 1948.

At the same time, a new poll showed that 41 percent of Israeli Arabs, who have shared a country with Jews for six decades, said they believed the Holocaust never happened. Barely half said Israel had the right to exist.

While the relationship between Israel's Jewish and Arab citizens has suffered years of ups and downs, it is difficult not to see the recent events as a low point.

"Someone needs to see that a red warning light is blinking," said the Hilou, 55, her hair dyed blond and elegantly coifed and her Hebrew flawless.

While many of Israel's Arabs remain estranged from the state, Hilou's life has been dedicated to changing the system from within. She was born in the coastal town Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, in 1953, five years after most of its Arab population fled or was expelled in the fighting that surrounded Israel's creation.

She earned two degrees at Israeli universities, held a string of influential positions in government offices and women's organizations, and eventually joined the once-dominant but fading Labor Party.

In February's election, Labor slid into fourth place behind Yisrael Beitenu, a party whose election campaign assailed the perceived disloyalty of Israel's Arabs, threatened to revoke their citizenship and boasted that only its tough-talking leader, Avigdor Lieberman, truly "understands Arabic."

Today, Hilou is volunteering with community organizations and waiting for a job offer. Ghaleb Majadele, Labor's only other Arab lawmaker and the country's first Muslim Cabinet minister, also lost his seat.

Lieberman is Israel's foreign minister. The government is dominated by hawks but the newly truncated Labor is a junior member, its leader, Ehud Barak, serving as minister of defense.

Israel's Arabs are far from homogenous. Most are Muslims, but some, like Hilou, are Christian. A small minority, made up of Druse Arabs and some members of Bedouin tribes, serves in Israel's military. Some live only among Arabs, others in mixed cities like Jaffa.

The 11 representatives of Arab parties in Israel's parliament are split into three fractious groupings. Some of their more outspoken members have expressed support for armed struggle against the Jewish state.

Those policies only serve to infuriate mainstream Israeli Jews and provide fodder for Lieberman's supporters, Hilou said. Their protests against discrimination are just, Hilou said, "but the question is how you say it and what happens next."

Hilou has had many opportunities, she said, but she and her family still face the humiliations of Arab life in Israel.

Her twin daughters, she said, were recently "treated like terrorists" at Israel's international airport, and her son-in-law saw an engineering job opening mysteriously disappear when the potential employer saw the Arab name on his CV.

While enjoying equal rights under the law, Arabs suffer from discrimination in government budgets and employment. They have also largely been blocked from moving into rural Jewish communities because of admittance rules and bylaws designed to keep them out.

The anger felt by many Arabs manifested itself in the recent poll carried out by Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha. In Smooha's first annual survey in 2003, 81 percent of Israeli Arabs said they supported Israel's right to exist.

In this year's poll, with an error margin of 3.7 percentage points, it dropped to 54 percent, a sign of protest, he said.

Yet many Arabs appreciate Israel's relative prosperity and its democracy. None of the anti-Arab bills introduced recently appear to have a real chance of becoming law, and the proposed loyalty oath was rejected by a committee of Cabinet ministers before it ever reached parliament.

In Smooha's poll, 57 percent described Israel as a good place to live, a seemingly contradictory finding that suggests Hilou's belief in Jewish-Arab coexistence is not a lost cause.

"Being an Arab in Israel means holding very complex views," Smooha said.