American Groups Create Task Force to Aid Arabs

Rachel Silverman
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

NEW YORK

They live just a mile apart, but odds are that Eldad Garfunkel and Kasim Abu Raya would not ordinarily have met. As a Jew and an Arab, both Israeli citizens, their paths seldom crossed.

Such is life in Israel.

Then a new school opened in town, thanks to an Arab-Jewish co-educational group called Hand in Hand. Instructors pledged to teach Arab and Jewish kids under the same roof, emphasizing values of co-existence and democratic engagement.

Intrigued by the concept, Garfunkel and Raya took a chance and signed up their children.

Now, eight years later, the two men are in frequent contact. 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."

A 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.

The coalition includes the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the New Israel Fund, UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, and the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Fund. It represents a major push on an issue that had been on the American Jewish community's list of priorities years ago, but was then eclipsed by the intifada.

According 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 some three times higher than that of Israel's Jewish population. They also face political, medical and educational inequities, insists the center.

In addition to socioeconomic strain, Israeli Arabs face attitudinal biases on the part of their Jewish counterparts. 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. 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.

Community Seen as Radical

The hostility toward Israeli Arabs stems in part from a tendency for Israeli Jews to question the loyalty of their Arab neighbors, said Sikkuy officials.

"In Israeli Jewish minds, 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.

But recent history has shown that the issue is not so simple. Opinion polls show that Israeli Arabs increasingly are identifying as Palestinian rather than Israeli, and - led by political leaders who seem to go out of their way to provoke the Jewish majority - the community is seen as increasingly radical.

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.

"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 co-existence between Israel's Jewish and Arab citizens. "This is a defense issue.

"It's kind of like if you have someone on drugs, and you don't get them to rehab," he continued. "You're enabling a bad situation to get worse."

At the symposium, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, underscored that point, saying: "We will not be at peace externally unless we have security internally."