| About MossawaOur MissionStaff and BoardDonateGet InvolvedSupportersLinks | Mossawa holds conference on "Human Rights and Collective Rights: Desirable vs. Existent Status of the Arab Minority in Israel"Debate over the nature of a future Israeli constitution and the collective rights of the Arab minority was taken to a new level this past Thursday, May 31. For the first time, members of the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, as well as former Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner, joined representatives of the Arab community in a public conference to discuss at length the question of Arab minority rights protection in Israeli law.
 Audience participants at the Mossawa Center conference.
Organized by the Mossawa Center, the conference, titled “Human Rights and Collective Rights: Desirable vs. Existent Status of the Arab Minority in Israel,” drew over 120 attendees to the Journalists’ Union in Tel Aviv, including representatives from international missions, civil society, NGOs, universities and the general public, bringing together a broad spectrum of viewpoints from both the audience and the speakers. Dr. Yousef T. Jabareen, the author of the Mossawa Center's "An Equal Constitution For All," speaking on the conference's second panel on minority-majority constitutional arrangements in Israel, explained the inequality and discrimination against the Arab minority existent in the current legal system, and the reasoning behind the collective rights demanded by the Arab community. "Israeli law today actually recognizes exclusively one collectivity, which is the Jewish one," Dr. Jabareen said, "and these collective rights demanded in the document, through them we wish to upgrade the status of the Arab public, the Arab minority, and to give it an equal status to that of the Jewish community ... it is our right to demand full equality because it is either a full equality or continued discrimination ..." Also speaking on the second panel, former Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner said that "Israel was not established to further democracy; it was founded as the Jewish state," but expressed the view that it would be possible to create a "synthesis" between definitions of the nation and both Jewish and democratic. "Excluding the Arab minority is not good for this county," she said. "Israel as a Jewish state must give the other nationalities living in its midst the rights they're entitled to."  Former Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner.
In response, Mossawa Center Director Jafar Farah expressed the Arab community's unwillingness to accept "this road accident called institutionalized discrimination." Farah criticized Dorner's assertion that equality could be realized given the current definition of the state. "We have had a Jewish democratic state for 59 years," he said. "It has failed [to] guarantee equality for us." Rabbi Gilad Kariv of Israel Action Center also highlighted the importance of Palestinian history in framing the contemporary debate. "As to how the majority society treats the Palestinian minority," he said, "it is to a great extent the discrepancy in historical narratives that feed and fertilize the discrimination...without a brave and cautious attempt to deal with the narrative issue we will not be able to create a brave future for the Jewish majority or for the Arab minority in Israel."  Rabbi Gilad Kariv. The presence of separate realities for Jewish and Arab citizens "is not something given to us by God, but is something structured by human beings which can be changed by democratic legitimate rules," said High Follow Up Committee Chair Shawki Khatib. According to MK Michael Eitan, the debate over the constitution "opens up a window to the fundamental problems of our existence." He went on to ask, "is it not high time to look for truth, and at what we choose to sweep under the carpet out of fear of having this conversation? The debate over the constitution," Eitan said, "illustrates something that we all know, but are not aware of the severity of. There is currently no real dialog, on all levels, between Jews and Arabs in Israel." Speaking on the same panel, MK el-Sanea said "there is no democracy without equality," and expressed the view that "on the governmental level there is no discussion being held as to how the government should relate" to the Arab population living within its jurisdiction. "We are in a state," he said, "in which we were a majority, but have become the minority."  MK Taleb el-Sanea. Prior to these discussions, Mossawa Center convened a panel of international experts to offer lessons learned and examples, both successful and failed, of other constitutions and their provisions for minorities. The panel, titled “Constitutional Equality and the Protection of Minority Rights: International Perspectives” provided a greater context for the overall content of the conference. Dr. Julie Ringelheim, researcher at the Center for Philosophy of Law at the University of Louvain in Belgium, presented an overview of European approaches to recognizing and protecting national minorities, noting trends of recognition in the constitutions of European countries, and emphasizing the difference between direct and indirect discrimination. Clive Baldwin, head of advocacy at Minority Rights Group International, discussed how constitutions have attempted to entrench majority and minority rights, and prohibit discrimination, concentrating on cases from Botswana and Bosnia-Hercegovina.  Clive Baldwin of Minority Rights Group International. Overall, a message of hope was expressed throughout the day. Hebrew University law faculty professor, Dr. Dafna Golan, cited the example of more than 26 societies in which a process of transitional justice and reconciliation was initiated post-conflict, expressed the hope that establishing the relationship between Israel's Jewish majority and its Arab minority in a future constitution "could form the basis for truth and reconciliation" between the two communities. | Mossawa in the NewsEventsPress releases |
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