by Jonathan Cook, September 29, 2009
"Demands from Israel’s chief commander this month that all Israeli citizens should be required to perform national service has turned the spotlight on a rarely discussed group of soldiers: members of Israel’s Palestinian minority.
Though no official statistics are available, an estimated 3,000 of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens have broken one of their society’s biggest taboos and are currently serving, often as combat troops on the front line of the conflict with their Palestinian kin, in the occupied territories........
Soldiers like S. are extremely wary of speaking publicly, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Middle East expert at New York University, discovered when she began the first study of the group a decade ago. Her findings were published this year as a book, Surrounded, published by Stanford University Press.........
Kanaaneh, who was raised in the Palestinian village of Arrabeh in northern Israel before her move to the U.S., said none of the soldiers was prepared to go into detail about what they did during their service. She suspects that this reflects in large part feelings of shame associated with their role enforcing the occupation.......
Many rights and benefits in Israel are tied to military service and therefore claimed mostly by the Jewish population, including a wide variety of jobs, entitlement to state-controlled land, and economic privileges such as cheap loans, government allowances, and tax breaks. The noted Israeli jurist David Kretzmer has called this a policy of "covert discrimination" against the Palestinian minority.......
In Palestinian communities, where most of the land has been confiscated by the state and where new houses are often classified as illegal and subject to demolition, the offer of land is a powerful incentive........
A comment she heard from several soldiers was "Once your uniform is off, you’re a dirty Arab again."
Kanaaneh is also dismissive of the view that military service allows Palestinian soldiers to integrate fully into Israeli society......."
"Demands from Israel’s chief commander this month that all Israeli citizens should be required to perform national service has turned the spotlight on a rarely discussed group of soldiers: members of Israel’s Palestinian minority.
Though no official statistics are available, an estimated 3,000 of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens have broken one of their society’s biggest taboos and are currently serving, often as combat troops on the front line of the conflict with their Palestinian kin, in the occupied territories........
Soldiers like S. are extremely wary of speaking publicly, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Middle East expert at New York University, discovered when she began the first study of the group a decade ago. Her findings were published this year as a book, Surrounded, published by Stanford University Press.........
Kanaaneh, who was raised in the Palestinian village of Arrabeh in northern Israel before her move to the U.S., said none of the soldiers was prepared to go into detail about what they did during their service. She suspects that this reflects in large part feelings of shame associated with their role enforcing the occupation.......
Many rights and benefits in Israel are tied to military service and therefore claimed mostly by the Jewish population, including a wide variety of jobs, entitlement to state-controlled land, and economic privileges such as cheap loans, government allowances, and tax breaks. The noted Israeli jurist David Kretzmer has called this a policy of "covert discrimination" against the Palestinian minority.......
In Palestinian communities, where most of the land has been confiscated by the state and where new houses are often classified as illegal and subject to demolition, the offer of land is a powerful incentive........
A comment she heard from several soldiers was "Once your uniform is off, you’re a dirty Arab again."
Kanaaneh is also dismissive of the view that military service allows Palestinian soldiers to integrate fully into Israeli society......."
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