The disease of racism and how to cure it

[Classical_Liberal]

The disease of racism and how to cure it

By Nazir Majali



I would like to believe that if those same people who expressed their desire to have the Arabs expelled from the State of Israel in a survey by the Center for the Study of National Security at Haifa University had been asked their opinion in public rather than in a pollster's questionnaire, the results would have been different.



In that survey, 63 percent of the Jews said they support the idea that the government should encourage Arabs to emigrate; 45 percent said Arab citizens should be prevented from voting for the Knesset. In open discussions, on television or in public interviews, Jewish citizens would certainly be embarrassed to express such chauvinistic and racist opinions. We can assume that they would want to be portrayed according to the best tradition of "the only democracy in the Middle East," and of the Jewish people. As members of a nation that went through the Holocaust and suffered racial discrimination more than any other, they wouldn't be willing to be exposed as Arab haters, as people who have no trouble trampling the rights of the Arab citizens of the state, to the point of expelling them from their homeland.

But those questioned found an opportunity this time to say what they really felt, and to transmit a message to anyone interested - that we, in this country, have deteriorated to such a point; and please, deal with the crisis.

And in fact, we are all, Arabs as well as Jews, obligated to deal with the problem - which is the problem of all of us. It wouldn't be right for each side to transfer responsibility to the other's court. Judging by the answers in other surveys that have been published in the past, the results of the new survey are not particularly surprising. They only signal a continuation of the deterioration, and indicate that almost nothing has been done so far to check the phenomenon......

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/443157.html

[Lithos]

1. Duplicate

Please continue here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x72992