The increasingly harsh political climate in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government has prompted the leadership of the country's 1.3 million "Israeli Arab" citizens (as Palestinians living inside Israel are termed) citizens to call the first general strike in several years.
The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada (uprising), when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.
The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called "racist" government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.
"In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts", said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel.
"This attitude is feeding down to the streets."
Confrontations between the country's Arab minority and Netanyahu's coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.
The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of al nakba, or the catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948 when Israel was formed; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist (i.e. specifically Jewish) state; and banned political demands for ending Israel's status as a Jewish state.
Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.
But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when education minister Gideon Saar presented educational reforms.
He confirmed plans to drop the word "nakba" from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism.
He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.
Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.
Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Saar "must understand that he is the education minister, not the defence minister".
The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands more classrooms and is massively underfunded. Up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than on an Arab one, according to surveys.
Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in August showed Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.
Netanyau said: "We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land."
Barakeh accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. "Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs — the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever."
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, said in August that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.
Of the foreign ministry's 980 employees, only 15 are Arab — a pattern reflected across the civil service sector, Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organisation, said.
Housing minister Ariel Atias has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens, and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, "more Jewish".
Interior minister Eli Yishai has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.
Transport minister Israel Katz has insisted that road signs include place-names only as they are spelled in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.
Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. In August, infrastructures minister Uzi Landau refused to meet Taleb al Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business.
Landau justified the decision by saying Arab MPs were "working constantly here and abroad to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state".
Shortly afterwards, al Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah's congress in Bethlehem, prompting Lieberman to state: "Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk — they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined."
Tibi replied: "Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement."
Israel's annual Democracy Index poll, published in August, showed that 53% of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.
Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.
Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Farah said, with only one conviction.
At the start of September, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi's actions "reckless".
This was closely followed by another controversial case in which Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al Atrash, as the latter fled.
Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a "real dirty Arab".
[Reprinted from Counterpunch.org.]