The Unrecognized

I mentioned this video (by Adalah) once before as an afterthought to this post. I am posting it again because I want to bring your attention to the awesome woman interviewed near the end of the film.

Please click here to stream the video from the Adalah site so you can actually read the subtitles.


After all of the lawyers and such who give their professional information about the situation of the Bedouin in the unrecognized villages in Israel, and all of whom speak with varying levels of proper, Modern Standard Arabic, we hear this woman. She is Amal ElSana AlH'jooj, the Director of AJEEC, The Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation. She speaks with passion that would blow all the rest out of the water, and in dialect, and comes across with simultaneous rawness and eloquence regarding the most fundamental problem driving just about the entire conflict here. She is speaking of the Palestinians inside of Israel, but the sentiment applies to the whole darn thing. She hits it right on the nose:

First of all, and this is a fundamental point, the state must start changing its attitude toward Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is a difficult issue. The state must stop seeing us as a security threat. The state today sees us as a security and demographic threat.

To this day, when an Arab woman gives birth, it frightens the Israeli Interior Minister and the Israeli Foreign Minister. This is the first thing that must change.

Secondly, the state cannot consider itself a 'democratic' state in the Middle East while 72,000 of its citizens are without drinking water.

Either the state decides to be democratic with equal rights for all, or it is not democratic. If it is not democratic, then we will know how to relate to it. But Israel can't have it both ways.

In completely unrelated news, I would also like to bring your attention to my new phrase of the day: 7elli 3an 6eaz aboui. Used to express 'leave me alone.' Translates to 'get off my dad's ass.'