Tyler Morning Telegraph · 27 March 1980

CP-1980-009

Arabs Living In Israel Complain Of Discrimination

Israelites Claim Arabs Have ‘Fared Well’ Under Jewish Rule

United Press International, Ara, Israel

Transcribed from the clipping

“The grim-faced soldier motions each car past the roadblock with a cursory glance and an absent wave of his submachine gun. Occasionally, he orders a vehicle to pull over for inspection. The stopped cars carry Arab passengers… ‘We’re always being stopped and checked on the roads and it’s humiliating,’ said Mahmoud Woshahy, 23, an Israeli Arab… ISRAELI ARABS see themselves as second class citizens in a state founded and governed by Jews, a people particularly aware of persecution. Yet barely a whisper of dissent rippled among the Jewish majority when one of its military leaders, Maj. Gen. Avigdor Ben-Gal, defined the Arabs in Israel as ‘a cancer in our body only waiting for a chance to jump at our throats and strangle us.’… ‘I am an Israeli citizen but in practice I am nothing,’ Woshahy said. He is from Ara, a hilly village of ankle-twisting dirt paths 40 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. ‘In my heart I am a Palestinian.’… ‘If we needed this land, we confiscated it from the Arabs. We had to create a Jewish state in this country, and we did,’ Gur-Arye said candidly. ‘I don’t apologize for what happened 32 years ago. We didn’t start the war.’”

Photograph caption

CHILDREN PLAY ON UNPAVED STREETS OF ISRAEL · Israeli Arabs Say Their Towns Get Little Attention

Context added by this archive

A wire survey of the Arab citizens of Israel, printed in Texas. The line that matters is not the general’s; it is the clause in front of it. The paper reports that the remark passed without objection, and then moves on to budget figures. Also on the page: a Nazareth of 45,000 with a budget of $3.6 million against a largely Jewish Acre of 35,000 with $7.3 million, and a Haifa lawyer’s count of land seizures in 470 of 570 Arab villages. The masthead carries two papers and two dates, the Tyler Courier-Times of 26 March and the Morning Telegraph of 27 March; the later date is recorded here.

Cite this item

"Arabs Living In Israel Complain Of Discrimination," Tyler Morning Telegraph, 27 March 1980. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1980-009. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1980-009

Elsewhere in the archive

• Holy Land Village AttackedTyler Morning Telegraph · 27 December 1947 · the same newspaper
• Is Zionism Racism?The Wichita Eagle · 27 January 1980 · the same year
• UN papers on Zionism challenge Israel itselfMiami News · 29 January 1980 · the same year
• No Compromise At Kiryat ArbaSarasota Herald-Tribune · 12 February 1980 · the same year