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Arab collaborators not exempt from Israeli racism

August 31, 2017 at 11:14 am

Palestinian protesters carry posters depicting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on 14 April 2017 [Ashraf Amra/Apaimages]

As long as there have been national liberation struggles and resistance movements, there have been collaborators. The phenomenon is an old one.

The oldest strategy in the proverbial Book of Imperialism is divide and rule: recruiting a sector of the population of the oppressed into the fold of the oppressor. In some cases, this sector will be an elite one, a comprador class, persuaded they have more in common with the imperial or occupying entity than with their own people. In other cases, religious or ethnic differences are emphasised in an attempt to instigate, invent or stoke sectarian or racial tensions.

The Nazis in France had Philippe Pétain, the leader of the collaborating Vichy puppet regime. In Norway they had Vidkun Quisling. The British Empire was particularly adept at Divide and Rule, and often stoked sectarian differences in order to rule the countries around the world they occupied more effectively. The soldiers who maintained British and French imperial rule throughout Asia and Africa were often drawn from the ranks of the native peoples themselves, under white officers.

The South African apartheid regime had the Bantustans – the supposed black “Homelands”. In the self-serving mythology of Afrikaner South Africa, the black majority in the country “arrived” there around about the same time as the white settlers coming from Europe. And hence the blacks were no less “settlers” than the whites – so the Afrikaner mythology went. This false narrative was meant to serve as a distraction from the international criticism that South African apartheid received, and the Bantustans were used as a justification for denying the black majority the vote, and other basic rights.

The narrative was broadly rejected around the world, until eventually apartheid was defeated. But the corrupt and violent Bantustan regimes were a useful tool for the apartheid regime.

Read: The ‘Israelisation’ illusion and ‘Israeli Arabs’ propaganda

Although there are important differences, in many ways the Israeli apartheid regime is quite similar to the South African apartheid regime. And when it comes to the collaboration phenomenon, Israel is extremely similar.

Israel has an equivalent of the Bantustan regimes: it’s called the Palestinian Authority. The PA polices in the West Bank eradicate any sign of Palestinian resistance, whether armed or unarmed. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas says that collaboration with Israel – what is termed “security coordination” – is “sacred” and will never end.

But the phenomenon of a tiny minority of Palestinians collaborating with the Zionist movement’s crimes in Palestine is almost as old as Zionism itself.

One recent example of this was reported in the Israeli press, when a diplomat in the foreign ministry was threatened with disciplinary measures by the deputy foreign minister.

Ismail Khaldi is a Palestinian from the Galilee region, in 1948 Palestine – present day Israel. Marketed as “Israel’s first Bedouin diplomat”, he has toured the world as an Arab face to whitewash Israel’s war crimes. He’s not been very successful. In 2011, students in Edinburgh shut down one of his propaganda talks on campus.

Image of Ismail Khaldi [Alaska CUFI/Facebook]

But Khaldi’s self-hatred and collaboration has not advanced him as far as he would have liked. Zionism’s racism is so endemic and so deeply entrenched that it is expressed even towards the “Good Arabs” like Khaldi who cooperate with Israel and even serve in its military.

In August, Khaldi had to apologise after accusing the Israeli government of “Bedouin heritage cleansing”. He was made to delete his Facebook posting, which accused the authorities of instigating policies in which local people in his village of Khawaled could no longer afford to buy land plots. He wrote: “Even if we need to go to the ICJ [International Court of Justice!] We won’t allow the [regional] council to turn Khawaled into an isolated ghetto!”

Khaldi has had several other such outbursts online in recent years, reflecting longstanding tensions. In 2015 he admitted that “a colleague in the ministry and others in Israel hate Arabs and Muslims more than anti-Semites hate Jews,” the Jerusalem Post reported.

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He’s also been behind a long running campaign for an important access road to his village to be paved. It says something profound about Zionism that one of Israel’s most high profile Arab collaborators can’t even get a modern road into his own village.

Khaldi’s complaints about Israeli racism and “Bedouin heritage cleansing” bring to mind the South Lebanon Army (SLA), an Israeli proxy force, whose members had to flee to Israel in 2000 when Lebanese resistance force Hezbollah defeated the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

They and their families later faced Israeli racism from both the state and society, despite the fact the SLA literally killed for Israel. Zionism’s contempt for Arabs knows no bounds.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.