THE Bishop of Exeter, the Rt
Revd Michael Langrish, said last week that the Arab citizens of
Israel were facing increasing "inequality and discrimination".
Introducing a debate on "the
issues of equality and discrimination affecting Israel's Arab
citizens" in the House of Lords, on Thursday of last week, Bishop
Langrish said that Israeli citizens who were Arabs included "not
only Muslim and Christian Palestinians, and Bedouin Arabs, but
Arabic-speaking Druze, and a small number of Circassians as
well".
There was "a widening gap in
Israeli society between law and practice," he said. "In law,
Israeli Arabs enjoy full equality, and are endowed with the full
spectrum of democratic rights. . . However, in practice there are
many areas of life where Israeli Arabs are systematically
disadvantaged." Jewish and Arab Israelis had "different citizenship
rights and constraints in relation to marriage and family
reunification", Bishop Langrish said.
The Knesset, the Israeli
legislature, had "passed a raft of discriminatory legislation" in
recent years, he said, which had "helped further to alienate
Israel's non-Jewish citizens". There was also "an increasing desire
among a majority of the Jewish public to see preference for Jews
over Arabs in various areas of public life".
Bishop Langrish said that
"addressing Israeli-Arab discrimination needs now to be seen as a
justice issue in its own right."
He called on the UK
Government and the EU "to press Israeli governments for the
realisation of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, in which
Jews and Arabs live together with full and equal human dignity and
civil rights".
Responding to the debate, the Senior Minister of State at the
Foreign Office, Baroness Warsi, said: "The promotion and
protec-tion of human rights is at the heart of UK foreign policy.
How a country treats its minorities is an important test of a
country's democracy and respect for human rights and the rule of
law. This is equally true for Israel."