Electronic Intifada has a story about the latest incident of a Palestinian citizen of Israel being refused entry to a public facility, this time a swimming pool, because he was not Jewish.<\/p>\n
I find it interesting how much people are outraged by these stories. Yes, such racism is disgusting. And these reports do reveal something disturbing about Israeli society. But there are\u00a0far<\/em>\u00a0worse forms of\u00a0racism in Israel than this kind of informal and unthinking prejudice.<\/p>\n These stories resonate precisely because they are symbolic, visual, visceral. Israeli officials understand this very well, which is why they try, with a measure of success, to limit this kind of public racism – what I referred to in a recent article as petty apartheid.<\/p>\n Much more important is grand apartheid: state planning that ensures the key physical, economic and potential resources – land, housing, water, education, employment – are under the exclusive control of the privileged, Jewish group.<\/p>\n But stories about Israel’s grand apartheid are deeply unsexy for several reasons.<\/p>\n First, unpicking the complex legal facade Israel has created to conceal this kind of systematic, institutionalised racism is hard, tedious work for reporters and readers alike.<\/p>\n Second, one can always find new examples of swimming pools or amusement parks that discriminate; the state’s racism, on the other hand, is unrelenting and unchanging. And that violates one of the cardinal rules about news: it needs to appear new.<\/p>\n And third, we expect our outrage at examples of petty racism to be the harbinger of change. Public revulsion, we hope, can lead to the ending of a swimming pool’s racist policy. Such stories help to make us feel empowered. But the reality of grand apartheid – covert, complex, legal – is so vast and intangible as to deny us an emotional payoff.<\/p>\n Which is why, I fear, for most of our media and politicians the debate about racism in Israel will continue to be stuck at first base.<\/p>\n