Terra Incognita: Discrimination cuts both ways

Seth Frantzman
JPost
02 November 09

At a recent meeting of the Israel-Europe Policy Network regarding Muslim minorities, MK Ophir Paz-Pines declared that as interior minister in Ariel Sharon's government he had presided over a discriminatory policy against Arabs. He claimed that Israel's Arab citizens have faced "structural" discrimination since the state's founding. As an example he pointed to discrepancies in state funding directed toward Arab municipalities.

Israeli Arab municipalities do face financial discrimination, but in large part it is a discrimination of their own making. Israeli Arab municipalities barely collect taxes, many are on the verge of bankruptcy, there is a complete lack of enforcement of building codes and residents do not invest in their own infrastructure.

Rafik Haj of Ben-Gurion University has shown in his recent thesis that only 18 percent of Arabs pay municipal taxes (arnona) while 53% of Jews do. Haj claimed that one reason for this is because Arabs can't afford to pay. This claim is blatantly false, and the noncompliance with taxation is only part of the problem. Arnona is based on how much land someone owns or how large a house someone has. But other studies have shown that in Arab villages statistics for ownership and size of houses are woefully inaccurate, meaning people are taxed less than they should be. The chaos in Arab villages is comparable to the situation in southern Italy, where people traditionally do not pay their share of taxes.
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