Israel-Palestine Mega Fact Check!

Although the Arab citizens of Israel ostensibly have many of the same rights as Jewish citizens, such as the right to vote, they are also discriminated against in a variety of ways:

• The agricultural lands (and access to sufficient water for agriculture) are mostly controlled by Jewish moshavim and kibbutzim. To gain access to these communities, a citizen needs to go through an admissions committee, whose primary function is to reject Palestinian Arabs.
• Israeli Arabs are in practice barred from owning land in 900+ localities in Israel as well as from the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
• Israeli Arabs are prohibited from having family members in occupied territories come live with them in Israel.
• Israeli Arabs protesting the government often leads to disproportionate violence or retribution.
• Palestinian schools, local councils, and municipalities in Israel receive far less funding per capita than Jewish ones.
• Israel will seize the land of Palestinians who don't farm it for three consecutive years (under the old Ottoman "fallow lands" law). This law does not appear to be applied to Jewish land owners.
• Israel's Employment Law (1988) prohibits discrimination in hiring, working conditions, and so on, due to race or religion. "Despite the Employment Law (1998), the Israel human rights group Adalah has reported that Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination in work opportunities, pay and conditions. Adalah has also reported that the state of Israel itself (the largest employer in Israel) does not enforce said law."

In the 1990s a Palestinian party pushed for reforms to change Israel from a state that gives preferential treatment to Jews into a state for all citizens. Ehud Olmert met with the Shin Bet about this issue; they concluded that anyone who pushes for this kind of reform would be labelled a "subversive" and they would use any means "including non-democratic ones" to defeat such a campaign.

In 2002, the Nazareth-based Human Rights Association published a report documenting how Palestinian Members of the Knesset (MKs) are unduly targeted by the state. Over the previous two years, 9 of the 10 Palestinian MKs had been assaulted by the security services, some several times, 7 of whom had to be hospitalized. They also found that the state launched 25 investigations into these 10 MKs in the same period.

Legislator Azmi Bishara, the figurehead of the political movement to transform Israel from a Jewish state to a state for all its citizens, "or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy." While Bishara was abroad in 2007, Israel charged him with treason and informed him that he'd be executed if he'd ever return to Israel. Both charges—helping Hizbollah, laundering money for terrorist organizations—appear to have been made up.

Source: Disappearing Palestine: Israel's experiments in human despair (2008) by Israeli journalist Jonathan Cook.