Thursday, February 22, 2007

"Whenever the central government builds a new industrial area, it gets located in a Jewish town instead of an Arab town," he said. "The Israeli towns get the local tax revenue and the jobs. Look, this highway separates our reality from theirs." Central government allocations for public services further skew the income gap. In public education, for example, the state invests about twice as much per Jewish pupil as per Arab pupil. Nearly half of Israel's Arabs live below the poverty line, and their rates of unemployment and infant mortality are twice the national average. They face obstacles securing residency permits for Arab spouses who are not Israeli. Exempt from military service, they do not qualify for thousands of higher-paying jobs reserved for veterans. They make up only 10% of Israel's university undergraduates. Arab leaders also chafe at limits on local autonomy, such as the Education Ministry requirement that all public schools use textbooks that teach history from a Jewish perspective."