A letter to Barack Obama from a Palestinian doctor in Galilee:
The newly-elected prime minister of… Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity.… They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood.… They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to… Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.
Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of… Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total.… Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations.… Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens — and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.