The High Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that local authorities must provide women’s sports teams with 150 percent higher budgets than municipal men’s teams receive in an precedent-setting affirmative action move.
The High Court obligated the Ramat Hasharon Local Council, together with all local councils across the country who fund local sports teams, to adopt criterion set by the Ministry of Science and Sport that say women’s teams must receive additional budgets in an act of affirmative action.
MK Ahmad Tibi (Hadash) is demanding affirmative action for Arabs at Bank of Israel and other public sector institutions.
….
“Bank of Israel hires according to criteria of merit, and ignores differences in religion, sex, race or nationality,” wrote [Bank of Israel Governor David] Klein.
Tibi said he would not be placated by Klein s promises. “I want a systematic change in employment policy,” he said.
In Israel, as here, it is clear that adopting “affirmative action” means abandoning policies that bar discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or nationality.
Affirmative action is legalized discrimination. An institution that adopts affirmative action immediately becomes an institution in decay. The decay may be hidden beneath a veneer of residual competence for a while, but like tooth decay, it will eventually reveal itself.
This is almost amusing. Given the treatment of Jews thoughout the arab domination portions of the ME, the arabs should be glad to have the simple eaual rights they are granted in Israel.
As to the attempts to force equal results by gender in sports, there should eventually be some recognition that interest in sports participation may not be the same between men and women. There ARE a few differences between them (no matter how much we encourage them to be the same, they just aren’t). Eventually we need to determine a way to recognoze equality that does not entail forcing identical behavior.
At the time I arrived in Israel (1998), the government-owned airline had zero Arab employees. The national electric company, as I recall, had three, and the newly-privatized telephone company, also zero.
Israel had a non-discrimination law, but it had not been enforced in a single case. (That is no longer true: a café owner was fined a few thousand dollars for sacking a pair of Israeli Arab sister waitresses.)
Somehow, it beggars belief that these companies’ hiring practices were run along those wonderful strictly meritocratic lines.
In terms of tokenism, after these embarrassments became public, El Al hired four Arab trainees, two flight attendants and two sales agents placed in Arab communities. One of the flight attendants was featured on the cover of the inflight magazine.
Against this background, Arab calls for “affirmative action” sound a little to me like a demand for restitution for a generation of conscious and deliberate discrimination.
“Restitution” has always struck me as a stronger argument for affirmative action than, say, “diversity,” even with its ultimately unsustainable reliance on a belief in group rights rather than individual rights. (Without a reliance on group rights, it would literally make no sense to describe a refusal to hire, say, an airline attendant who was personally innocent of any discriminatorry wrongdoing in favor of an Arab applicant who had not been discriminated against for that position as “restitution.”) A better solution, it seems to me, is to compensate actual victims of discrimination — perhaps by giving them the jobs or promotions they would have had but for the discrimination, perhaps monetarily — and at the same time to implement a vigorous non-discrimination policy with steep penalties for violating it.
As you know, John, you and I aren’t that far apart on the “restitution” issue. Hypothetically, though, let’s suppose another generation goes by with casual indifference to Israeli Arab equality of employment, and toss in curiously disproportionate expenditures in education and physical infrastructure. Add in the fact that as Israeli Arabs are (perhaps with good reason) excused from army service, they lose both the networking connections made there and certain veterans’ preferences. Toss in security fears about Arab solidarity with terrorists, perhaps not all unfounded but with implications for employment in a host of industries. The Israeli Supreme Court’s decision opening the housing market was greeted with fury much like the “Pledge of Allegiance” decision in the USA and has not been implemented.
Now, after another generation of this, there won’t be any single way of identifying specific applicants who were discriminated against in hiring or promotion. I’m a little skeptical of whether the existing (unfair) structure can be dismantled without some pretty broad measurements of “Have you hired any Arabs?” We wouldn’t have gotten rid of Jim Crow litigating one water fountain at a time.
Andy – I sort of agree, and sort of don’t.
First, the sort of agree: I should have made clear in my post (and also in my recent one about India) and in my comment that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I really don’t have strong feelings about affirmative action issues in other countries. That’s because, ultimately, my views on those issues here at home are not grounded in abstract universal principles but in principles that I believe are essentially (though certainly not necessarily uniquely) American. That is, I believe they grew out of and in turn shaped both who we are and our values regarding who we should be. Thus I generally do, or at least believe I should, refrain from arguing that multiculturalism/proportional representation/group rights/etc. are inherently wrong and should be adopted nowhere. Other countries have different histories and different values and I am perfectly willing to accept the fact that a group-based multiculturalism might well be best for them. Thus I would give Israel, India, et. al. much wider latitude (I know they will be relieved to hear that) than I sometimes sound like I do.
Here, as you know, I am not unalterably opposed to some restitution efforts. But your drinking fountain example, I believe, supports my disagreement with across the board hire blacks/admit blacks enforced racial balancing. No, we didn’t litigate each drinking fountain. What we did was pass a civil rights law (see recent post on it) making racial discrimination across the board illegal. More could, and should, have been done to enforce that law, but the lack of satisfactory enforcement is not a justification for abandoning non-discrimination in favor of a group rights-based right to proportional representation, which requires “positive discrimination” (as the French now call their new affirmative action policies).