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The Commission recommended genuine equality for Israeli Arabs, saying:
"The state should initiate, develop, and operate programs to close gaps, with an emphasis on the fields of budgets, in all areas relating to education, housing, industrial development, employment, and services."
Nonetheless, discriminatory gaps widened in areas of education, land, housing, construction, employment, healthcare, politics, civil liberties, and personal safety. Israel institutionalized second-class citizenry for everyone not Jewish, mainly Muslims. ACRI thus concluded, saying:
"This reality is morally intolerable and, ultimately, it threatens not 'merely' " Israel's 20% minority, "but all of us....A state that restricts" basic rights; allocates them unfairly; "discriminates against citizens (by misallocation) of resources, infrastrutures, and education; and that labels certain citizens as enemies, is a state" with no democratic legitimacy whatever, heading rapidly toward despotism.
A Final Comment
Israel's huge political prisoner population belies any democratic pretense, Ahmad Sa'adat a prominent prisoner of conscience, discussed in an earlier article, accessed through the following link:
On December 8, 2008, he was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment, Israel's harshest political punishment, illegal under international law.
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