“Mr Badarne of the Laborers’ Voice said he has heard similar stories from other Arab workers.
“Laws against discrimination exist in Israel. The problem is that there appears to be no interest in enforcing them.
“If I go to the shopping mall, even the notices in the windows asking for sales assistants require army service from applicants.
“At least in these cases we can prove that it is racism we are dealing with.
“More sinister, however, is the more recent practice of employers telling Arab applicants that a position is already filled to avoid the threat of legal action. There the racism is veiled.”
Large sections of the economy are officially off limits to Arab workers because they fall within what Israel defines as its security industries, especially weapons manufacturers, the airports and national airline, ports and refineries, and the various security agencies.
But he said many large state-owned corporations that are not involved in security fields were also reluctant to employ Arabs, sending a message to smaller firms that discrimination was legitimate.
According to figures provided in 2004 by Nachman Tal, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet, the domestic security service, only six of the 13,000 employees of the Israeli Electricity Corp were Arabs.
Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, admitted racial discrimination was rife in a speech to the parliament in December. “It is terrible that there is not even one Arab employee [out of 900] at the Bank of Israel.”
Of the civil service, he added: “There is no arguing that some government ministries did not hire Arabs for years.”
Government statistics show that 12.5 per cent of all Arab college graduates are unemployed, nearly four times the figure for Jewish graduates.
Even those who do work are often forced into low-paying and menial jobs, Mr Badarne said.
Mr Salami, who trained as a schoolteacher, said that, among the 20 guards from his village, four were lawyers.
Mr Badarne pointed out that the long-standing Zionist principle of “Hebrew labour”, or Jews employing only other Jews, still had great influence in Israeli society.
He was especially critical of the country’s trade union federation, the Histadrut, which has traditionally also been one of the country’s largest employers.
It did not allow any admission of Arab workers until a decade after Israel’s creation and even then it set up a separate, and marginal, Arab section within the organisation, he said.”
Arabs left on the wrong side of the tracks in Israel