blake 3:17
30th October 2012, 02:09
A thoughtful piece for Aljazeera interpreting the vicious racism in contemporary Israel and its continuity with the past.
Israel is an apartheid state (no poll required)
A new Ha'aretz poll indicates a majority of Jewish Israelis favour apartheid - but that's nothing new.
Last Modified: 29 Oct 2012 10:13
A poll of Jewish Israelis published last week in Ha'aretz newspaper created headlines round the world with its findings of support among the public for discriminatory policies. Some greeted the survey's results as vindication of claims made by critics of the Jewish state; others pointed to what they said were flaws in the methodology and how the statistics were being presented.
There is, however, no need for such a poll in order to reach the conclusion that Israel is guilty of apartheid: The facts speak for themselves.
Firstly, a clarification about terminology. To talk about Israeli apartheid is not to suggest a precise equivalence with the policies of the historic regime in South Africa. Rather, apartheid is a crime under international law independent of any comparison (see here, here, here, and here). As former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard put it in the foreword to my first book: "It is Israel's own version of a system that has been universally condemned."
It is impossible to understand this "system" without remembering that its foundations were laid by the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Nakba. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, up to 90 per cent of the Palestinians who would have been inside the new state were expelled, their properties confiscated, and their return prevented. As these refugees were denied citizenship and their right to return ignored, Israel passed legislation to open up the new borders to Jews everywhere.
Thus the only reason why Israel, a so-called "liberal democracy", has a Jewish majority at all is because of the forced - and ongoing - physical exclusion of Palestinians from their homes. From 1948 to 1953, 95 per cent of new Jewish communities were established on expelled Palestinians' property. The amount of land belonging to Palestinian refugees expropriated by Israel's "Absentee Property Law" amounts to around 20 per cent of the country's total pre-1967 territory.
Rearranging demographics
Today, around one in four Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are "present absentees", their homes and land confiscated. By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost around 65 to 75 per cent of its land. Since 1948, over 700 Jewish communities have been established inside Israel's pre-67 borders - but only seven for Palestinian citizens (and those in order to concentrate the Bedouin population in the Negev).
Over the decades, the Israeli state has sought to "Judaise" areas of the country deemed to have "too high" a number of Palestinian citizens compared to Jews, particularly the Negev and Galilee regions. One strategy in the Galilee was to establish mitzpim (Hebrew: "look out") communities whose goal, according to a Jewish Agency planner, was to "keep Arab villages from attaining territorial continuity and attract a 'strong' population to the Galilee'."
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens live in dozens of "unrecognised villages", mainly in the Negev (though "non recognition" is not restricted to the south). They suffer from home demolitions and a lack of basic infrastructure. A serious new threat is the Prawer Plan, with planned mass evictions threatening up to 70,000 with forced relocation and the destruction of their villages.
This planned ethnic cleansing is driven by the sort of anxiety Shimon Peres expressed to US officials in 2005, when he worried that Israel had "lost" land in the Negev "to the Bedouin" and would need to take steps to "relieve" the "demographic threat". A senior official in the Jewish Agency in 2003 explained a new Judaisation initiative on the grounds that "the birthrate of the Bedouins and Arabs in the Galilee is much faster than the Jewish" and thus "we are quickly losing our majority there".
Another element in this regime of ethnic privilege is admissions committees, which operate in around 70 per cent of Israeli towns and permit (or deny) residency on the basis of social "suitability". By "rejecting applications" from Palestinian citizens, the committees "have notoriously been used to exclude Arabs from living in rural Jewish communities" (Human Rights Watch).
Their role is now legislated for in around 42 per cent of communities, and those supporting the law were not shy to express their motivations. MK Israel Hasson (from the "centrist" Kadima party) said the law's purpose is to "preserve the ability to realise the Zionist dream in practice", while MK David Rotem (from FM Lieberman's party Yisrael Beiteinu), said Jews and Palestinians should be "separate but equal", affirming that "Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens".
Separate but separate
Israel's institutionalised racism has serious consequences even for Palestinians' choices about who to marry. In January, the High Court - a forum praised by "liberal" defenders of Israeli apartheid - upheld a law severely restricting Israeli citizens' ability to live with spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. In the majority opinion, Justice Asher Grunis wrote that "human rights are not a prescription for national suicide" - referring to the "demographic" spectre that haunts apartheid regimes.
Full article: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121027145235386715.html
Israel is an apartheid state (no poll required)
A new Ha'aretz poll indicates a majority of Jewish Israelis favour apartheid - but that's nothing new.
Last Modified: 29 Oct 2012 10:13
A poll of Jewish Israelis published last week in Ha'aretz newspaper created headlines round the world with its findings of support among the public for discriminatory policies. Some greeted the survey's results as vindication of claims made by critics of the Jewish state; others pointed to what they said were flaws in the methodology and how the statistics were being presented.
There is, however, no need for such a poll in order to reach the conclusion that Israel is guilty of apartheid: The facts speak for themselves.
Firstly, a clarification about terminology. To talk about Israeli apartheid is not to suggest a precise equivalence with the policies of the historic regime in South Africa. Rather, apartheid is a crime under international law independent of any comparison (see here, here, here, and here). As former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard put it in the foreword to my first book: "It is Israel's own version of a system that has been universally condemned."
It is impossible to understand this "system" without remembering that its foundations were laid by the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Nakba. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, up to 90 per cent of the Palestinians who would have been inside the new state were expelled, their properties confiscated, and their return prevented. As these refugees were denied citizenship and their right to return ignored, Israel passed legislation to open up the new borders to Jews everywhere.
Thus the only reason why Israel, a so-called "liberal democracy", has a Jewish majority at all is because of the forced - and ongoing - physical exclusion of Palestinians from their homes. From 1948 to 1953, 95 per cent of new Jewish communities were established on expelled Palestinians' property. The amount of land belonging to Palestinian refugees expropriated by Israel's "Absentee Property Law" amounts to around 20 per cent of the country's total pre-1967 territory.
Rearranging demographics
Today, around one in four Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are "present absentees", their homes and land confiscated. By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost around 65 to 75 per cent of its land. Since 1948, over 700 Jewish communities have been established inside Israel's pre-67 borders - but only seven for Palestinian citizens (and those in order to concentrate the Bedouin population in the Negev).
Over the decades, the Israeli state has sought to "Judaise" areas of the country deemed to have "too high" a number of Palestinian citizens compared to Jews, particularly the Negev and Galilee regions. One strategy in the Galilee was to establish mitzpim (Hebrew: "look out") communities whose goal, according to a Jewish Agency planner, was to "keep Arab villages from attaining territorial continuity and attract a 'strong' population to the Galilee'."
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens live in dozens of "unrecognised villages", mainly in the Negev (though "non recognition" is not restricted to the south). They suffer from home demolitions and a lack of basic infrastructure. A serious new threat is the Prawer Plan, with planned mass evictions threatening up to 70,000 with forced relocation and the destruction of their villages.
This planned ethnic cleansing is driven by the sort of anxiety Shimon Peres expressed to US officials in 2005, when he worried that Israel had "lost" land in the Negev "to the Bedouin" and would need to take steps to "relieve" the "demographic threat". A senior official in the Jewish Agency in 2003 explained a new Judaisation initiative on the grounds that "the birthrate of the Bedouins and Arabs in the Galilee is much faster than the Jewish" and thus "we are quickly losing our majority there".
Another element in this regime of ethnic privilege is admissions committees, which operate in around 70 per cent of Israeli towns and permit (or deny) residency on the basis of social "suitability". By "rejecting applications" from Palestinian citizens, the committees "have notoriously been used to exclude Arabs from living in rural Jewish communities" (Human Rights Watch).
Their role is now legislated for in around 42 per cent of communities, and those supporting the law were not shy to express their motivations. MK Israel Hasson (from the "centrist" Kadima party) said the law's purpose is to "preserve the ability to realise the Zionist dream in practice", while MK David Rotem (from FM Lieberman's party Yisrael Beiteinu), said Jews and Palestinians should be "separate but equal", affirming that "Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens".
Separate but separate
Israel's institutionalised racism has serious consequences even for Palestinians' choices about who to marry. In January, the High Court - a forum praised by "liberal" defenders of Israeli apartheid - upheld a law severely restricting Israeli citizens' ability to live with spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. In the majority opinion, Justice Asher Grunis wrote that "human rights are not a prescription for national suicide" - referring to the "demographic" spectre that haunts apartheid regimes.
Full article: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121027145235386715.html