Israel

[emma_goldman]

Leading Israeli Journalist Asks: Can You Really Not Know?
By Amira Hass
HA'ARETZ (Israeli Newspaper)
AUGUST 30, 2006
www.haaretz. com

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the
dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us." Leave
aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and
destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an
entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers,
machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the
ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These
are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors,
media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not
support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking
trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about
you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you
all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws?
Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated
for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are
entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that
forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home?
That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of
additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another
exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire
killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?
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Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the Jordan
Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all side with an
Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have
obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the
occupied territories?

Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to
forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and
medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from
receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to
hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had no idea that the
discrimination practiced in the distribution of water - which is solely
controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of Palestinian households
without water during the hot summer months; we had no idea that when the
IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it also blocks their access to
springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344 in
the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it
passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the access of
thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that you support the
quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals,
the disruption of electricity and water supply to 1.4 million human
beings, closing their only outlet to the world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your
faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in
which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are
letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours
under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm
are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and under - yallah, back to Jenin,
residents of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick
woman who skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully
detained for hours. Machsom Watch's site is available for all; in it are
countless such testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it
cannot be that those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a
Jewish grave in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish
local newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will
not be appalled and outraged.

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all
collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active
and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing,
suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and
tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews.

We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in
concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and recreation
in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us. Therefore, the
burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is immeasurably heavy.

[Jamal]

True, very true!
The situation over there is dreadful! The Palestinians are not living, this is not a life! Continuous opression from the IDF is leaving them breathless. Even in the past war, the Palestinian neighborhoods in the North where not given bomb shelters!

Over 65% of the Palestinians live under the line of poverty based on UN standards!


That you all side with an
Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have
obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the
occupied territories?

Even the Palestinians who haven't obtained foreign citizenship, like the ones in Lebanon, are prevented from returning to there families!

The Palestinian situation is far from "wrong", it goes deep beyond that!

[JC1]

Even the Palestinians who haven't obtained foreign citizenship, like the ones in Lebanon, are prevented from returning to there families!

The Palestinian situation is far from "wrong", it goes deep beyond that!

Agreed. What must happen is that all arab states give citizenship to the children of palistinian refugee's. This should be a minimum demand of communists in the region.

Arabs and Jews in Israel should be intergrated.

[norwegian commie]

The jeeves see the situaton, we do, the entire world has some sort of idea of what is going on. Some of the most eager israel supporters abondon their belief after a trip to palestine/Israel.

Why does the world nothing?
Why, instead of seeing the injustice, my country goes to boikott!?
A party, in the goverment sais, lets boycott israel! and the result is boikotting palestine.

The people need to wake up. Can they not see? good question.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2006, 10:55 AM

Even the Palestinians who haven't obtained foreign citizenship, like the ones in Lebanon, are prevented from returning to there families!

The Palestinian situation is far from "wrong", it goes deep beyond that!

Agreed. What must happen is that all arab states give citizenship to the children of palistinian refugee's. This should be a minimum demand of communists in the region.
That isn't the demand of the Palestinians themselves. And as Marx pointed out, communists should be guided by the real movement.


"After 50 years in Lebanon, the 370,000 Palestinians still face severe social discrimination," said Kahtan, another member of the organization. "We are denied basic rights as residents of the country. Palestinians cannot hold over 70 categories of jobs by law and you pay taxes but get none of the social security benefits that other workers are entitled to."

Bassam added, "We are fighting for the civic rights that any human being is entitled to. As long as we are forced by the Israelis to live outside our country, Palestine, we are entitled to live with some dignity. We are not demanding to become Lebanese citizens because we will never give up our own homeland, but these restrictive laws on Palestinian refugees must be lifted."
Article: Palestinians in Lebanon say: 'We will never give up the fight for our homeland" (http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6404/640454.html)

They are prevented from returning to their homeland by one of the many explicitly discriminatory laws enforced by Israel (as the Amira Hass article points out.) Anyone Jewish has an automatic right to "return" to Israel; but Palestinians expelled by ethnic cleansing have no such right.

Hass points out that Palestinians who hold foreign citizenship are not allowed even to return to the occupied territories; but the larger injustice is that no expelled Palestinian is allowed to return to Israel.

She points out that "Israeli Arabs" are second-class citizens. But the larger injustice is that Palestinians in the occupied territories have no citizenship rights at all. They have been under Israeli rule for almost 40 years; with no end in sight. But voice and vote in the government which rules over them? Forget it.

Finally, I've never liked the approach of trying to guilt-trip people into activism. "As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill."

That's a common approach among privileged liberals and some radicals in the U.S., too. It's an approach which assumes "we" have something in common with the imperialist state and ruling class.

Far less irreconcilable than the approach which rejects any responsibility for imperialism, insisting on a common revolutionary struggle by workers across borders.

[Jamal]

Palestinian refugees here in Lebanon are suffering greatly from lack of humanity towards them, as Severian stated, they are without any civil rights and most of them are living below the line of poverty.

The reason the government says that it has these laws against the Palestinians in Lebanon is that it does not want them to give up the fight to get there land back, so it makes them live in hell so they do not like it here and never want to stay.

We, leftists in Lebanon, are fighting for these people's rights, as a humane being at least! The jobs they can work in are countable on one's hands, and non of them hold opertunities of progress and promotion.

[Guerrilla22]

This is a fact Israeli apologist like Dershowitz never seem to acknowledge. Palestinians don't have the right of return but any and all Jews do, its illegal for a Jew to marry a non-Jew in Israel and refugees are detained and returned to their homeland if caught, unless of course you can prove that you are Jewish.