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Hermit
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Apartheid Israel
« on: 2009-08-04 10:12:17 » |
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Poll: 77% of 'Soviet' olim support Arab transfer
Survey conducted by Israel Democracy Institute focuses on integration of immigrants from former Soviet Union into Israeli society after 20 years of aliyah. 2009 Democracy Index finds immigrants tend to be more hawkish, believe less in Israeli democracy, and are much more pessimistic.
Source: Ynet
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2009-08-03
The 2009 Democracy Index, published by the Israel Democracy Institute on Sunday, reveals marked differences between the immigrant population from the former Soviet Union and the general population in Israel.
The IDI's 2009 Democracy Index was handed to President Shimon Peres Monday. The survey was carried out in March 2009 on a sample representative of the adult population in Israel of 1,191 respondents. The respondents were interviewed in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian. The sampling error is 2.8%.
Around half of the public feel that they are unable to influence government policy, but almost 80% feel that they are able to change things in different frameworks in which they live, work or study. It should be emphasized that among immigrants the sense of influence is the lowest, with more than 40% of them feeling that they have no ability to change things within any of these frameworks.
The Israeli public believes in freedom of expression as a general value, but for the most part refuses to allow harsh criticism to be expressed against the state. 74% support “Freedom of expression for everyone, regardless of their opinions.” However, 58% agree that “political speech should not be permitted to express harsh criticism of the state of Israel.” This is a significant increase as compared to 48% in 2003.
Growing support for denying Arabs' rights
53% of the Jewish public supports encouraging Arabs to emigrate from Israel. 77% of immigrants support this idea, compared with 47% of the veteran public. 33% of veteran Jews are accepting of the inclusion of Arab parties in the government, by comparison with 23% of immigrants.
Only 27% of respondents objected to the statement that there should be “a Jewish majority in decisions relating to the fate of the country,” by comparison with 2003, when 38% objected to this statement. These figures indicate relatively broad support for decreasing the political rights of Israel’s Arab minority.
54% of the general public (Jews and Arabs) agrees that “only citizens who are loyal to the state are entitled to benefit from civil rights” (56% of the veterans, 67% of immigrants and 30% of the Arabs). 38% of the entire Jewish public believe that Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens (43% of the veterans hold this belief, versus 23% of immigrants). In addition, 41% of veteran Jews are of the opinion that “Israeli Arabs face greater discrimination than Jewish Israelis,” compared to 28% of immigrants holding this view.
FSU immigrants more hawkish
The use of violence: 33% of immigrants from the FSU think that political violence is legitimate, as compared to 35% of Israeli Arabs and 22% of veteran Israelis. Among the general public, the greatest legitimacy is given to the use of political violence by young people aged 18 to 30, at 27%.
Evacuating settlements: 48% of Israelis are not prepared to evacuate any settlements within the framework of a permanent agreement; 37% are prepared for the evacuation of isolated settlements; and 15% are prepared to evacuate all the settlements over the green line.
The position of the immigrants from the FSU is more hawkish than that of the general Jewish public: 64% are not prepared for settlements to be evacuated in the framework of a permanent agreement; 30% are prepared for the evacuation of isolated settlements; and 6% are prepared to evacuate all the settlements.
Desire to live in Israel
In the 31-40 age group (parents of children up to the age of 18), 80% of veteran Israelis are certain that they want to raise their children in Israel, compared to only 28% of immigrants from the FSU. 92% of the veterans have some degree of desire to see their “children or grandchildren live in Israel”, as compared to 74% of immigrants.
In light of the weight that the immigrant population gives to security issues, it is possible that one of the explanations for these findings is that more than half of the immigrants from the FSU live in peripheral settlements in the north and south, which have suffered from an insecure security situation and have lived under considerable threat in recent years.
Only 50% of immigrants aged 18 to 30 are certain that they want to live in Israel, by comparison with 77% of veteran Israelis in this age bracket. In the older age group, the percentage of immigrants wanting to live in Israel is comparable to that of veteran Israelis.
Among immigrants from the FSU, there is a significant reduction in the percentage of people who are certain that they want to live in Israel. This trend is particularly notable among young people, with only 48% of immigrants up to the age of 40 being certain that they want to live here (as compared to 59% in 2007). A decrease in the desire to live in Israel was also characteristic of young veteran Israelis at the end of the Second Lebanon War, but this group has seen an impressive recovery, and as of 2009 the level has returned to pre-2006 figures (80%).
Both immigrants and veterans cite security and economic conditions as the primary reasons that they would leave the country, although 81% of immigrants—as opposed to 59% of veteran Israelis—claim that the security situation is the main reason for wanting to leave Israel.
Approximately half of Israelis feel that the important condition for being “really Israeli” is to be born in Israel.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #1 on: 2009-08-30 11:44:27 » |
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Damaging Israel's priceless assets
Netanyahu's demonising of human rights groups – and European funding of them – does disservice to a proud Jewish history
Source: guardian.co.uk
Authors: Antony Lerman
Dated: 2009-08-30
With the left in Israel in disarray and unable to mount any effective opposition to the policies of the Binyamin Netanyahu government, Israel's human rights groups occupy a more significant place than ever in the political landscape. They, and a handful of journalists, are the only organisations and individuals in Israel that have the moral authority and objective expertise to call the government to account for any human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza at the hands of Israeli officials or settlers.
While the Likud-led coalition can brush aside virtually any criticism from opposition groups in the Knesset, reports by human rights groups can get under its skin.
Netanyahu made this perfectly clear on Wednesday when he mounted an outspoken attack on Breaking the Silence after meeting with Gordon Brown in London. Calling on the British government and other European governments to cease funding such groups, Netanyahu said: "They are breaking the silence regarding the only democracy in the Middle East with an independent judiciary and investigative media, which deals with these matters continually."
Breaking the Silence is the organisation of veteran Israeli soldiers that interviewed those who participated in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Their testimonies "reveal[ed] ... the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions."
The group's report, released on 15 July, was thoroughly trashed at the time by the Israeli government and military authorities. But 10 Israeli human rights and social change organisations wrote to their country's prime minister, minister of defence and foreign minister on 2 August, protesting against the government's attack and its attempt to prevent the group from receiving funding, and saying that the testimonies placed "a large question-mark over the 'most moral army in the world' image". The testimonies also appeared to confirm claims made by international human rights organisations such as Amnesty, which accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the conflict.
All of the Israeli human rights groups have come under attack at some point. One of the signatories of the 2 August letter was Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHR-I), which was founded in 1988 to "struggle for human rights, in particular the right to health, in Israel and the Occupied Territories", through advocacy and action aimed at "changing harmful policies". One of their main current concerns is torture and the role Israeli doctors may have played in cooperating with the practice or failing to report it when they witness it. On 13 August NGO Monitor, which claims to promote critical debate and accountability of human rights organisations in the Arab Israeli conflict, criticised PHR-I for engaging in "political campaigns" and not "universal human rights activities".
It also quoted Dr Yoram Blachar, president of the World Medical Association (WMA), who said PHR-I is a "radical political group disguised as a medical organisation". But Dr Blachar is not just president of the WMA. He is also chairman of the Israel Medical Association (IMA), to which all Israeli doctors are obliged to belong. Last week, after increasingly harsh criticism of PHR-I by Dr Blacher, the IMA announced that it was severing all ties with the group. Dr Blachar explained the decision in a letter saying: "the outrageous situation is that PHR's activity serves as fertile ground for antisemitism, anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism".
The fact that most of PHR-I's 1,500 members are also members of the IMA makes a mockery of Blachar's campaign and simply makes it look as if the IMA opposes action to ensure the right to healthcare to all, irrespective of their religion or nationality – surely a fundamental principle for any doctor. Blachar's bizarre rhetoric no doubt has something to do with a list of 13 doctors PHR-I suspected of co-operating in, or failing to report, the torture of Palestinians. Blachar is listed as one of those it suspects of failing to report. [ Hermit : Classic Israeli situation ]
The attacks on Israeli human rights groups are crude and unsophisticated. To damn them because they conduct public campaigns to get their message across and achieve change is to completely misunderstand their declared roles. To say such actions do not constitute "universal human rights activities" is to condemn these organisations to impotence and to add "human rights values" to the list of ideological animosities towards Jews that the Israeli government and many of its supporters wheel out when they want to demonise criticism of Israeli actions.
The fact that Netanyahu makes such a high profile attack on Israeli human rights groups at the very moment that the media are full of speculation about an imminent breakthrough in restarting peace negotiations also calls into question just what kind of peace process the Israeli government wishes to engage in. If you make these groups the enemy, you are setting your face against the kind of essential truth-telling and openness that must underpin the trust both sides need to have in each other if a just peace is to be achieved and sustained.
The current government seems bent on making Israel a more illiberal society by undermining freedom of speech, condoning public expressions of racism and threatening mass deportation of refugees. So it's not surprising that Netanyahu cannot understand just how priceless an asset the country's human rights organisations are. It's absurd to trumpet Israel as the "only democracy in the Middle East" and in the same breath attack the very organisations that any democracy must cherish. Their very aims are to strengthen democracy and the rule of law. [ Hermit : An identical reaction to that inspired by the disapprobation of Apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s ]
These groups are now an integral part of a kaleidoscopic array of voluntary organisations that make up a vibrant global Jewish civil society – a connection that has its roots in the role Jewish NGOs played in building the international human rights system in the 1940s and 1950s. If the Israeli government had any sense it would base its public relations strategy on this fact. By continuing to demonise Israeli human rights groups, it's just shooting itself in the foot.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #2 on: 2009-08-31 04:09:38 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-08-30 11:44:27
Source: guardian.co.uk
<snip>
Netanyahu said: "They are breaking the silence regarding the only democracy in the Middle East </snip> |
[Blunderov] Strange kind of democracy that disenfranchises half the people living in it by means of exile, murder, intimidation, expropriation and biased legislation. Sounds a lot like apartheid to me - which is a recognised crime against humanity.
Down with the "two state solution". The world does not need anymore bantustans. Jerusalem is one city, not two.
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #3 on: 2009-08-31 09:40:34 » |
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Whatever East Jerusalem is, like the rest of the territories seized by Israel in 1967 and later, it is not now a part of Israel, no matter that Israel claims that it is.
As I have noted before, Israel's ongoing, highly successful appropriation of Palestinian land and resources has made a viable two state solution utterly impossible. Which means that unless they blow themselves and their neighbours up as a preventive measure, Israel will eventually but inevitably lose its Jewish nature - whereupon demographic realities will mean that the Jews will become a minority and had best be praying that the Palestinians are nicer to them than they have been to the Palestinians. It also means that unless the enormous stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as well as their delivery systems are destroyed in the lead up to this (and, as in the case of South Africa, it is very likely that the Americans will have quite a lot to say on the subject and will likely accompany their statements with very serious and not at all diplomatic threats ) that a very well armed Islamic power will arise in the midst of a rather sensitive area.
Given that it is not just I, the Grand Ayatollah and the president of Iran saying this, but also the CIA (who last year predicted 15 years until Israel collapses into a single state), which may have more than a little to do with Obama's State Department's brief pretence to an attempt to bring Israel to the negotiating table, before his administration folded like the wet cardboard it is in the face of AIPAC threats to Democrat incumbents.
US Won’t Press Israel on Settlements
US Promises Not to Press for East Jerusalem Freeze
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2009-08-27
While the US State Department publicly insisted the official Obama Administration on the Israeli settlements had not changed, privately diplomats are saying that the adminstration has done a virtual 180, backing off pretty much all its demands with respect to Israel’s settlement activity.
At this point, the US had agreed to completely abandon complaints over Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967. Though the US will not publicly endorse the continued construction it will no longer ask Israel to freeze them.
About all they got was a dubious promise from the Netanyahu government to not issue new construction permits for settlements in the West Bank for nine months. Even this promise likely means little, as thousands of already approved construction projects will continue in the meantime and the Israeli government is already talking about an exit strategy from the program, even though it hasn’t officially halted the permits yet.
The Palestinian Authority has previously said it will not return to the peace talks without a halt to the settlement expansion, and in all likelihood a brief pause in new permits will likely not be sufficient to them. Since the Israelis are giving President Obama everything he is asking for at this point (which is to say, virtually nothing) this may result in the US returning to its familiar role of cheering Israel as a peacemaker while chastising the Palestinians. [ Hermit : Ultimately ensuring that "the regime currently occupying Israel will vanish from the pages of time" and if ever any nasty bunch of Machiavellian schemers deserved to score such an emphatic own goal, I think that the Israelis have repeatedly done their best to prove that they do. ]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #4 on: 2009-09-08 13:32:24 » |
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Palestinians 'seriously considering' one-state
Source: AFP
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2009-09-06
Former US president Jimmy Carter said Sunday Palestinian leaders were "seriously considering" a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, following a visit to the Middle East.
"A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea," Carter wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.
"By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy," he explained. "In this non-violent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela."
Carter noted that in doing so, Palestinian leaders were taking into consideration current demographic trends.
He said non-Jews were already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, "and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority."
Carter added that a two-state solution for the conflict was "clearly preferable" and had been embraced at the grass root level but that a one-state solution was "a more likely alternative to the present debacle."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #5 on: 2009-09-22 10:53:04 » |
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Hamas is not al-Qaida
The two are radically different – the position of the democratically elected Hamas is about land, not religion, creed or race
Source: The Guardian
Authors: Anas Altikriti
Dated: 2009-09-21
The New Statesman's interview with Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, was one of the most significant interviews with the leading figure in a movement that has been demonised and excommunicated by most of the western world and its media. The fact that Meshal realises that his words will be scrutinised by his allies and supporters as closely as his adversaries confirms that he speaks of the official position of Hamas on a number of crucial issues which the pro-Israel propaganda apparatus has managed to manipulate for so long.
Arguably, the most important assertion made in the interview, conducted by Ken Livingstone, is that in which Meshal clearly stated that the Palestinian struggle was anything but a conflict between Muslims and the Jewish people. He insisted that the Palestinians were fighting against the occupier who had dispossessed them of their homes and lands, regardless of religion, creed or race. He also went on to confirm that the concept of coexistence was largely present in the Palestinian psyche, and that genocide, as suffered by Jews in Europe (and which he described as "horrible and criminal") was alien not only to the Palestinians but to the inhabitants of the region as a whole.
His statement that Jews, Muslims and Christians had for centuries lived side by side – implying there was nothing intrinsic to prevent this happening again in the future – is crucial. This mirrors Ismail Haniyeh's response, after he became prime minister in 2006, to the question of whether the Palestinians wished to throw the Jews into the sea: "Does a besieged people that is waiting breathlessly for a ship to come from the sea want to throw the Jews into the ocean? Our conflict is not with the Jews, our problem is with the occupation."
This unequivocal stand is one that ought to be welcomed by Jewish communities around the world. Rather than the fear-mongering tactics of the Israeli media machine, particularly during the Gaza attack earlier this year, warning Jews of imminent attacks against them and their facilities, Meshal was sending a clear message of assurance that the Palestinian struggle was political rather than religious and about real political grievances and not against the Jewish people per se. This comes after Meshal had himself publicly rejected any attack committed anywhere in the world which exploited the premise of the Palestinian struggle.
His comments on democracy were equally enlightening. He explained that since the Palestinian people included the entire political, religious and ideological spectrums, Hamas would abide by the outcome of their vote, respect the rights of different faiths and political views, and refrain from imposing Islamic law against the wishes of the people. This position has been condemned by al-Qaida and the leading Salafi-jihadi theologian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi who stated that they and Hamas shared "neither ideology nor doctrine".
Meshal's interview was denounced by Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis on grounds that would equally exclude the government from talking to Israel were it not for the double standards applied to Palestine and the Middle East. Indeed, the very fact that Ivan Lewis should be made a minister with responsibility for the Middle East, given his clear bias as a former deputy leader of the Labour Friends of Israel, is a sad indication of how little interest it displays in convincing people of any kind of fairness in its approach to this part of the world.
The British government led the way in proscribing Hamas when the Islamic movement won the majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in January 2006. More recently it is reported that the British government has been heavily involved in training and supporting the security forces of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which have been accused of imprisoning, torturing and physically abusing members of Hamas and other political factions. While finding time to condemn an interview in a weekly magazine, neither Ivan Lewis nor the British government as a whole has accepted the finding of the authoritative UN report on Gaza authored by a committee led by a South African judge well known for his support for Israel, which condemned Israel for war crimes and possibly even crimes against humanity in Gaza.
A few weeks ago in Oxford, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, spoke promisingly on the Palestinian issue, making clear that al-Qaida and Hamas were quite different. On that he was right. When the Twin Towers were attacked in September 2001, the Palestinian intifada was at its peak and people around the world were gripped by the resolve and tenacity of the Palestinian people. Visiting South Africa at the time, I found most universities had unions supporting the Palestinian struggle and comparing it to their own successful struggle against apartheid.
However, one immediate reaction to the collapse of the towers and the death of almost 3,000 Americans was the mobilisation of the Israeli propaganda machine which claimed that the fight it was engaged in on the streets of Palestinian towns and villages was the same as that which the US and its people had horrifically come face to face with. The message was that Hamas, which was in the forefront of the Palestinian struggle, was one and the same as al-Qaida, and that their persecution of Hamas was simply part of the global war on terror. The radical different policies and methods of Hamas and al-Qaida, not least the refusal of Hamas to take up arms outside Palestine, were dismissed.
Even the most superficial examination exposes these lies. Al-Qaida has four main features: it has called for a "global war on the Crusaders and Jews"; it sees any target anywhere around the world that serves its cause as legitimate; it dismisses democracy as an affront to Islam and a satanic system of rule; and it believes in enforcing Sharia law in all Muslim countries, if not beyond.
As Gideon Levy, a columnist for the popular Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, explains in the New Statesman, Hamas is totally different. In fact, Hamas supports democracy, is the democratically elected majority representative of the Palestinian people and takes up arms solely within Palestine because there is no alternative against an illegal occupying power that confiscates its people's lands and destroys their livelihoods. In similar circumstances, as Israeli leaders have themselves admitted, any people in the world would do the same.
It is high time that we act assertively to resolve the 61-year Palestinian tragedy and end the ongoing crisis. It is time for the British government to stop discrediting itself by blatant double standards and to listen to many, including the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and to recognise and speak directly to those whom the Palestinian people have chosen to represent them: Hamas.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #6 on: 2009-09-25 10:36:06 » |
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Israeli drive to prevent Jewish girls dating Arabs
Source: The National
Authors: Jonathan Cook (Foreign Correspondent)
Dated: 2009-09-25
A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.
The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate – and little discussed – initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.
In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.
Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel’s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state’s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.
Since the state’s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.
Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.
In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple’s return.
Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was “too small to be studied”. “Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.”
The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva.
The girls’ involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode among some young people.
In sentiments widely shared, Mr Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said “Russian girls”, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.
Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships with Arab men because they “did not undergo the religious and Zionist education” to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.
Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.
“We can’t tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice,” he said.
Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into the city as a result.
Petah Tikva’s hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is shared by other communities.
In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as “Fire for Judaism” that tries to stop interracial dating.
Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem’s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.
One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, said: “Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to explain to them the dangers of what they’re getting themselves into. In the last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian] villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren’t heard from after that.”
He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.
Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an “unnatural phenomenon”.
Haim Shalom, head of the municipality’s welfare department, is filmed saying: “The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab.”
In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to “beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime”.
Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the “seducing” of Jewish girls was “another form of war” by Arab men.
Both Kiryat Gat and Safed’s campaigns were supported by a religious organisation called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to “saving” Jewish women.
According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West Bank. It launches “military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab villages” in co-ordination with the police and army.
“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the website.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #7 on: 2009-09-28 15:53:28 » |
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Gaza peace protester is imprisoned in own home
Source: The National
Authors: Jonathan Cook (Foreign Correspondent, Nazareth, Israel)
Dated: 2009-09-28
Nine months after he helped to organise protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza, Samih Jabareen is a prisoner in his home in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, an electronic bracelet around his ankle to alert the police should he step outside his front door.
The 40-year-old actor and theatre director is one of dozens of Arab political activists in Israel who have faced long-term detention during and since Israel’s winter assault on Gaza in what human rights groups are calling political intimidation and repression of free speech by the Israeli police and courts.
A report published last week by Adalah, an Arab legal rights group in Israel, said 830 Israeli demonstrators, the overwhelming majority of them Arab citizens, were arrested for participating in mostly peaceful demonstrations during the 23 days of the Gaza operation.
According to the report, the police broke up protests using physical violence; most protesters were refused bail during legal proceedings, despite the minor charges; the courts treated children no differently from adults, in violation of international law; and Arab leaders were interrogated and threatened by the secret police in a bid to end their political activity.
This month’s report by the UN inquiry into Gaza, led by Judge Richard Goldstone, dedicated a chapter to events inside Israel, concluding similarly that there was wide-scale repression of political activists, non-governmental organisations and journalists in Israel.
The goal, the committee said, was “to minimise public scrutiny of [Israel’s] conduct both during its military operations in Gaza and the consequences that these operations have had for the residents of Gaza”.
Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, said the police and legal system had resorted to mass arrests and a declared policy of “zero tolerance” as the most effective way to suppress peaceful protests.
According to Adalah’s statistics, a third of all those arrested were people under the age of 18, and, in a break with normal legal procedure, 80 per cent were refused bail for the entire period of legal proceedings. Detention is usually reserved for people considered a danger to the public. Most charges related to participation in a prohibited gathering, disturbing the peace or assaulting a police officer. Some children were charged with stone-throwing.
Ms Baker said it was telling that all the detainees in northern Israel, where most of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens live, were kept in detention throughout proceedings, while in Tel Aviv, where joint Arab-Jewish protests were held, all those arrested were quickly released.
She said: “The police used the power of arrest not to punish criminal behaviour, but as a weapon to deter the Arab population from staging entirely lawful demonstrations. This is a tactic we have seen used before in Israel, particularly in the first and second intifadas.”
She noted that there were echoes of events in October 2000, at the start of the second intifada, when Arab citizens held demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories. Thirteen unarmed Arab demonstrators were shot dead and hundreds were beaten and arrested.
A later state inquiry castigated the police for treating the Arab minority, a fifth of Israel’s population, as an “enemy”. Unlike in 2000, however, police commanders on this occasion did not resort to rubber bullets or live ammunition.
Mr Jabareen, a prominent political figure in Jaffa, said that during the Gaza assault he had been put under a three-day house arrest and faced a series of interrogations where he was warned he would be jailed.
Three weeks after the Gaza assault ended, at a small demonstration in northern Israel, he said the police set a “trap” for him. “When I arrived, the police commander clearly knew who I was. He immediately had seven officers surround me. I was soon on the ground and they were beating, hitting and kicking me.”
Mr Jabareen was jailed for three weeks and has been under house arrest ever since. He said his treatment contrasted with that of the ultra-Orthodox in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem who have been clashing with police for months to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath.
“They are shown on TV throwing punches at the police and hurling stones at them. A few arrests have been made, but despite the high levels of violence, they are almost always released the same or next day. How can I still be under house arrest for eight months? It is clear that different legal standards are being applied.”
Adalah found that a new directive was issued to police commanders about how to handle the protests, though the police have refused to divulge its contents. Ms Baker said she would petition the attorney general for the information.
The Goldstone Committee noted widespread intimidation and humiliation of community leaders. It also recorded that at least 20 Arab leaders were forced to attend illegal interrogations by the Shin Bet where they were asked about their political activities.
Police demanded Amir Makhoul, the head of the Ittijah co-ordinating body for Arab organisations in Israel, attend an interrogation following a speech he gave on December 29 in Haifa. After he refused, he was forcibly escorted to a police station where he was interviewed for four hours.
“They told me I would be thrown in jail if I continued my political work and that they could arrange for me to be dumped in Gaza. Their main concern seemed to be that I was urging the younger generation to be more politically active,” he said.
The Arab minority is staging a general strike on Thursday to protest the increasingly harsh climate.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #8 on: 2009-10-15 02:01:16 » |
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Israel Rules Out Peace Talks Unless UN Abandons Gaza Report
Western Nations Urge Israel to Probe Report Findings
[ Hermit : What this amounts to is that Israel will continue with its illegal occupation and collective punishment of all Palestinians unless the world agrees to abandon prosecution of Israelis for their brutal and glaring war crimes. At this point the goose is a smouldering lump of white hot char. Given that Israel and many of their American stooges have been calling for "killing sanctions" against Iran over completely unsupported suspicions that they may be thinking about nuclear weapons, and threatened massive economic sanctions against their quisling government in the West Bank, isn't it time for "killing sanctions" against Israel, which a mountain of irrefutable evidence shows is armed to the teeth with nuclear and biological weapons and routinely engages in ongoing war crimes. ]
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2009-10-14
Though over the last several months Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trumpeting what he claimed to be an offer of unconditional peace talks, his government is now clearly laying out conditions.
Gabriella Shalev, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, is now demanding that the international body abandon all consideration for the Goldstone report on war crimes committed during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, and says there can be no peace talks until they do so.
“We will not sit at the table and will not talk with bodies and people who accuse us of war crimes,” the ambassador declared, just the latest in a long line of officials expressing faux-outrage at a report which seems to have done little but confirm what several reports from private human rights groups in Israel and abroad have been saying for months.
The United Nations, of course, isn’t an actual party to the hypothetical Israel – Fatah peace talks, but Fatah was finally forced to abandon its call to let the matter drop, under intense pressure from Palestinians still angered by the massive civilian toll in the Gaza Strip and outraged at what was seen as simple blackmail after Israel threatened economic sanctions on the West Bank to punish them if the matter was pursued.
The US [ Hermit : Which of course has lilly white hands, never having engaged in war crimes without pursuing the culprits! ] has repeatedly condemned the Goldstone report as “biased” though it accuses both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the Israeli incursion, but officials still say that the Israeli government ought to at least probe the charges made in the report. For now that seems unlikely, and the very suggestion appears to have been the excuse the hawkish Netanyahu government has been looking for to abandon the pretense of peace talks outright.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #9 on: 2009-10-16 14:08:13 » |
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UN Rights Council Endorses Gaza War Report
Goldstone Report Moves on to Almost Certain US Veto at Security Council
[ Hermit : Hooray. Now the US will either support justice or will have to formally register its hypocrisy in a way that will drastically reduce its legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world lessening its ability to machinate on Israel's behalf, and expose the Obama administration's complicity in suppressing the prosecution of war crimes in an undeniable form. Will this mean that monsters such as Charles Taylor will be released? Or will he be found guilty of committing war crimes for a non-Israeli goal? ]
Source: Antiwar.com
: Jason Ditz
: 2009-10-16
The 575-page Goldstone Report, a report on war crimes by the Israeli government and Hamas during the January Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, has been formally endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in a 25-6 vote.
The report will now be referred to the United Nations Security Council, where assuming it is even brought up for a vote it will almost certainly be vetoed by the United States, which has repeatedly and vociferously parroted Israeli objections to the report.
Israel has insisted that the report, penned by a group of experts led by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, is biased despite the fact that it faults both Israel and Hamas over the massive civilian toll. Israeli officials have also insisted that Goldstone, who is Jewish, is an “anti-Semite” for issuing a report so critical of Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who cited the report frequently in a screed condemning the United Nations last month on the assembly floor, has warned the rest of the world that it had better reject the accusation of war crimes, because so many of them are involved in similar wars and might face similar charges if the precedent is set.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #10 on: 2009-11-11 11:37:13 » |
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Department of meaningless gestures
Source: The New ForeignPolicy.com
Authors: Stephen Walt
Dated: 2009-11-11
Two eminent mainstream journalists -- Tom Friedman and Joe Klein -- recently called for United States to disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, on the grounds that Palestinians were too divided to make a deal and the Israelis were not interested in one. Friedman couldn't bring himself to draw the logical conclusion -- if the United States truly going to "disengage," that also means cutting off its economic and military assistance -- but Klein did.
I have a certain sympathy for this position (and even wrote similar things myself before I wised up), but there are two problems with this specific idea. The first is that it is a meaningless prescription: There's no way to cut the aid package (or even put a hold on it, which is what Klein recommends) so long as Congress is in hock to AIPAC and the other groups in the status quo lobby. And unless I've missed something, I doubt groups like J Street would support it either.
Friedman and Klein's statements do convey how discourse in the United States is changing, but the specific recommendation they offer here is a non-starter. Remember: we are dealing with a Congress that just voted to condemn the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344-24. The aid package may be indirectly subsidizing the settlements and threatening Israel’s future as a Jewish majority state, but a supine House and Senate will still sign the annual check.
The second problem, I fear, is that it is too little, too late. Having dithered, delayed and dissembled ever since the Oslo Accords -- while the number of settlers more than doubled -- we are about to face an entirely different problem. The sun is now setting on the "two-state solution" -- if it is not already well below the horizon -- and pretty soon everyone will have to admit that they are sitting around in the dark and pretending they see daylight.
Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton's mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent "Road Map" -- to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine. And on what basis could the United States oppose such a campaign, without explicitly betraying its own core values?
In this regard, it was telling that Martin Indyk -- a key figure in the lobby and far from a harsh critic of Israeli policy -- is quoted in the Times saying "more than likely, we are entering a new era." I think he's right, and he sounds worried. He should be, because the Obama administration isn't remotely ready for it.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #11 on: 2009-11-16 14:05:11 » |
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A Scoundrel With Permission
: Antiwar.com
: Uri Avnery
: 2009-11-16
When the TV news starts with a murder, people are relieved.
This means that no war has broken out, no suicide bomb has exploded, no Qassam rocket has been launched at Sderot. Ahmadinejad has not test-fired a new missile that can reach Tel Aviv. Just another murder.
Not that Israel is the world’s murder capital. We shall have to work much harder to reach the heights of New York or Moscow, not to mention Johannesburg. Statistics even show our murder rate is declining.
But lately Israel has been shocked by a series of exceptionally brutal murders. A husband took revenge on his wife by killing his little daughter and burying her in a forest. A man who lived with the wife of his son killed her daughter, his own granddaughter, put her little body in a suitcase and threw it into Tel Aviv’s Yarkon river. A son who quarreled with his wife killed her and her mother, cut up both bodies and dispersed the parts in garbage bins. A young man who had a quarrel with his mother killed her, and then went off to kill his brother, too. A man in his 70s killed his wife in her sleep with a hammer.
In recent weeks, there were two cases that trumped even these atrocities.
Damian Karlik, an immigrant from Russia who worked as head waiter in a Russian restaurant, was dismissed for theft and decided to take revenge on the owners, Russian immigrants like him. He went to their apartment and stabbed to death six people, one after another – the owner and his wife, their son and his wife, and their two small grandchildren.
An immigrant from the U.S. called Jack Teitel, an inhabitant of one of the most extreme West Bank settlements, has now confessed to the killing some years ago of two random Palestinians. He returned briefly to America, and, after coming back, put bombs into police cars. Why? Because the police were protecting gays and lesbians. He is also suspected of killing two traffic policemen for the same reason. He also claimed responsibility for the mass killing of gays in a Tel Aviv club (though that may be empty bragging). He planted a bomb in the home of some Messianic Jews (Jews who regard Jesus as the Messiah) and grievously injured a 15-year-old. He tried to kill the leftist professor Ze’ev Sternhell with another bomb which wounded him.
What is so special about these two cases is that they involved new immigrants who were allowed into Israel in spite of already being under investigation for crimes in their homelands.
The Law of Return accords every Jew the right to immigrate ("make Aliyah") to Israel, where he or she automatically receives Israeli citizenship on arrival. But even according to this law, the minister of the interior can reject people suspected of serious crimes.
This makes the case of Karlik especially interesting. He was suspected in Russia of armed robbery, but the organization in charge of issuing Israeli immigration permits in Russia asserts that they did not know about it.
This organization, Nativ ("path"), was active in the Soviet Union as one of the Israeli secret services, like the Mossad and Shin Bet. Its particular job was to infiltrate Jewish communities and induce Jews to come to Israel.
Apart from this, Nativ was also engaged, of course, in espionage. It is no secret that for decades immigrants arriving from the Soviet Union were interrogated exhaustively by the Shin Bet about military, economic, and other installations in their former homeland. The precious information thus gathered ensured Israel a high standing in the Western intelligence community.
After the collapse of the Communist regime, Nativ was to be disbanded, but like every threatened organization it fought for its life. It was decided to leave it intact and put it in charge of immigration to Israel from all the former Soviet republics. They now have to make sure that immigrants are kosher Jews according to religious law (or close non-Jewish relatives, who are also allowed to come).
The religious credentials of the immigrants interest Nativ much more than any criminal record they may have. It seems Nativ has no contacts with the Russian police, who probably suspect it of other activities.
Thus it happens that a person like Karlik, a man under investigation for robbery with violence, was found suitable for immigration. His ethnic pedigree was impeccable. After his arrival in Israel, the Russian authorities officially applied for his extradition for robbery, but the request was denied. The escaped robber was issued a license for a gun and allowed to work as a guard.
Teitel’s case is similar. True, in the U.S. there is no Nativ, but the logic of those in charge of emigration to Israel is the same: to bring immigrants without asking unnecessary questions. According to religious law, a Jew remains a Jew even if he sins.
These affairs shine a spotlight on one of the guiding principles of the Zionist establishment: to bring Jews to Israel, whatever the price. Statistics must show that this year – or any other year – a record number of Jews have "made Aliyah." In many communities, the bottom of the barrel is scraped in order to bring more Jews. Emissaries find "lost tribes" of Jews in Peru and Ethiopia, India and China.
In this situation, there is an understandable temptation to overlook the criminal past of would-be immigrants. So what if somebody, a kosher Jew, has robbed a bank or mistreated children? In Israel he will perhaps mend his ways. Or if somebody was put on trial abroad for illegal arms deals, money laundering and/or selling blood-stained diamonds – he is welcome, and if he brings his millions with him, the leaders of the state will be happy to be photographed in his company.
That is true, of course, only for an immigrant who is a Jew according to the Halakha (religious law). If he is a goy, the story is quite different. That is the province of the leader of the Shas Party, Eli Yishai.
In the present Israeli government there are several candidates for the title of racist in chief. An objective jury would be hard put to choose between them.
The favorite is the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a certified racist whose entire career in Israel is built on hatred toward Arabs and foreigners. It was he who appointed as minister of justice the kippa-wearing lawyer Ya’akov Ne’eman, who is now busily engaged in securing the all-important position of legal adviser to the government (practically the attorney general) for a judge educated in a Yeshiva (Orthodox school), who lives in one of the more extreme settlements and who has become notorious for several rightist judgments. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, of course, is also an excellent candidate.
But the king of racists is the minister of the interior. He is more dangerous than his colleagues because he has absolute power over the civil status of every person in Israel, immigration and emigration, the Register of Residents, and the expulsion of foreigners. In this position he is now doing to foreigners what others have done to Jews in many countries. He is untiring in his efforts to guard the real Israel – not the "Jewish and democratic state" as it is officially defined, but rather the "Jewish and demographic state." For this purpose he has recently created a special para-police force for the detection and deportation of illegal foreigners.
It is difficult to decide whether Yishai is an extreme fanatic or a complete cynic, or some strange combination. As matter of fact, when Shas was still a moderate party, in those distant days when its guru, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, ruled that it is permissible to give back the occupied territories, and its former leader, Aryeh Deri, was the darling of the Left, Yishai, too, declared "Yes to Oslo, yes to the evacuation of Jews from Hebron, yes to Arafat!" But since then much dirty water has flowed down our polluted rivers, Shas has turned into a radical right-wing party, and Yishai is now the most extreme rightist in the government.
His unshakable devotion to the purity of the race arouses admiration. Hardly a day passes without some shocking news about his activities. He fights like a tiger for the expulsion of 1,500 children of foreign workers who were born in Israel, who speak Hebrew and attend Israeli schools, who have no other homeland. Yishai is ready to lay down his life for their deportation.
The Interior Ministry prevents the entry of American and European citizens who bear Arab names. Officials of the UN and the EU in charge of projects for the Palestinians are normally unable to enter from Jordan (or anywhere else outside Israel), and if they somehow do obtain permission, they are then forbidden to cross the Green Line into Israel. Foreign women married to Israelis are expelled without mercy. There is no end to the examples.
In the eyes of Yishai, every son of a Thai is an enemy of the Jewish state, every daughter of a Colombian worker is a threat to the purity of the Jewish people. He has declared that the foreign workers are an "infection," and he warned that Tel Aviv is "becoming Africa." He has disclosed that the foreigners carry frightening diseases, such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and such. And in this respect they resemble gays and lesbians, who, according to Yishai, are "sick people."
Such a person would not remain a minister in the cabinet of the U.S. or most European countries. In the homeland of the Nuremberg laws, he would not even come close to a government position.
Recently, during the operation "Cast Lead," Yishai demanded that we "bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza" – which does not hinder him from denouncing Judge Richard Goldstone as an abominable anti-Semite. He himself, by the way, never risked his skin as a combat soldier; this national hero served as an NCO for religious services in a transport unit.
Eight hundred years ago, Rabbi Moshe Ben-Nahman, called Nahmanides, coined the phrase "Scoundrel with the permission of the Torah," meaning a person who does despicable things which are not expressly forbidden in the Bible. I am not sure if even this appellation would fit Yishai, since the Bible forbids more than once the mistreatment of strangers – "Ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow" (Jeremiah 7:6), "He … loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment" (Deuteronomy 10:18), and many other commandments to this effect.
But more important than Yishai himself is the phenomenon that he represents: the invocation of the demographic demon, which terrifies the country.
Sixty-two years after its foundation, the state of Israel is still living in fear of the "demographic danger." It is afraid of its Arab citizens and therefore discriminates against them in every sphere. It is afraid of the 400,000 Russians who have come to this country with their Jewish relatives in accordance with the Law of Return, but whose mothers were not Jewish. Here is a built-in contradiction: while the Nativ operators are interested in maximizing the number of immigrants, Yishai and his people deny these very same immigrants the right to marry Jews or to be buried in Jewish graveyards. They serve in the army, but if they fall in action they cannot be buried next to their comrades.
Practically all Hebrew Israelis want a state with a Hebrew majority, where the Hebrew language, culture, and tradition are cultivated. But many of us do not want a man-hunting, woman-hunting, and child-hunting state, closed to asylum-seekers, where foreign workers who outstay their welcome must live in permanent fear, like our ancestors in the ghettoes.
In order to exorcise the demographic demon, my friends and I have applied to the courts and requested that the registration "Nation: Jewish" in the Ministry’s Register of Residents be replaced with "Nation: Israeli." Our application was rejected by Judge Noam Solberg – the very same person the minister of justice is moving mountains to get appointed as attorney general.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Apartheid Israel
« Reply #12 on: 2010-02-09 05:21:21 » |
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The apartheid will end when Israelis have to face its cost
Source: The National
Authors: Tony Karon [Tony Karon is a New York based analyst who blogs at rootlesscosmopolitan.com]
Dated: 2010-02-07
The former US president Jimmy Carter set off a firestorm in 2006 when he said that Israel would have to choose between maintaining an apartheid occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians. That Mr Carter brokered Israel’s most important peace treaty with an Arab country was immaterial; he was branded an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite and even a Holocaust-denier.
Israel’s friends in the US reacted out of instinct, knowing that an association with apartheid – South Africa’s erstwhile system of racial oppression – would bring international condemnation and isolation. But there was no word of protest from that quarter last week when Israel’s defence minister said what Mr Carter had. “If, and as long as between the Jordan (River) and the (Mediterranean) Sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” warned Ehud Barak, speaking at Israel’s annual Herzliya security conference. “If the Palestinians vote in elections it is a binational state and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”
Which, of course, is exactly what Mr Carter was arguing. The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned in November 2007 that without a two-state solution, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights”, which it would be unable to win because American Jews would not support a state that denies voting rights to all of its subjects.
Mr Olmert and Mr Barak, of course, raised the spectre of “apartheid” to remind Israelis that they could face international isolation if they remain indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. Sometimes, such warnings from Israelis come as if attached to a demographic time-bomb – the idea that once Palestinians become a majority of the population between the Jordan River and the sea, Israel will be left in an apartheid situation. But apartheid is a qualitative, not a quantitative notion: it’s the denial of basic democratic rights to a whole category of people, regardless of their numerical strength, that defines apartheid.
While it may have been couched as a warning about the future, Mr Barak’s statement was actually a confession of the present state of affairs: one state has controlled the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean since 1967, and that state denies the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza the right to vote for the government that rules them. That is the essence of apartheid.
The rubric of “occupation” actually serves as a convenient fiction for Israel because it suggests a temporary condition. But at home, the Israelis have stopped pretending that their presence in the West Bank is temporary. They plan to keep major settlement blocs, illegal under the rules of occupation as defined by the Geneva Convention, in the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem and so on. For Israelis, there is no distinction in lifestyle or access between living in the West Bank and living inside Israel’s 1967 borders – the settlements are now little more than an extension of Israeli suburbia.
Equally fictitious is the notion that there is a “peace” in the works that will change the situation. Israel’s leaders are not prepared to offer a credible Palestinian state, and they are under no pressure, domestically or internationally, to do so. Israeli public opinion has soured on the need for peace with the Palestinians, bottled up in Gaza and behind a security wall in the West Bank. Why risk provoking a civil war with militant settlers who are the backbone of the Israeli army and threaten violence to hang onto the West Bank? In the old days, Yitzhak Rabin would say that Israel would “pursue peace as if terror did not exist and fight terror as if peace did not exist”. For today’s Israelis, why pursue peace if terror has been contained?
By opening the peace process (but never concluding it) Israel found itself increasingly integrated in a global society with Europe and the US. It’s football teams play in European leagues; its supermodels grace the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition; its hi-tech entrepreneurs are key players in the digital marketplace. Most Israelis never see Palestinians, except during stints in the military. The “demographic” threat is an abstraction.
It should come as little surprise that Israelis are cool towards Mr Obama’s peace effort: Israel’s cost-benefit analysis weighs against pursuing a peace agreement that carries risk. There are no consequences for maintaining the status quo. Unless Mr Obama and others can change that cost-benefit analysis, they’re wasting their time.
It wasn’t a moral epiphany that prompted Rabin to embrace the Oslo peace process; it was his reading of the geopolitical situation at the end of the Gulf War, and the assumption that Israel could not rely on unconditional US support. But Mr Sharon and Mr Netanyahu subsequently proved that Israel can, in fact, count on US support without concluding a two-state peace – it simply must go through the motions of a “peace process”.
The apartheid fear for Israeli leaders is not of the moral turpitude of maintaining such a system – which they already do – it’s a fear of this being recognised for what it is.
Mr Barak’s recent confession came in the same week that South Africa celebrated the 20th anniversary of its former president FW de Klerk’s announcement that he would free Nelson Mandela and negotiate a political settlement. Like Rabin, de Klerk was motivated by a strategic calculus. Sanctions were beginning to bite, and with the Cold War all but over the US government made clear that they would not come to de Klerk’s aid. Maintaining apartheid would leave the regime isolated and increasingly impoverished. The cost of maintaining the status quo offset the risks of heading down the uncertain road of peace.
The Israelis are not going to dismantle what Mr Barak has essentially admitted is an apartheid system unless the consequences of maintaining it become prohibitive. As long as they can count on unconditional support in the West, the Israelis will go through the motions but maintain the status quo.
The optimist might even read Mr Barak’s “apartheid” admission as a cry for help: certainly, those Israeli leaders serious about a two-state solution are unlikely to make any headway unless they can demonstrate to their own people that the cost of maintaining the status quo have become too high. But they can only do this if Mr Obama shows Israelis the consequences.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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