It’s time to admit it. Israeli policy is what it is: Apartheid

I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. Not anymore.

Bradley Burston • Haaretz • Aug 17, 2015
What I’m about to write will not come easily for me. I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be counted on to argue that, while the country’s settlement and occupation policies were anti-democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not apply. I’m not one of those people any more. Not after the last few weeks. Not after terrorists firebombed a West Bank Palestinian home, annihilating a family, murdering an 18-month-old boy and his father, burning his mother over 90 percent of her body — only to have Israel’s government rule the family ineligible for the financial support and compensation automatically granted Israeli victims of terrorism, settlers included.
I can’t pretend anymore. Not after Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, explicitly declaring stone-throwing to be terrorism, drove the passage of a bill holding stone-throwers liable to up to 20 years in prison.
The law did not specify that it targeted only Palestinian stone-throwers. It didn’t have to.
Just one week later, pro-settlement Jews hurled rocks, furniture, and bottles of urine at Israeli soldiers and police at a West Bank settlement, and in response, Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rewarded the Jewish stone-throwers with a pledge to build hundreds of new settlement homes. This is what has become of the rule of law. Two sets of books. One for Us, and one to throw at Them. Apartheid.
We are what we have created. We are what we do, and the injury we do in a thousand ways to millions of others. We are what we turn a blind eye to. Our Israel is what it has become: Apartheid.
There was a time when I drew a distinction between Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies and this country I have loved so long.
No more. Every single day we wake to yet another outrage.
I used to be a person who wanted to believe that there were moral and democratic limits — or, failing that, pragmatic constraints — to how low the prime minister was willing to go, how far he was willing to bend to the proud proponents of apartheid, in order to bolster his power. Not any more. Not after Danny Danon. Not when the prime minister’s choice to represent all of us, all of Israel at the United Nations, is a man who proposed legislation to annex the West Bank, effectively creating Bantustans for Palestinians who would live there stateless, deprived of basic human rights.
The man who will represent all of us at the United Nations, the man who will speak to the Third World on our behalf, is the same man who called African asylum seekers in Israel “a national plague.”
The man who will represent all of us at the United Nations is the same politician who proposed legislation aimed at crippling left-leaning NGOs which come to the aid of Palestinian civilians and oppose the institution of occupation, while giving the government a green light to keep financially supporting right-wing NGOs suspected of channeling funds to support violence by pro-settlement Jews.
What does apartheid mean, in Israeli terms?
Apartheid means fundamentalist clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, supremacism, and subjugation.
Apartheid means Likud lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter calling Sunday for separate, segregated roads and highways for Jews and Arabs in the West Bank.
Apartheid means hundreds of attacks by settlers targeting Palestinian property, livelihoods, and lives, without convictions, charges, or even suspects. Apartheid means uncounted Palestinians jailed without trial, shot dead without trial, shot dead in the back while fleeing and without just cause.
Apartheid means Israeli officials using the army, police, military courts, and draconian administrative detentions, not only to head off terrorism, but to curtail nearly every avenue of non-violent protest available to Palestinians.
Late last month, over the explicit protest of the head of the Israeli Medical Association and human rights groups combatting torture, Israel enacted the government’s “Law to Prevent Harm Caused by Hunger Strikes.” The law allows force-feeding of prisoners, even if the prisoner refuses, if the striker’s life is deemed in danger.
Netanyahu’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who pushed hard for passage of the bill, has called hunger strikes by Palestinian security prisoners jailed for months without charge or trial “a new type of suicide terrorist attack through which they will threaten the State of Israel”.
Only under a system as warped as apartheid, does a government need to label and treat non-violence as terrorism.
Years ago, in apartheid South Africa, Jews who loved their country and hated its policies, took courageous roles in defeating with non-violence a regime of racism and denial of human rights.
May we in Israel follow their example.

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https://medium.com/@thepalestineproject/it-s-time-to-admit-it-israeli-policy-is-what-it-is-apartheid-e6d19bde2f58


Good for him for finally getting there and admitting to what Israel is.  It might have been hard for you Bradley, but you saw what was around you in the end.

I thought Israel had substantial numbers of Muslim and Arab backgrounds, and who are treated as equal citizens and actively involved throughout society etc...


Can the same be said for other non Muslim/Arabs in Palestine...!?

You thought wrong.

Tommy Monk wrote:I thought Israel had substantial numbers of Muslim and Arab backgrounds, and who are treated as equal citizens and actively involved throughout society etc...


Can the same be said for other non Muslim/Arabs in Palestine...!?

You are not wrong they have equal rights in Israel

Again right they do not have equal rights under Hamas though slightly better under Fatah

No they don't.  I suggest you educate yourself for once.

sassy wrote:No they don't.  I suggest you educate yourself for once.

Really?

Can Muslims in Israel be Judges?
Be members of Parliment?

Yes

My mother, Zakia, was so proud that my sister and I spoke better Hebrew than Arabic. Osman, my father, believed that by achieving the highest levels of education, we would one day be treated as equal in our country, Israel. He sincerely believed that Palestinians capable of articulating their narrative would win the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.
My parents believed in the promise of a democracy that transcends ethnicity. I still retain that dream, but it is tested every time I go home. I am a citizen of Israel, married to an American Jew, yet I am not welcome in Israel. For I am Palestinian.
During a recent visit, my husband breezed through security at Ben-Gurion airport, but our teenage daughter and I — who both have dual citizenship of Israel and Italy — were strip-searched. I’m inured to the procedure: I have to endure it almost every time I enter and leave the country. But our daughter, age 17, sobbed with chagrin. “This place breeds hate everywhere!” she cried.
On the same trip, I attempted to renew her Israeli passport. “She is not Jewish,” an official told me, “and therefore we are not sure she is entitled to citizenship.”
For Israeli Palestinians — and we make up 20 percent of the population — these are ordinary humiliations. But I wonder what my parents, both now dead, would have made of the graffiti that recently appeared on the walls of our family home in Haifa, a mixed city in the north of Israel.
“Death to Arabs,” it read.
During the recent war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, my cousin was walking on the beach near her home, also in Haifa. She overheard a group of Israeli sunbathers casually discussing how the Israeli Army should deal with the residents of Gaza — “Just kill them all,” she heard one say.
“I’ve never felt so scared in my 32 years,” she told me. “I don’t want them to know I’m Palestinian.”
Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and are part of the coalition government. Central to their politics is a program of discriminatory legislation, designed to curtail the civil rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens.
Chief among the more than 50 discriminatory Israeli laws documented by Adalah, the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, is the Law of Return, which automatically guarantees Israeli citizenship for every Jew regardless of birthplace. Often, they are shepherded into settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law), where they receive government benefits. Palestinian Israeli citizens, meanwhile, are subject to a ban on family reunification: If they marry a fellow Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they are prohibited from living in Israel under the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law.
In September, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a petition challenging the Admissions Committees Law, which allows communities to reject housing applicants based on “cultural and social suitability” — a legal pretext to deny residency to non-Jews. In practice, even before the law was passed, it was virtually impossible for a Palestinian to buy or rent a home in any majority-Jewish city.
Further ethnic separation is maintained by the education system. Aside from a few mixed schools, most educational institutions in Israel are divided into Arab and Jewish ones. According to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a Hebrew University professor of sociology who has produced the most comprehensive survey of Israeli public school curriculums, not one positive reference to Palestinians exists in Israeli high school textbooks. Palestinians are described as either “Arab farmers with no nationality” or fearsome “terrorists,” as Professor Peled-Elhanan documented in her book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.”
Israel’s system of segregation has led to a situation where, according to a recent poll, 42 percent of Jews say they have never met a Palestinian.
Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews did not serve in the armed forces. Today, they do — and serve in every capacity, including in the most important elite Israeli army units, such as the Sayeret Matkal special forces and Unit 8200, whose responsibilities include gathering intelligence on any Palestinian they deem a “security threat.”
Unlike every former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., Yoram Cohen, who today heads the agency, is a religious Jew. That change is typical of Israeli society. The greater integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews clearly offers benefits to Jewish Israelis, but for Palestinian Israeli citizens, it has meant a new, religiously inspired racism, on top of the old secular discrimination.
National leaders proudly promote hate policies. Israel’s foreign minister and the leader of the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, Avigdor Lieberman, has championed a call to boycott the businesses of Palestinian citizens of Israel and, ominously, has even sought to make the “transfer” of Palestinians legal. Secretary of State John Kerry has met with Mr. Lieberman — apparently without challenging him on such reprehensible views.
This is the atmosphere in which Israel’s Palestinians live. And there is no redress available to us elsewhere. Our rights and welfare certainly cannot be represented by the Palestinian Authority, whose jurisdiction is limited to partial control of the population of the West Bank. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, cannot negotiate for us because we are Israeli citizens. Israel, however, prefers not to think of us as such, and thus resorts to all manner of petty aggressions to prove it, like trying to deny my daughter a new passport.
Israel is quick to point out efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Yet what truly undermines Israel’s international standing is not its critics, but Israel’s abysmal treatment of its own citizens who are Palestinian. It is little different than other countries that have systematically discriminated against and segregated a whole class of its people based on race, religion and ethnicity.
While Israel (like the United States) claims to abhor racism and human rights violations elsewhere, the country’s political leadership is actively enacting laws that ensure a pervasive institutionalized system of discrimination. What Israel needs, conversely, is a civil rights movement.
Rula Jebreal is an author and foreign policy analyst.

http://www.alternet.org/world/israels-palestinian-residents-are-treated-second-class-citizens

Arab Israeli's regularly have their homes destroyed, their businesses confiscated etc etc.  Anyone who thinks they have equal rights wants their bumbs read.

And lets not forget, the footpaths and roads they are not allowed to use, Jews only it says.

Muslim population of Israel is about 20% isn't it Sassy?

Ethiopian Jews hold protest in Tel Aviv against racism

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/ethiopian-jews-hold-protest-tel-aviv-racism-150518193345455.html

Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html

And non-Jewish people can never be a majority in Israel. Only Jewish people can migrate to Israel wherever it is that they come from.

They actually have a Ministry to go out into Europe etc to convert people to Judism and get them to go to Israel to oust the Palestinians.

New Diaspora Ministry Initiative Could Open Israel’s Gates to Millions of non-Jews With Jewish Links’

New advisory committee set up to explore policy change – without any representatives of relevant ministries or organizations.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.671594

While our treacherous govts are pursuing mass immigration policies to such an extent as to make white British people a minority...



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1043717/One-whites-claim-victims-racism.html

Put it in the UK section thank you, where you can whine about immigrants to your heart's content and we can ignore you.

The A-word reappeared in Israel this week. The country’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, approved a scheme that would have seen a crude form of segregation of Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, with Palestinians banned from using Israeli-run bus services in the occupied territory.

At the last moment the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, intervened and overturned Ya’alon’s decision, suspending the scheme – but not before a collective howl of protest from Israeli opposition leaders and human rights groups. The leader of the leftwing Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On, could not have been clearer: “This is how apartheid looks,” she said. “There is no better or nicer way to put it.”

The charge is not new. Two Israeli former PMs have warned that if the country continues on its current path, it will become the successor to apartheid South Africa. Some campaigners claim that point has already arrived – that Israel is a racist, pitiless oppressor of Palestinians, killing them en masse whenever it wants to, that it is an apartheid state.

There are few charges more grave. I should know: during 26 years as a journalist in South Africa I investigated and reported the evil that was apartheid. I saw Nelson Mandela secretly when he was underground, then popularly known as the Black Pimpernel, and I was the first non-family member to visit him in prison.

I have now lived in Israel for 17 years, doing what I can to promote dialogue across lines of division. To an extent that I believe is rare, I straddle both societies. I know Israel today – and I knew apartheid up close. And put simply, there is no comparison between Israel and apartheid.

The Arabs of Israel are full citizens. Crucially, they have the vote and Israeli Arab MPs sit in parliament. An Arab judge sits on the country’s highest court; an Arab is chief surgeon at a leading hospital; an Arab commands a brigade of the Israeli army; others head university departments. Arab and Jewish babies are born in the same delivery rooms, attended by the same doctors and nurses, and mothers recover in adjoining beds. Jews and Arabs travel on the same trains, taxis and – yes – buses. Universities, theatres, cinemas, beaches and restaurants are open to all.

However, Israeli Arabs – Palestinian citizens of Israel – do suffer discrimination, starting with severe restrictions on land use. Their generally poorer school results mean lower rates of entry into higher education, which has an impact on jobs and income levels. Arab citizens of Israel deeply resent Israel’s “law of return” whereby a Jew anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel but Arabs cannot. Some might argue that the Jewish majority has the right to impose such a policy, just as Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states have the right not to allow Christians as citizens. But it’s a troubling discrimination.

A major factor causing inequity is that most Israeli Arabs do not serve in the army. While they are spared three years’ compulsory, and dangerous, conscription for men (two years for women) and annual reserve duty that continues into their 40s, they do not receive post-army benefits in housing and university study.

This is more complicated than at first sight. Most Arabs in Israel are Muslim and only a few take up the option of alternative national service with the same pay as non-combat soldiers. However, Druze Arabs have always been conscripted, exactly like Jews, and many hold high ranks in the army; Bedouin Arabs are not conscripted but volunteer.

How does that compare with the old South Africa? Under apartheid, every detail of life was subject to discrimination by law. Black South Africans did not have the vote. Skin colour determined where you were born and lived, your job, your school, which bus, train, taxi and ambulance you used, which park bench, lavatory and beach, whom you could marry, and in which cemetery you were buried.
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Israel is not remotely like that. Everything is open to change in a tangled society in which lots of people have grievances, including Mizrahi Jews (from the Middle East) or Jews of Ethiopian origin. So anyone who equates Israel and apartheid is not telling the truth.

So much for Israel “proper”, inside the Green Line determined by war. On the West Bank, the present story starts with the 1967 six-day war: Israel believed Egyptian and Syrian threats to invade and struck first. Jordan’s King Hussein leapt in and attacked Israel. To general astonishment, Israel defeated Jordan’s famed Arab Legion, evicting it from Jerusalem and the West Bank (the Gaza Strip also featured – but Gaza is a story in itself).

Not only did Israelis view the conquered West Bank as a vital buffer against another Jordanian attack, but religious beliefs came to the fore – including those that saw this territory as the ancient heartland, the biblical Judea and Samaria given by God to the Jews and which had to be retained.

Settlements have been built and today house some 400,000 Jews, plus another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. Large numbers are there for the clean air and good living, but messianic zeal is at the heart of it. Settlers are opposed by many Israelis; but they enjoy support, and the government funnels millions of dollars to them, legally and illegally.

Israel is in military occupation of the West Bank. Day after day the actions needed to maintain it debase Palestinian victims as well as their Israeli occupiers. It means checkpoints, late-night raids and detentions and killings, and administrative cruelties in regulating people’s lives. Palestinians resist and fight back, attacking both soldiers and settlers; sometimes that has seen them undermine their own morality through suicide bombings against civilians.
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This is occupation. It is a tyranny. It is wrong and must end. The point does not need to be embellished. Dragging in the emotive word “apartheid” is not only incorrect but creates confusion and distracts from the main issue.

What is often misunderstood is that West Bank Palestinians are not Israeli citizens and they need permission to cross the border. About 92,000 legally enter Israel to work each day, with another estimated 5,000 coming in illegally. They pass through the security barrier, part-wall but mainly fences. Originally planned as a means of blocking suicide bombers, Israel has twisted the barrier’s purpose to grab land from Palestinians. That is exploitative and damaging. But calling it the “apartheid wall”, as critics do, is untrue propaganda.

Of course Israel isn’t perfect, despite its many and wondrous achievements since 1948. However, for critics it’s not enough to denounce its ills and errors: instead, they exaggerate and distort and present an ugly caricature far distant from reality.

So why is the apartheid accusation pushed so relentlessly, especially by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement? I believe those campaigners want Israel declared an apartheid state so it becomes a pariah, open to the world’s severest sanctions. Many want not just an end to the occupation but an end to Israel itself.

Tragically, some well-intentioned, well-meaning people in Britain and other countries are falling for the BDS line without realising what they are actually supporting. BDS campaigners and other critics need to be questioned: Why do they single out Israel, above all others, for a torrent of false propaganda? Why is Israel the only country in the world whose very right to existence is challenged in this way?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/22/israel-injustices-not-apartheid-state