En Passant

Three key features characterize Israeli apartheid:

•Four million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories lack the right to vote for the government that controls their lives through a military occupation. In addition to controlling the borders, air space, water, tax revenues, and other vital matters pertaining to the Occupied Territories, Israel alone issues the identity cards that determine the ability of Palestinians to work and their freedom of movement.

•About 1.2 million Palestinian Israelis, who make up 20 percent, or one-fifth, of Israel’s population, have second-class citizenship within Israel, which defines itself as a Jewish state rather than a state for all its citizens. More than 20 provisions of Israel’s principal laws discriminate, either directly or indirectly, against non-Jews, according to Adalah: The Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel.

•Millions of Palestinians remain refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, unable to return to their former homes and land in present-day Israel, even though the right of return for refugees is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Zionism is not interested in peace with the Palestinians. It has only one goal – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine. It wants nothing less than the destruction of the Palestinians as part of the ultimate gaol of Zionism – an expansionist Jewish state across the region without Palestinians or their memory

The spreading campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel has the potential to focus the world’s attention on the crimes against the Palestinian people.

Analogies are lies which reveal the truth. Israel is an apartheid state. Zionism is an  exclusivist and racist ideology in its vision and practice. In this world view Palestinians are lesser humans. They have no rights to their land. The 20 percent of the Israeli population who are Palestinian are second class citizens. They sit at the [...]

Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Aborigines has changed little. White Australia must offer its first people universal land rights and a proper share of resources argues John Pilger in the New Statesman. I remember the boys dressed in army surplus, the girls in hessian, silhouettes framed in beach shanties, staring across an abyss. You were [...]

Solidarity with Palestine is as necessary and as justifiable as it was to oppose the Iraq war, or the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In mid-September, a visiting Palestinian-American academic told a Melbourne lecture that Israel is an apartheid state, more extreme in its policy against Palestinians than South Africa had been against its Black population. Professor Saree Makdisi is one of a growing number who make such a comparison – usually provoking an outraged response from pro-Israel commentators. [...]

 There are strikes or threatened action in the following sectors in South Africa: Gold, Platinum, Coal, Municipal workers, Paper and Chemicals, Rail, Communications, Doctors, the SABC.  Couple this strike wave with the first recession since the downfall of apartheid and the anger in the townships over the conditions people are forced to live in and the situation [...]

There’s a recent paper from the Human Social Research Council of South Africa arguing that Israel is practising apartheid and colonialism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. There is a link here.