ISRAEL WHERE 'A' STANDS FOR APARTHEID

                                                              

12 September, 2013

Israel: Where ‘A’ Stands for Apartheid

Hameed Abdul Karim

Supposing Iran imposed strict regulations on its Jewish community telling them there are places in the country they cannot go to, or gives them special coloured number plates for their cars which identifies them as Jews or constructs a ‘barrier’ around their residences restricting their movements and effectively blocking them from accessing other parts of Iran, or make a strict checkpoint system where Jews would have to queue up for hours to get a permit to go to taboo places for legitimate business or to visit a sibling or to take a patient to hospital.

Add to this mix an official announcement that henceforth Iran would be an exclusive state  for Aryans and Aryans only, thus automatically relegating all minorities to a second class status, can you imagine the outcry  of such outlandish racist policies would make?  The world press would go to town denouncing Iran as a racist country on the lines of white ruled apartheid system in South Africa. World leaders would join the pundits on TV calling for sanctions on Iran and its removal from the United Nations among many other things.

And yet such a state exists in this time and age. It’s called Israel where the letter ‘A’ stands for apartheid.

Zionism equals Apartheid

Back in 1987 Dr. Uri Davis, a prominent Israeli academic and activist, wrote a book titled ‘Israel An Apartheid State’ in which he describes how Israel imposes its spiteful racist policies under the banner of its avowed ideology of Zionism to harass and humiliate Palestinians on a daily basis. The motive is to drive out the remaining Palestinians who weathered the storm that was the Naqba in which the Jewish Zionists expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes to make way for the state of Israel. Ninety percent of the land has been legally defined as land which only Jews can cultivate or lease. Other key institutions such as the Kibbutz are based on the same principles as apartheid. They are reserved for Jews only at the expense of the original inhabitants who have tilled the land for generations after generations.

In recent times former US president Jimmy Carter says in his book ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’ that former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban had told him that ‘Arabs and Jews were inherently incompatible and would ultimately have to be separated’ despite the fact that historically Jews have lived side by side with Christians and Muslims without any discrimination or pogroms like in Europe. Up until this day there a Jews virtually all over the Middle East and the Gulf region. Bahrain’s ambassador to the US is a Jewish woman. It hardly occurs to Israeli Jews that they are the ones responsible for the crisis and the chaos they have created in the Middle East. Going further Jimmy Carter says the Israelis ‘utilizing their political and military dominance, are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories’. Examining options for Israel Carter says one is ‘a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed…’

South African anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel laureate Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu is a vociferous campaigner against Israeli apartheid and has fearlessly called for a boycott of Israel by the world community until it abides by all UN resolutions. He has called on Israel to end the occupation and comply by the resolution calling for a two state solution.

Jewish state

In a shocking move that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak called upon his people to make peace with the Palestinians or run the risk of becoming like white South Africa where racism reigned supreme. But it was not altruism that prompted him to make these comments. Rather it was the innate superiority complex in him that made him make those remarks. He worries that if the question of Palestine is not settled Israel might not be a Jewish state. His idea, like the idea of all Zionist leaders, is to see that the remaining ‘Israeli Arabs’ in Israel are kicked out and that only Jews remain thereby creating a fascist Jewish state on the lines of what LTTE ‘supremo’ Velupillai Prabhakaran had in mind in his concept of an exclusive homeland for Tamils in the north and east. Expressing the same sentiments before him former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that he dreaded the day when the Palestinians demand voting rights. He said ‘If that happens Israeli as a Jewish state is done for’. It seems that all issues vis-à-vis the Palestinian question are always centred round Israel and never is a word mentioned about any of the grave injustices the ‘Jewish’ state commits on the Palestinians. We always hear of Israel looking for a ‘peace partner’ but never hear of Palestinians looking for justice and dignity that they have been deprived of by the Western backed ‘Jewish’ state of Israel, do we? Why is that we never hear that Palestinians are looking for a peace partner from among the oligarchy in Israel?

The ‘barrier’

Take the ‘barrier’ that is now called the apartheid wall that Israel has built on the pretext of protecting its citizens. The ‘barrier’ is 406 miles long and is high as 25 feet which means it is more than five times longer than the Berlin Wall which came under severe criticism by the west until it was smashed down by ordinary citizens of Germany. And yet the same west mentions no word of condemnation for Israel for its blatant apartheid policies of oppressing the Palestinian people.

If Iran were to create a ghetto and put a ‘barrier’ around its Jewish population you can imagine the consequences. There will be a steady stream of news everyday to fill us all with horror and the suffering of the Jews. And quite rightly so. Yet when Israel shamelessly does the same thing to the Palestinians it becomes kosher.