Treatment of Palestinians is apartheid by any other name

Were it not for the razor wire, giant concrete blocks, steel gates, watchtower and standard-issue surly teenage soldier, it would be impossible to tell at what point the barren uplands of Israel’s eastern Negev give way to the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank.

Jonathan Cook - Award Winning Journalist

The military checkpoint of Shani vaguely marks the formal demarcation between Israel and occupied Palestinian territory, but in practical terms the distinction is meaningless. On either side of the Green Line, Israel is in charge.

In recent weeks it has been intensifying a campaign to evict Palestinian farming communities summarily from their ancestral lands to replace them with Jewish newcomers.

Israeli human rights lawyers, tired of the international community’s formulaic criticisms, say it is time to be more forthright. They call these “ethnic cleansing” zones – intended to drive off Palestinians irrespective of the provisions of international law and whether or not the Palestinians in question hold Israeli citizenship.

In the occupied South Hebron Hills, a dozen traditional communities – long ago denied by Israel the right to enjoy modern amenities such as electricity and running water – are struggling to remain in the cave-homes that sheltered them for centuries.

Israel has reclassified much of their land as a military firing range and demands that they leave for their own safety. An appeal to the Israeli courts, the latest instalment in a 14-year saga to avoid eviction, is due in the next few days.

Israel’s concern for the villagers’ welfare might sound more convincing were it not encouraging Jews to live close by in illegal settlements.

Palestinians in other parts of the occupied territories coveted by Israel – such as villages next to Jerusalem and those in the fertile Jordan Valley, the territorial backbone of any future Palestinian state – are being squeezed too. Firing ranges, closed military zones and national parks are the pretexts for Israel to appropriate the farmland these rural communities need to survive.

As a result, Palestinian life is withering in the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank Israel was temporarily entrusted with – the so-called Area C – under the Oslo Accords. Endlessly harassed Palestinians have sought sanctuary in West Bank cities under Palestinian Authority control. Today the remnants in Area C, a population of about 100,000, are outnumbered three to one by Jewish settlers.

A discomfited European Union, normally mealy-mouthed on Israel’s occupation, has started to describe this as “forced transfer”. The term may sound ominous and reproving, but human rights groups say that, from a legal perspective, the terminology obscures rather than illuminates what is taking place.

“Forced transfer”, observes Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s minority of 1.5 million Palestinian citizens, usually describes uncoordinated and unofficial incidents of population displacement, often as an outcome of war.

Bishara and others argue that Israel is carrying out a systematic and intentional policy to drive Palestinians off their land to replace them with Jewish communities. This, they say, should be identified as “ethnic cleansing”, a term first given legal and moral weight in the Balkans conflict in the early 1990s.

As evidence, the lawyers point to recent developments inside Israel. The treatment of tens of thousands of Bedouin in the Negev, all of them Israeli citizens, is virtually identical to that of Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills.

The Bedouin too have faced a prolonged campaign to push them off their ancestral lands and into a series of “townships”, forcibly urbanising them in the country’s most deprived communities. In the disconcerting language of Israeli bureaucracy, the Bedouin need to be “concentrated”.

Israel has increased the pressure – as in the West Bank – by denying these Bedouin all public services, and demolishing any concrete homes they build. As with Palestinians under occupation, the Bedouin have found their communities reclassified as firing ranges, military zones or national forests.

The village of al-Araqib, near Beersheva, for example, has been demolished more than 50 times in recent years as Israel plants on its land – with a suitably sinister irony – the Ambassadors’ Forest, commemorating the help provided to Israel by the international community’s diplomatic corps.

 

How Israeli apartheid is coming unstuck

One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching.

Source: Y-net

Superland, a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May. When a staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the booking immediately.

As the story went viral on social media, the park’s managers hurriedly offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and Arab children to keep them apart and prevent friction.

Government ministers led an outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, called the incident a “symptom of a sick democracy”. Defence minister Moshe Yaalon was “ashamed”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the “racist” policy be halted immediately.

Such sensitivity appears to be a reaction to an explosion of popular racism over the past few months against the one in five Israelis who belong to the country’s Palesinian Arab minority. Some Israeli Jews have started to find the endless parade of bigotry disturbing.

Israeli TV recently revealed, for example, that a group of children with cancer who had been offered a free day at a swimming pool were refused entry once managers discovered that they were Bedouin.

According to another TV investigation, Israel’s banks have a secret policy of rejecting Arab customers who try to transfer their accounts to a branch in a Jewish community, even though this violates banking regulations.

The settlers, whose violence was once restricted to setting fire to the crops of Palestinians or rampaging through their villages in the West Bank, are now as likely to attack Arab communities inside Israel. Torched mosques, offensive graffiti on churches and cars set ablaze in so-called “price-tag” attacks have become commonplace.

Similarly, reports of vicious attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly becoming a news staple. Recent incidents have included the near-fatal beating of a street cleaner, and a bus driver who held his gun to an Arab passenger’s head, threatening to pull the trigger unless the man showed his ID.

Also going viral were troubling mobile-phone photos of a young Arab woman surrounded by a mob of respectable-looking commuters and shoppers while she waited for a train. As they hit her and pulled off her hijab, station guards looked on impassively.

However welcome official denunciations of these events are, the government’s professed outrage does not wash.

While Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating Superland for its racism, they were busy backing a grossly discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz newspaper called “one of the most dangerous” measures ever to come before the parliament.

The bill will give Israelis who have served in the army a whole raft of extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and the provision of public and private services. The catch is that almost all of the country’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens are excluded from military service. In practice, the benefits will be reserved for Jews only.

Superland’s offence pales to insignificance when compared to that, or to the decades of state-planned and officially sanctoned discrimination against the country’s Palestinian minority.

An editorial in Haaretz this month observed that Israel was really “two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. … This is the gap between the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a Third World country.”

Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment.

None of this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified 57 laws that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the statute books.

Less visible but just as damaging is the covert discrimination Palestinian citizens face every day when dealing with state institutions, whose administrative practices find their rationale in the entrenchment of Jewish privilege.

This week a report indentified precisely this kind of institutional racism when it found that students from the country’s Palestinian minority were confronted by a series of 14 obstacles not faced by their Jewish compatriots that contributed to denying them places in higher education.

The wave of popular prejudice and racist violence is no accident either. Paradoxically, it has been unleashed by the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of rightwing politicians like Netanyahu, whose constant fearmongering casts Palestinian citizens as disloyal, a fifth column and a demographic threat to the state’s Jewishness.

So why if the state is so committed to subjugating and excluding Palestinian citizens, and Netanyahu and his ministers so determined to increase the weight of discriminatory legislation, are they decrying the racism of Superland?

To make sense of this, one has to understand how desperately Israel has sought to distinguish itself from apartheid South Africa.

Israel cultivates, as South Africa once did, what scholars term “grand apartheid”. This is segregation, largely covert and often often justified by security or cultural differences, to ensure that control of resources remains exclusively in the hands of the privileged community.

At the same time, Israel long shied away from what some call South Africa’s model of “petty apartheid” – the overt, symbolic, but far less significant segregation of park benches, buses and toilets. More

 

Horror: ‘Breaking the Silence’ releases women’s frightful testimonies of occupation

"Do you know what it means to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories?" With these words, Breaking the Silence has released stunning new testimonies from former soldiers, six Israeli women.

Very upsetting. Raw brutalization and debasement. Who cannot weep when they hear these women's stories of degradation? This society has lost its soul, and these brave witnesses are open about the damage, so as to try and save Israel and Palestine-- the politics are irrelevant to this work.

Full testimonies here. In the video excerpts above, the women describe the brutalization of the Palestinians, enforced by debasing peer pressure among the soldiers:

"You can't think that they're good hardworking people trying to survive in a closed, place."

"Later I realized that in order to be there you have to break them, break their spirit. Breaking them means making them wait, blindfolding them, treating them badly, writing 'Death to Arabs' on their vests."

"Putting cigarettes out on them."

One describes a smiling girl who transforms into the "roadblock queen," a tyrant adored by Israeli soldiers.

Several describe routine thefts from Palestinians: of prayer beads, pottery, food. What is wrong with taking gifts? one said to herself.

Another: We could do whatever we wanted.

And the psychic damage of oppression is foremost in these women's minds. That's why they're coming forward. One says she paid a high high price for her service, and so has her entire society.

"People don't know what's going on there."

Here is a link to all the new women's testimonies. See the ghastly headlines: "Slap," "Collective Punishment," "Flak Jackets with 'Death to Arabs Written on Them'" "Throwing them into the sewage pit," "Because I'm bored," "Settler violence." More

Breaking the Silence: Testimonies of female soldiers.

These testimonies seek to tell the Israeli public and international community what it means to be a woman serving in the territories. In order to prove oneself as a woman soldier, one needs to be "more manly than a man". Often, for female soldiers to become "one of the guys," it means that they must use violence and show force in their everyday tasks. The testimonies paint a difficult picture, whereby whoever isn't willing to be violent and abusive finds herself socially ostracized. As female soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we also had to beat, detain, humiliate and intimidate Palestinians. We weren't supposed to tell our families and friends what we did and what it means to serve in the territories.
As women, exposing our identities through these testimonies is especially complex and difficult. We have less legitimacy to talk about what is happening in the OPT and our involvement in implementing the occupation.
This is an opportunity to have our voices heard both as soldiers and women, and to take part in opposing the Israeli control over Palestinians. This is also an opportunity for us to face up to our actions and take responsibility for them.
We hope that our choice to testify and speak publicly will encourage other women who served in the OPT to join us and speak openly about their military service. More

 

Israeli rabbis commit atrocity against Jewish history

When settlers and Rabbis called the policemen and soldiers of Israel “Nazis”, hardly anyone spoke out. When I voiced criticism over this, I received phone threats.

Yoram Kaniuk

Then, last week, when MK and MD Professor Aryeh Eldad sided with rabbis who warned their flock not to rent or sell property to non-Jews, I remembered that in Nazi Germany many physicians also identified with Hitler. The term “Nazi” now lingers once more in the air, but on the opposite side to that of settlers who swore at soldiers. The word “Nazi” now lingers because the Rabbis who signed the racist declaration committed an atrocity against Jewish history.

A duck may be declared as such if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck and walks like a duck. Nazis began their assault on Jews by by humiliating them, by forbidding them to share life with Germans. The benches on the boulevards were marked “Germans only”. The Nazi claimed that only someone possessing of pure German blood could be a part of the German nation.

Rabbis and other racists, who popped up like mushrooms following a rain of anti-humanist sewage, fear dangerous encounters between Jews and Arabs or life among gentiles. Much in the same did the Nazis, unlike the Italian fascists, fear intermarriage and launch campaigns of defamation and humiliation against their resident enemy. At first they did not consider murdering the Jews. The wanted to isolate them, to discriminate against them, to have them fired from their workplaces. They refused to share a park-bench with them and called on them to immigrate.

Those who wished to immigrate and had the opportunity could flee, even with their assets. Prior to becoming the driver of Jews to their death, Adolf Eichmann worked in Vienna and later in Prague as the head of a state agency devoted to forcing immigration on the Jews. The Nazis wanted the Jews out of Europe, which, in their eyes, they had soiled. Annihilation began only after the Nazis could no longer await immigration and the nations of the world refused to receive the refugees.

Thus, the racist actions committed by the Rabbis and by much of Israel’s population today is old-school racism which we are adopting sixty five years after the Holocaust. Pure German blood massacred the Jews. Jewish law is rich with goodness and rich with ugliness, but when Rabbis speak on television about wanting to expel Arabs from this land and not co-reside with them, we must remember of whom these rabbis and other racists learned their craft.

This is because if anyone who voices such opinions and acts according to them at home and on the street would look at the map knowing its measure, they will understand that none of it would work without a horrible punitive action. There’s hardly enough in a decree forbidding Arabs from living in the town of Safed or a housing project for Jews only built in Jaffa, or in the occupied territories of the West Bank. There, the expulsion, the robbing and the beating of anyone who isn’t Jewish has already been permitted by Jewish law.

All that’s left for them then is annihilation, otherwise the Arabs will avenge, helped by the international community. This may well be the case, and just as the Nazi state crumbled so will this Israeli state, so distant from the culture of Israel, from the values of Israel, from the wisdom of Israel. Those who do not know history and do not know the Holocaust turn the Holocaust into a rope by which to hang and hate those who live here and are not of our own: the immigrant workers, the children of mixed marriages and non-Jews in general.

One rabbi, interviewed on television this week, was shocked to hear blasphemous Rabbis being called “racists”. Nearly in a cry, with his startled eyes shut, he said something like “how can the word racism could ever be said in relation to Rabbis?”

These are the crooked and corrupt, because the word “racists” weighs heavy on that vacant and vehement fool and reminds him, heavens forbid, of the Holocaust. What does it do? Remind him? And this is while all that was ever done in the struggle of religious Zionism against Jewish nationalism, against the gentiles, against the God of Israel, is all racism in the spirit of the Nurnberg laws.

Had that God existed, then I assume, grace of first hand acquaintance, he wouldn’t have wanted to see “National Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem as a sort of pagan golden calf taken for Jewish by them, its plaza split into separate sections for men, women, gentiles and foreigners. It is much like the “gold-less” calf that the Jews had when they left Egypt, and was surely created of looted Egyptian jewelry, or where else would the gold come from?

Soon the nations of the world will declare their acceptance of a Palestinian state in accordance with the 1967 borders. Israel will stand alone. Will the Jews of this world, whom Israel’s Rabbis put at risk, accept the verdict? And what then of the State of Israel? It shall become another episode in the history of the Jewish people. More

 

 

Israelis abuse school children's human rights

 

WATCH: Israeli soldiers stand by, escort settlers as they attack Palestinian villages

Following the murder of a settler from Yitzhar on Tuesday, dozens of Israeli settlers from the region attacked several Palestinian villages. They threw stones at Palestinians, at cars and buses, smashed windows and burned houses. These videos, taken by B’Tselem photographers from the villages Asira al-Qibliya and Urif, show how IDF forces allow the riots against the Palestinian farmers to take place. In several cases the soldiers talk to the rioters or try to shove them away. In others, they simply provide escorts for them as they throw stones or storm the villages.

Video from Asira al-Qibliya: