Losing the Propaganda, Moral and Legal War

JERUSALEM — ON Feb. 4, 1965, as a teenager, I left South Africa, the country of my birth, for a new home in a place I’d never been — Israel.

Palestinian Land Loss 1946 - 2010

I loved South Africa, but I loathed the apartheid system. In Israel, I saw a fresh start for a people rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, a place of light and justice, as opposed to the darkness and oppression of apartheid South Africa.

Now, almost 50 years later, after decades of arguing that Israel is not an apartheid state and that it’s a calumny and a lie to say so, I sense that we may be well down the road to being seen as one. That’s because, in this day and age, brands are more powerful than truth and, inexplicably, blindly, Israel is letting itself be branded an apartheid state — and even encouraging it.

In apartheid South Africa, people disappeared in the night without the protection of any legal process and were never heard from again. There was no freedom of speech or expression and more “judicial” hangings were reportedly carried out there than in any other place on earth. There was no free press and, until January 1976, no public television.

Masses of black people were forcibly moved from tribal lands to arid Bantustans in the middle of nowhere. A “pass system” stipulated where blacks could live and work, splitting families and breaking down social structures, to provide cheap labor for the mines and white-owned businesses, and a plentiful pool of domestic servants for the white minority. Those found in violation were arrested, usually lashed, and sentenced to stints of hard labor for a few shillings per prisoner per day, payable to the prison service.

None of this even remotely exists in Israel or the occupied territories. But, increasingly, in the mind of the world it does. This is because of Israel’s own actions and a vigorous campaign by those who oppose its occupation of Palestinians’ land and, in some cases, Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. They understand that delegitimization is Israel’s soft belly and apartheid the buzzword to make it happen.

International isolation is potentially more dangerous for Israel than the Iranian nuclear program. The Palestinians and their supporters, particularly the young generation, some of whom have graduated from the best universities in the world, have come to realize that the stones of the first intifada and the suicide bombers of the second are yesterday’s weapons in yesterday’s war.

Boycott, divestment and sanctions are now the way they seek to end the Israeli occupation or Jewish Israel itself. Their message has started to resonate with trade unions, churches, universities and international companies in Europe and the United States, who see Israel as oppressing Palestinians and violating their human rights.

A Dutch pension giant’s decision last month to divest from Israel’s five largest banks because of their ties to occupation rang warning bells in Israel’s business community and the Treasury. According to the finance minister, even a partial European boycott would cost Israel 20 billion shekels (about $5.7 billion) in exports annually and almost 10,000 jobs. But the greatest damage is self-inflicted.

The “apartheid wall,” “apartheid roads,” colonization, administrative arrests, travel restrictions, land confiscations and house demolitions are the clay apartheid comparisons are made of, and cannot be hidden or denied, for as long as Israel continues with the status quo.

Military occupation comes with checkpoints, antiterrorist barriers, military courts, armed soldiers and tanks. That’s the reality, no matter what your politics, and just the ammunition the Palestinians and their supporters need in their new war.

In the coming weeks, the United States is expected to put forward a framework for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry. The Palestinians have said that if the talks fail to produce an agreement, they will take the battle against Israel and for their independence to the International Criminal Court and the United Nations and its various organizations, and fight for sanctions and boycotts, which they hope will force Israel, like apartheid South Africa before it, to its knees. As South Africa learned in the 1980s, possessing nuclear weapons may deter foes on the battlefield, but it doesn’t help you win a propaganda war. More

 

Does Uri Avnery know so little about Israel?

One of my concerns about Uri Avnery is that, whatever the good work he has done as a journalist and peace activist, especially in regard to the occupied territories, he still has an ability to write utter nonsense when it comes to what is happening inside Israel.

It is difficult to know whether this is simple ignorance or a bad case of ideological blinkers. But it is also hard to believe a man who has studied his own society for so long can really know so little about what is going on there.

Jonathan Cook

There is a lot to challenge in his latest piece, on the comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa, but the following paragraph really assaults the intellect:

On the whole, the situation of the Arab minority inside Israel proper is much like that of many national minorities in Europe and elsewhere. They enjoy equality under the law, vote for parliament, are represented by very lively parties of their own, but in practice suffer discrimination in many areas. To call this apartheid would be grossly misleading.

I’d love Avnery to point out the European state where, like Israel, 93 per cent of the land has been nationalised for one ethnic group (Jews) to the exclusion of another ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs). Or where vetting committees operate by law in hundreds of communities precisely to prevent one ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs) from living in these communities.

Or the European state, like Israel, where the law is designed to confer rights on members of an ethnic group (Jews) who are not actually yet citizens or present in the state, privileging them over a group (Palestinian Arabs) who do have citizenship and are present in the state.

Or a European state that has 55 laws that explicitly discriminate based on which ethnic group you belong to.

Or a European state that, like Israel, defers some of what should be its sovereign powers to extra-territorial bodies such as the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund whose charters obligate them to discriminate based on ethnic belonging.

Or the European state that denies its citizens access to any civil institutions on personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and burial, requiring all citizens to submit to the whims and prejudices of religious leaders.

Or a European state which does not recognise its own nationality, and where the only way to join the dominant national group (Jews) or to immigrate is through conversion.

I’d be surprised if he could find one European state that has a single one of these characteristics. Even if he could, it would not have more than one of those characteristics. Israel has them all and many more.

Now tell me Israel discriminates against Palestinian Arab citizens the way European states do against their minorities. More

 

Former President Jimmy Carter speaks about Israel

 

Jimmy Carter calls on America to reverse course and regain moral leadership

 

Jimmy Carter, former US president and Nobel Peace Laureate, is calling on Americans to reverse course and regain moral leadership. In an opinion piece published by the New York Times, Carter says that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US adopted policies that violate several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There has been little opposition from either Democrats or Republicans or the American people. Carter cites what he calls the 'arbitrary' rule that any man killed by drones is considered a terrorist.

Israel is an apartheid regime: UN official

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights has accused the international community of complicity in Israeli settlement policies and says Israel is implementing an apartheid system.

Richard Falk United Nations Special Rapporteur

Richard Falk made the remarks during a press conference after addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday and delivering a report, AFP reported.

"The international community is conspiring -- maybe unwittingly -- in a process that has no way of bringing justice to the people involved in this conflict," Falk said about the Israeli settlements.

He noted that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are offered no protection in Israeli law, adding that their treatment is akin to apartheid.

"I think one has to begin to call the reality by a name," he said, likening the "discriminatory dualistic legal system" in the West Bank to the former system in South Africa.

Falk criticized the work of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the region as the so-called Middle East Quartet's peace envoy, calling the process “a trick rather than a way to find a solution to the problem.”

In his report, Falk also expressed concern about Israel's use of administrative detention, the expansion of settlements, and violence by settlers.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time. More

 

Jimmy Carter savages US foreign policy over drone strikes

Former president calls on Washington to regain moral leadership in wake of drone strikes and targeted assassinations?

Drone strikes and targeted assassinations abroad have seen the US violating human rights in a way that "abets our enemies and alienates our friends", according to the former president Jimmy Carter.

He said America was "abandoning its role as a champion of human rights", and called on Washington to "reverse course and regain moral leadership".

Jimmy Carter: 'America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.' Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Revelations that US officials were targeting people including their own citizens abroad were "only the most recent disturbing proof" of how far such violations had extended, he wrote in the New York Times.

At a time when popular revolutions were sweeping the globe, the US should be strengthening, not weakening, "basic rules of law and principles of justice", Carter said.

Attacks on human rights after 9/11 had been "sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public", he said. "As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues."

Carter added: "While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 with US leadership, "has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world's dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs," he said. More