The Last Colony

[barryqwalsh]

Editor’s note: In the new collection, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, twenty scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine. Melissa Levin’s essay is an excerpt from that Haymarket publication. - See more at: The last colony

 

[Phoenall]

Editor’s note: In the new collection, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, twenty scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine. Melissa Levin’s essay is an excerpt from that Haymarket publication. - See more at: The last colony

Just another example of islamomarxist disinformation, propaganda and altered facts

Evidenced of Israel being apartheid that no one has managed to produce yet

 

[Lipush]

Editor’s note: In the new collection, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, twenty scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine. Melissa Levin’s essay is an excerpt from that Haymarket publication. - See more at: The last colony

Aha.

Whatever.

 

[barryqwalsh]

South Africa's prime minister John Vorster (second from right) is feted by Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (right) and Menachem Begin (left) and Moshe Dayan during his 1976 visit to Jerusalem.



The storm of controversy after Secretary of State John F. Kerry's warning that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state" reminded us once again that facts, data and the apparently tedious details of international law often seem to have little bearing on conversations about Israel conducted at the highest levels of this country. As was the case when other major figures brandished the "A-word" in connection with Israel (Jimmy Carter comes to mind), the political reaction to Kerry's warning was instantaneous and emotional. "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and any linkage between Israel and apartheid is nonsensical and ridiculous," said California Sen. Barbara Boxer. That's that, then, eh?

Not quite. Flat and ungrounded assertions may satisfy politicians, but anyone who wants to push the envelope of curiosity even a little bit further might want to spend a few minutes actually thinking over the term and its applicability to Israel.


"Apartheid" isn't just a term of insult; it's a word with a very specific legal meaning, as defined by the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1973 and ratified by most United Nations member states (Israel and the United States are exceptions, to their shame).

According to Article II of that convention, the term applies to acts "committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." Denying those others the right to life and liberty, subjecting them to arbitrary arrest, expropriating their property, depriving them of the right to leave and return to their country or the right to freedom of movement and of residence, creating separate reserves and ghettos for the members of different racial groups, preventing mixed marriages — these are all examples of the crime of apartheid specifically mentioned in the convention.


Seeing the reference to racial groups here, some people might think of race in a putatively biological sense or as a matter of skin color. That is a rather simplistic (and dated) way of thinking about racial identity. More to the point, however, the operative definition of "racial identity" is provided in the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (to which Israel is a signatory), on which the apartheid convention explicitly draws.


There, the term "racial discrimination" is defined as "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."

A few basic facts are now in order.

The Jewish state (for so it identifies itself, after all) maintains a system of formal and informal housing segregation both in Israel and in the occupied territories. It's obvious, of course, that Jewish settlements in the West Bank aren't exactly bursting with Palestinians. In Israel itself, however, hundreds of communities have been established for Jewish residents on land expropriated from Palestinians, in which segregation is maintained, for example, by admissions committees empowered to use ethnic criteria long since banned in the United States, or by the inability of Palestinian citizens to access land held exclusively for the Jewish people by the state-sanctioned Jewish National Fund.

UCLA, is the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."


Does the term 'apartheid' fit Israel? Of course it does.

 

[Shusha]

A few basic facts are now in order...

....in which segregation is maintained, for example, by admissions committees empowered to use ethnic criteria long since banned in the United States ...

Your "facts" are lacking. Admissions committees are explicitly forbidden, in the text, to discriminate based on ethnicity, religion, place of origin, nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation, political association, etc.

 

[Phoenall]

A few basic facts are now in order...

....in which segregation is maintained, for example, by admissions committees empowered to use ethnic criteria long since banned in the United States ...

Your "facts" are lacking. Admissions committees are explicitly forbidden, in the text, to discriminate based on ethnicity, religion, place of origin, nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation, political association, etc.

If you look at the sources for all these comparisons to Israel being an apartheid state you find that the deal with Palestine and come from the same group of anti semitic Jew haters