Israel as the Apartheid State

For several years I worked in the Middle East as an English teacher. In Saudi Arabia, Oman, Cairo and even inside Palestine.   I have made many trips to both the now Palestinian State that includes both the city of Ramallah and the Gaza region. I have seen firsthand the treatment of non-Jewish populations in a land where it is anything but democratic or equal.   Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a "Jewish and democratic state", as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media.   There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.

   The first law of discrimination in Israel is the right of citizenship. For most Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as "Jewish" or "Arab". For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person's religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is "Israeli".   Citizenship is based rather on one's religion, not on a person's ethnicity or country of origin as done throughout the rest off the world. This differentiation in citizenship is recognized in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country's Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens' relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians. Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel -- the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel's Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority. To use a phrase coined by the former U.S. Congressman ,Newt Gringrich; "an invented people" which is exactly what the fabricated Jewish State really is today.

    I would ask readers and my critics especially who have labeled me a Muslim apologist or an anti-Semitic antagonist writer to entertain the question of would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? Or , a court system that summarily dismisses more than 600 documented cases of child sexual assault ,submitted also to the International Court in the Netherlands by its army of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank against the children of the Palestinians taken for detention and interrogation?   In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained. In other words, the whole edifice of Israel's apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories.

     The rule of Apartheid not only destroys any proposed future peace agreement but it also   promulgates hatred and tensions in both the separated Palestinian and Jewish communities inside Israeli and the occupied Palestinian territories.    . The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. The forced Jewish ghettos of World War II have now become the forced Palestinian ghettos inside both Israel and in the occupied territories. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighborhoods. There are more than 700 similar rural communities -- mostly kibbutzim and moshavim -- that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws. Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalized -- that is, it is held in trust not for Israel's citizens but for world Jewry by Israeli law.

Access to most of this nationalized land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organizations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure Israel's apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. Even on air flights the rules are very different between Jews and non-Jews. That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed on my trip to Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus in 2010. . Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.    Their rude awakening to apartheid had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York's JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al's security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected. When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance -- in front of hundreds of fellow passengers -- till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologized.  

            And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not done that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens.  The same is true in the Jewish press inside Israel and outside through the media in America. How often when someone says the word "Muslim or Palestinian" do we think at once the word "Terrorist"? And just as often when we hear the word "Israeli or Jew", do we think of the word victim? Pick up a online or paper copy of the Jerusalem Post sometime. This is the exact view that the Israeli press seeks constantly to espouse. This gives credence to the continuation of a system of apartheid in Israel.