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Changing Israel from Without

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Now the Israeli education system is segregated until up to the universities. What the listeners should understand, it's not the petty apartheid of South Africa. What I mean by that, there are no different benches, and no different toilets, and no different...

DB: But you're saying Arabs and Jews don't go to school together.

IP: No. No. No, they don't go to school. But they can meet in the university, in the university.

DB: Are the schools equivalent? Are the Arab schools as good?

IP: No, they are not as good. And the whole program is designed by Jews for the Arabs, in Israel. As I said before, it's not the petty apartheid, although I think Israel is moving towards the petty apartheid because they don't have enough control in the old means.

It's more invisible, it's more sort of glass ceilings because Israel, at least until recently, wanted to portray itself as both Jewish and democratic, both an ethnic racist state but one which is also democratic. And I think that kind of marketing is not going well anymore.

I just published a book in February called The Idea of Israel in which I share how the whole marketing campaign of Israel, the truth trying to square the circle, to say Israel an apartheid state, but we're also a democratic state, is collapsing....

I think, really, coming back to the main point. I remember when Desmond Tutu came to the West Bank and some other, sort of big shots of the ANC [African National Congress] came and I was accompanying them. They mentioned something which I had never thought of before. And I said, "Why do you keep telling me that this is worse?" Because I read so much on the life of Africans under the apartheid regime, and I was always moved.  And it looked so callous and cruel. I said "Why are you so insistent that this is worse, in its totality?"

And Desmond Tutu said something very important. He said, "The whites in South Africa wanted to exploit the African. Which is very bad. They wanted to exploit, they wanted to make sure that everything is in their hands. But nonetheless, they still mixed. I mean there was an African nanny in every house of white families." He said, "My feeling is -- and he's absolutely right -- that Zionism doesn't want to exploit the Palestinian, it wants to eliminate him."

And it's far worse. If you're exploited, then one day you liberate yourself. But if someone wants to eliminate you, and will succeed, there is no redemption. There is no end. And this I think, someone ... only people coming from South Africa could immediately see this, that this is worse. I mean they have seen exploitation, and I think they are right. The Palestinians happen to be in a space where most of the people who have power in Israel to make decisions, don't want to see them. I'm not talking about genocide, but ethnic cleansing. But ethnic cleansing can also lead to genocide. And there's always this danger.

So it's worse than apartheid because they want to separate the Palestinians from the land of Palestine. They don't want to separate the Palestinians from the Jews, as the South Africans did (with blacks and whites). They want to separate the people from their land, from their history, and from their culture and their identity. That is a far more destructive and cruel project to my mind.

DB: John Pilger did the film, what was it in 1975 ["Palestine is the Issue"] and 25 years later he's still doing the film ["Palestine is Still the Issue"] and he's still calling it the same thing because it is still a core issue to peace in this world.

IP:  It absolutely is. I think we are all a bit distracted and rightly so by the horrific things that are going on in Syria, and by the unpleasant events, Iran, Israel and in the Arab world. But we should never forget that it all goes back to this issue. It is the last remnants of the colonialist period and it was kind of an open wound that never healed.

And there is a direct connection between the way the United States has kept alive a colonialist project, into the Twenty-first Century, and the horrible things that we are seeing elsewhere in the Middle East. The Middle East is not able to sort of remove the shackles, if you want, of the colonialist past and move into a different phase because there was this question of Palestine remained open, and unresolved. It epitomizes double talk of the West. It epitomizes the hypocrisy of the West, and so on. And it gave pretext to a lot of bad people to do bad things to their own brothers and sisters. Because they would say, "Yes, but look at the Americans and the Israelis."

DB: I have so many questions I want to ask you about all those issues. And every time you say something I have five more questions. But I do want to get to Syria and the plight of Palestinians in Syria. But before we do that I, just to stay with the terminology that is now used by many of us, and debated by others. We use this word ethnic cleansing. We were just talking about that. Could you talk about that? When you say ethnic cleansing what are the, sort of the continuing Israeli policies that make that, and you were beginning to talk about it, but make that definition real, and not hyperbole.

IP: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, when I decided to write a book in 2007 called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, I had to wander from one publisher to the other, because most of them said we're not going to associate the term ethnic cleansing with what Israel is doing. I convinced the publisher who eventually published the book, by showing him, the guys who were running the publishing house, by showing them the definition of ethnic cleansing in the State Department website. And the State Department website is very clear. It says: "If there are two ethnic groups on one land, and one group contemplates getting rid of all or part of the other ethnic group by peaceful or violent means, this is ethnic cleansing." And the State Department website goes on to say that "Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity." And that "the United States would never endorse anyone who is doing it."

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Dennis J Bernstein is the host and executive producer of Flashpoints, a daily news magazine broadcast on Pacifica Radio. He is an award-winning investigative reporter, essayist and poet. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and (more...)
 

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