Civil and Human Rights Looking Deeper into the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Israel is portrayed as a democracy that shares American values. Is this true? Do all its citizens enjoy the same civil rights before the law? What about the human rights of those under occupation?
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Kingdom of Lies: Information Clearing House - ICH
By Jeremy Salt - Ankara
May 01, 2009 "Palestine Chronicle" -- - Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful chapters of Australia’s history.
May 01, 2009 "Palestine Chronicle" -- - Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful chapters of Australia’s history.
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All modern ‘western’ colonial settler states share the same characteristics, i.e. the obliteration of indigenous cultures and the displacement of people from their land. This was true of the North American settlers, the Australian colonists and the Boers who eliminated the Herero people of southwest Africa in the early 20th century. Treaties in which the indigenous people were compelled to consent to the invasion and settlement of their land were signed in North America and New Zealand but not in Australia, where the colonists regarded the indigenous people as less than human and could therefore assert that the land was ‘empty’. There are numerous parallels here with Zionism not only on the basis of an ‘empty’ land being settled or of civilization being brought to a ‘primitive’ people but in the double nature of the colonialism. In North America and Palestine, settlement was fostered by a distant government against which the settlers eventually rebelled before declaring their ‘independence’.
Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at every stage from those who justified discrimination on the basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the 1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education, health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism involving police and the public at large show that attitudes are harder to change than laws.
The difference between Israel and these other settler states is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in the opposite direction.
Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at every stage from those who justified discrimination on the basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the 1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education, health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism involving police and the public at large show that attitudes are harder to change than laws.
The difference between Israel and these other settler states is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in the opposite direction.
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In a land in which the vast bulk of the population was not Jewish, a Jewish state could only be constructed by taking one inherently racist measure after another. If the state were to be Jewish so would land ownership and labor. The conditions written into the charter of the Jewish National Fund and other land-purchasing organizations stipulated that land once acquired could never be retained to non-Jewish hands. This ‘extra-territorialisation’ of land as it was described by a British commission of inquiry sent to Palestine fuelled the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. Exclusive Jewish access to the land was followed through after 1948 by the destruction of approximately 500 villages and the passage of ‘absent property’ and ‘present absentee’ laws which prevented even Palestinians remaining inside Israel from returning to the property they owned.
Security laws were another means of separating the Palestinians from their land. Consolidation of the Jewish presence on the land has continued through the attempt to erase the Palestinian presence in Jaffa and other cities inside the ‘green line’.
On the other side of the green line the tactics are cruder and more obvious. Open demographic war is being waged against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem while in Hebron the centre of the city has been closed down and residents around the market moved out in the name of ‘security’, i.e. the protection of racist and fanatical Jewish settlers living in the heights above. Across the occupied West Bank it is the armed interlopers who describe the Palestinians as interlopers and ‘infiltrators’ of their own occupied land. All of their vandalism, bullying, harassment of men, women and children, destruction of property and uprooting of olive trees and occasional killing is underwritten by the state, and yet the state is outraged when the charge of racism is raised in Geneva. The colonization of the territories is not incidental or accidental racism but the carefully thought out strategic and ideological racism of a racist state. The fact that it continues every single day is testimony to Israel’s contempt for universal values and international law.
Just as the land would have to be the exclusive possession of the Jewish ‘people’ (as 93 per cent of it is now legally classified), so it could only be worked by Jewish labor. Jewish employers were explicitly prohibited from hiring ‘Arab’ workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Until the 1960s the central Israeli labor organization, the Histadrut, would only admit Jewish members. In practice, labor discrimination has never worked perfectly because of the low cost of ‘Arab’ labor compared to ‘Jewish’ labor and because of the Palestinian need to work, a situation which has led to Palestinian laborers building the settlements being constructed on their own occupied land. When the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Gaza in the 1970s she expressed shock, not at the establishment of Jewish settlements on expropriated land, but at the use of ‘Arab’ labor to work the land for the settlers.
As Israel was the state for Jews wherever they lived and not for all the people who lived within its borders (so to speak, seeing that Israel has never actually declared its borders), the laws would have to be framed accordingly. The Nationality Law automatically conferred Israeli citizenship only on Jews (i.e born of a Jewish mother). The Law of Return granted the ‘right’ of ‘return’ to Jews who had never lived in Palestine while denying the right of return to Palestinians who had lived there for generations. Some families could trace their origins in Palestine back to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century.
The structural discrimination against the Palestinians can be measured in socio-economic statistics dealing with poverty, unemployment, access to government services and education, house construction and funding for municipalities. Taking their cue from the government, and the openly racist statements made by senior political, military and religious figures, describing the Palestinians as ‘two legged animals’, ‘drugged cockroaches’, ‘insects’, ‘snakes’ and ‘a cancer’, large numbers of Israelis polled have said they do not want to live in the same apartment blocks as ‘Arabs’ and in fact would like to see them out of the state altogether. The racism coming out of the mouths of rabbis and religious seminaries, couched in terms of an exclusive Jewish right to ‘Eretz Israel’, with many of the students or graduates of these seminaries living in the most aggressive of the West Bank settlements, is amongst the worst. ...
Security laws were another means of separating the Palestinians from their land. Consolidation of the Jewish presence on the land has continued through the attempt to erase the Palestinian presence in Jaffa and other cities inside the ‘green line’.
On the other side of the green line the tactics are cruder and more obvious. Open demographic war is being waged against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem while in Hebron the centre of the city has been closed down and residents around the market moved out in the name of ‘security’, i.e. the protection of racist and fanatical Jewish settlers living in the heights above. Across the occupied West Bank it is the armed interlopers who describe the Palestinians as interlopers and ‘infiltrators’ of their own occupied land. All of their vandalism, bullying, harassment of men, women and children, destruction of property and uprooting of olive trees and occasional killing is underwritten by the state, and yet the state is outraged when the charge of racism is raised in Geneva. The colonization of the territories is not incidental or accidental racism but the carefully thought out strategic and ideological racism of a racist state. The fact that it continues every single day is testimony to Israel’s contempt for universal values and international law.
Just as the land would have to be the exclusive possession of the Jewish ‘people’ (as 93 per cent of it is now legally classified), so it could only be worked by Jewish labor. Jewish employers were explicitly prohibited from hiring ‘Arab’ workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Until the 1960s the central Israeli labor organization, the Histadrut, would only admit Jewish members. In practice, labor discrimination has never worked perfectly because of the low cost of ‘Arab’ labor compared to ‘Jewish’ labor and because of the Palestinian need to work, a situation which has led to Palestinian laborers building the settlements being constructed on their own occupied land. When the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Gaza in the 1970s she expressed shock, not at the establishment of Jewish settlements on expropriated land, but at the use of ‘Arab’ labor to work the land for the settlers.
As Israel was the state for Jews wherever they lived and not for all the people who lived within its borders (so to speak, seeing that Israel has never actually declared its borders), the laws would have to be framed accordingly. The Nationality Law automatically conferred Israeli citizenship only on Jews (i.e born of a Jewish mother). The Law of Return granted the ‘right’ of ‘return’ to Jews who had never lived in Palestine while denying the right of return to Palestinians who had lived there for generations. Some families could trace their origins in Palestine back to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century.
The structural discrimination against the Palestinians can be measured in socio-economic statistics dealing with poverty, unemployment, access to government services and education, house construction and funding for municipalities. Taking their cue from the government, and the openly racist statements made by senior political, military and religious figures, describing the Palestinians as ‘two legged animals’, ‘drugged cockroaches’, ‘insects’, ‘snakes’ and ‘a cancer’, large numbers of Israelis polled have said they do not want to live in the same apartment blocks as ‘Arabs’ and in fact would like to see them out of the state altogether. The racism coming out of the mouths of rabbis and religious seminaries, couched in terms of an exclusive Jewish right to ‘Eretz Israel’, with many of the students or graduates of these seminaries living in the most aggressive of the West Bank settlements, is amongst the worst. ...
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Palestinian Foreign Minister Criticizes Israel's Racism in the Middle East
Geneva, April 21, - Palestine criticized on Tuesday in Geneva the racism methods maintained by the Israeli occupation in Gaza and West Bank during a speech by its Foreign Minister Riyad Al Maliki at the UN Conference against Racism.
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Referring to the occupant power, Al Maliki, denounced that Israel continues lifting the walls of racial segregation that seperate families, children, collegues and sick in hospitals.
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Al Maliki recalled that Israel continues broadening the colonization of the occupied territories with Jewish settlements and changing the Arab parts of eastern Jerusalem in a clear violation of international resolutions.
He added that Israeli is stealing the water from the West Bank to re direct it to the Jewish settlements and isolating the Palestinian people of all the components of the area.
Geneva, April 21, - Palestine criticized on Tuesday in Geneva the racism methods maintained by the Israeli occupation in Gaza and West Bank during a speech by its Foreign Minister Riyad Al Maliki at the UN Conference against Racism.
...
Referring to the occupant power, Al Maliki, denounced that Israel continues lifting the walls of racial segregation that seperate families, children, collegues and sick in hospitals.
...
Al Maliki recalled that Israel continues broadening the colonization of the occupied territories with Jewish settlements and changing the Arab parts of eastern Jerusalem in a clear violation of international resolutions.
He added that Israeli is stealing the water from the West Bank to re direct it to the Jewish settlements and isolating the Palestinian people of all the components of the area.
