Israel is the Middle East's apartheid South Africa - Wayne Madsen Report

Update: Israel is the Middle East's apartheid South Africa

Like the apartheid regime, Zionist Israel should be consigned to the ash heap of history

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa has demanded that South African expel the Israeli ambassasdor and recall its own ambassador in Tel Aviv. Today's South Africa knows an apartheid regime when it sees one. Although the West Bank now resembles discontiguous South African bantustans, nothing like Gaza ever appeared in apartheid South Africa. Gaza mirrors the worst ghettos of Nazi Germany. WMR is republishing the following article by the editor from 2012:

Israel adopting apartheid Bantustan model for Palestinians

By Wayne Madsen

The Israeli government calls them Areas A, B, and C of “Judea and Samaria.” To the rest of the world, the areas are known as Palestine, a nation that has state observer status in the United Nations and is a full member of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Arab League.

No other country in the world recognizes the existence of “Judea and Samaria” but 142 nations recognize the independence and statehood of Palestine.

Area C of the West Bank of Palestine is under full Israeli political and military control and there are plans underway to annex Area C to Israel. The Israeli military has security control over Area B, largely Palestinian rural land and in danger of being gobbled up by Israeli annexation if the expansionist Israel Home Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and the right-wing of Likud have their way. Area A is under the control of the Palestinian Authority and includes its administrative headquarters city of Ramallah and other Palestinian population centers.

When one looks at a map of the Israeli area boundaries in the West Bank one can only be reminded of the patchwork quilt of majority African “Bantustans” created by apartheid South Africa. In fact, what the Benjamin Netanyahu government has offered to Palestine in the way of independence is for an unarmed and defenseless entity to exist as an unequal part of a greater Israeli zone of influence with Area C being exchanged for Israel’s recognition of Palestine’s faux “independence.” Netanyahu has referred to the co-principality of Andorra as a template for Palestine. Andorra’s actual heads of state are a Spanish Catholic bishop and the French president. Andorra’s actual independence from Spain and France is highly debatable, even though the country is a member of the UN and Council of Europe.

Such contrivances as planned by Israel for Palestine have been seen before in Bantustans with the names of Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana.

And in what should be taught to every African student, Israel was not only a major supporter of apartheid South Africa but it had close trade and security relations with the Bantustans because it saw them as a model for future “Arabstans” in the occupied Palestinian territories. These “Arabstans” now exist in the Gaza Strip and Areas A, B, and C of the West Bank.

Close Israeli-South African relations were capped off by a visit from South African Prime Minister B. J. Vorster to Israel in April 1976, the first by a South African head of government. Israel and South Africa jointly manufactured military hardware and weapons and electronic and signals intelligence systems as a way to bypass UN sanctions imposed on the apartheid state. And the two countries, with the assistance of Taiwan, jointly produced nuclear weapons and the fissionable U-235 uranium isotope, testing an atomic bomb in the South Atlantic near the Prince Edward Islands on September 22, 1979. 

Although South Africa’s self-proclaimed Bantustans were only recognized by South Africa, Israel maintained de facto relations with the four entities. Transkei, Ciskei, and Bophuthatswana maintained trade missions in Tel Aviv staffed by Israelis. In fact, these Israelis were using passports from the “republics,” as well as other diplomatic contrivances, to support the illegal side of Mossad and international Jewish lobbying and Israeli influence-peddling operations worldwide.

With Transkei, Israel maintained close intelligence and counter-insurgency ties. Its Prime Minister George Matanzima, a nephew of then-imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, visited Israel in 1984, along with four Transkei Cabinet ministers.

But it was Ciskei, headed by President Lennox Sebe, which provided Israel with its closest Bantustan ally. Sebe traveled to Israel, supported illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, and received Israeli assistance, especially for his brutal police force. Relations were so close between the Bantustan and Israel, the Ciskei capital of Bisho had a sister city relationship with Ariel, an illegal Israeli settlement on the West Bank. A number of Israeli companies, many led by Likud officials, established themselves in Ciskei. Mossad and Israel Defense Force personnel helped Ciskei establish paramilitary units and an intelligence service. Ciskei’s flag shared its light blue and white colors with those of Israel’s flag.

Bophuthatswana resembled Palestine’s Area A and B territories. The Tswana “homeland” consisted of eight non-contiguous enclaves within South Africa. The Bantustan’s Sun City casino not only attracted top Western entertainers who did not want to run afoul of the sanctions on the apartheid regime, but also a fair number of Israeli-South African dual national organized crime figures who ran casino operations and opened up nearby strip clubs and bordellos catering to inter-racial sex.

Bophuthatswana maintained an unofficial embassy in Israel and the Bantustan’s President Lucas Mangope was received by a number of Israeli officials, including the famed General Moshe Dayan. Israel provided Bophuthatswana’s official armed forces with training and equipment and, in 1994, when Mangope was overthrown, he could only rely on the support of the white racist Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB), which was also believed to have received covert support from Israeli trainers and equippers. North West University in the former capital of Bophuthatswana, Mafikeng, honored the late Mangope in 2010. Unsurprisingly, the university also maintains close ties with Ben Gurion University in Israel.

Venda also received security assistance from Israel and its president, Patrick Mphephu, paid an official visit to Israel in 1980. In 1983, Israel hosted a large delegation from the Venda Chamber of Commerce.

Israel showed every intention of supporting other Bantustans after they became fully independent. In 1985, Israel received KwaZulu Bantustan’s Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. There were low-level Israeli links, mostly by Israeli military intelligence operatives in the guises of tourists and backpackers, with the Bantustan governments of Lebowa and Qwa Qwa in South Africa and Kavangoland, Ovamboland, and East Caprivi in then-Southwest Africa.

The Bantustans disappeared after the end of apartheid and were incorporated back into South Africa. Today, South Africa has implemented plans to boycott any goods originating from Israeli businesses in the occupied territories. Israel, the second-most ardent supporter of the Bantustans, after apartheid South Africa, has cried foul and is accusing South Africa of anti-Semitism. However, Israel stands guilty of racism and pro-segregation in Africa. It is a shameful history that Israel should not be permitted to run away from.

Israel's Dangerous Turn

By Robert Parry

June 2, 2010

After Israel’s lethal attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla carrying relief supplies to Gaza, a troubling question arises: Have Israeli authorities, who possess a major nuclear arsenal, become dangerously erratic?

This question can't be posed publicly in the American mainstream news media nor in U.S. political circles, where fear of the pro-Israel lobby remains strong. But it is a concern that is being discussed quietly by foreign policy analysts around the world.

Even as America’s commentariat again generates the predictable excuses for Israeli latest actions, the political reality inside Israel is one that is shifting more and more toward a society dominated by Jewish fundamentalists, including an aggressive and racist settler bloc.

The ultra-Orthodox Shas Party is now in the Likud ruling coalition and holds important Cabinet posts such as housing. Shas leaders have made it clear that they favor a country segregated not just between Arab and Jew but between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

If these fundamentalist elements continue to consolidate their political power, the world could soon be facing an isolated and paranoid religious state with some 200 to 400 nuclear warheads along with a sophisticated collection of chemical and biological weapons.

One Israeli émigré, who spent his young adulthood working for the Israeli government, told me that he fears Israel is becoming like North Korea, except qualitatively more dangerous because Israel has an advanced nuclear arsenal and sits in a more strategic part of the world.

The current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also appears excessively confident that Israel’s sophisticated propaganda network and its American neoconservative allies can overwhelm any criticism of Israeli actions in Washington and ensure eventual U.S. backing for a military strike on Iran.

Netanyahu has been dismissive toward President Barack Obama’s peace initiatives, particularly Obama’s demand that Israel stop building Jewish housing in traditionally Arab areas.

Ignoring those wishes, Netanyahu’s Shas Party allies announced new Jewish construction in Arab East Jerusalem last March as Vice President Joe Biden arrived to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with Israel.

Though Obama let his annoyance be known, Netanyahu followed up by announcing that the Jewish housing construction would go forward.

‘Kiss-and-Make-Up’

Faced with this Israeli intransigence, Obama quieted his criticism. He was reportedly looking forward to a “kiss-and-make-up” session with Netanyahu on Tuesday before Israel’s lethal assault on the “Freedom Flotilla” caused Netanyahu to cancel the meeting and rush back to Israel.

Obama also has fallen in line behind Israeli insistence that a confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program be put at the top of the international agenda and that a new Iranian offer to ship about half its low-enriched uranium out of the country be rejected.

The President had privately urged the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to draw Iran into that agreement, which they did two weeks ago. But Israel and American neocons denounced and ridiculed the deal, demanding instead stiffer sanctions and stepped-up efforts for “regime change” in Iran.

Instead of admitting that he had backed the Iran-Brazil-Turkey deal, Obama stayed silent, as he has in the wake of Israel’s middle-of-the-night commando raid on the flotilla, which left nine peace activists dead early Monday.

In a P.R. blitz on Tuesday, Israeli officials made a point of showing off knives and other hand-made weapons that some of the activists allegedly used to defend the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, when the Israeli commandos landed by ropes from helicopters.

According to Israeli accounts, the resistance from the people onboard led the commandos to open fire. The Israeli government and many U.S. commentators blamed the ship's resistance for the violence.

However, it would not be unusual – and certainly not illegal – for a ship’s crew and passengers in international waters to defend themselves from an armed assault, especially one launched in the dark of night. If the attackers were Somalis instead of Israelis, the ship’s defenders would be hailed as heroes.

In an e-mail to me, Marquette Professor of Moral Theology Daniel C. Maguire cited one important distinction between “Somali piracy and Israeli piracy – Israel kills during its piracy and then claims it does so in self-defense. That is [a] first in the history of piracy.

“Traditionally, pirates have been outlaws and admit it. It is very much like a rapist saying: ‘The victim I was raping resisted and so I killed her in self-defense.’ A defense like that would make even a mob lawyer blush.”

Act of War

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador and Foreign Office specialist on maritime law, said the Israeli commando raid was a violation of international law and the Law of the Sea, since the ship under a Turkish flag was in international waters.

If “the Israeli commandoes were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists in international waters, the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred," in this case Turkey.

"In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory. So,” Murray continued, “Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the attack by Israeli commandos falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime."

However, not surprisingly, the Israeli P.R. response to the intense international criticism worked wonders in winning over the U.S. news media.

After playing video of the Israeli assault and the efforts of some passengers to resist the attackers, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews came down decisively on the Israeli side, calling criticism of the lethal attack “an unfair shot at Israel.”

Matthews added that he agreed with the pro-Israeli position taken by the Washington Post's neoconservative editorial page, which faulted Israel for the sloppiness of its attack while siding with its purpose.

“We have no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla -- a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists,” the Post wrote on Tuesday.

“Israel says that some of the organizers have ties to Hamas and al-Qaeda. What's plain is that the group's nominal purpose, delivering "humanitarian" supplies to Gaza, was secondary to the aim of provoking a confrontation.”

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman weighed in Wednesday with an op-ed that downplayed the human tragedy in Gaza where some 1,400 Palestinians died in an Israeli month-long offensive at the end of 2008 and the start of 2009 and where a blockade has continued for three years.

"That concern for Gaza and Israel's blockade is so out [of] balance with ... other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred -- not the advice of friends," Friedman wrote.

So, in the view of the mainstream U.S. news media, Israel is justified in maintaining a fierce embargo on the 1.5 million people crowded into the tiny Gaza Strip and any “motley collection” of activists that tries to run the blockade is at fault for whatever happens.

Plus, it seems, when Israel launches an attack on a ship in international waters, the people onboard must accept whatever treatment they receive at Israeli hands. They must not fight back.

By contrast, one can only imagine how the U.S. press corps would rise up in collective fury if, say, Iran sent its commandos into international waters to attack and seize vessels that were on a humanitarian mission.

Lost Objectivity

What’s striking in all this is how far the U.S. news media has veered away from its supposed commitment to objectivity, even as it pretends to continue abiding by that journalistic principle.

The U.S. media also would drip with sarcasm over some of the post-facto rationales used to justify the attack, if the attacking nation wasn’t Israel.

For instance, there’s the Israeli accusation that the cargo on the ships wasn’t packed properly.

Shuki Sagis, chief executive of the Israel port at Ashdod, complained to the Jerusalem Post that the supplies – including scooters for the handicapped, wheelchairs, stretchers, hospital beds, boxes of medicine, food products and toys – weren’t neatly stacked.

“The cargo ships were loaded haphazardly, with all of the equipment mixed up in the large holds,” Sagis said. “Ships loaded in this way would not be accepted in any port. We are loading the equipment on the trucks far more carefully than it was loaded on to the ships.”

Other Israeli officials claimed that the humanitarian supplies on the ships were not items that were needed by the Gazans.

“I can say with great assurance,” said Colonel Moshe Levi, “that none of the equipment on board is needed in Gaza. The equipment that we found is all equipment that we have regularly allowed into the Strip over the past year.”

Levi said that fact “proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole premise of the voyage was for propaganda and provocation and not for humanitarian purposes.”

However, the Israelis did concede that their searches of the vessels turned up no weapons being smuggled into Gaza. The only “contraband” was construction equipment, including sacks of concrete and metal rods, Levi said.

Levi explained that Israel won’t let construction equipment in to rebuild Gaza, which was devastated by a month-long Israeli offensive that ended in January 2009, because the material might be used to build fortifications for "terrorists."

The notion that bombed-out Gazans must be made to survive in makeshift shanties so some future Israeli assault won’t be complicated by the existence of buildings that might be used by Gaza’s defenders could be regarded in a different context as evidence of grotesque inhumanity.

That is, if the perpetrators were some nation or group that the U.S. media didn’t like.

The Israeli Navy also claimed that it had learned an important lesson from its assault on the Freedom Flotilla.

A top Navy commander told The Jerusalem Post that the next time, Israel will use much more military force to stop the ships.

"We boarded the ship and were attacked as if it was a war," said the officer, who wasn’t identified by name. "That will mean that we will have to come prepared in the future as if it was a war."

Combined with other recent incidents, like Israel's Jan. 20 assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room and its open threats about bombing Iran, Israel might be diagnosed as suffering from a violent form of paranoia if it were a patient in a psychiatric ward rather than a nuclear-armed state.

Yet, instead of addressing this growing threat to world peace -- that is, Israel's increasingly erratic behavior and deepening religious fervor -- the U.S. news media continues to give this favored country a free pass.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Israel's Big and Small Apartheids The meaning of a Jewish state by Jonathan Cook

This article is the text of a talk delivered by the author to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21

Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state.

That is not surprising because, as I will argue, 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. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.

I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. 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.

So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.

First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.

A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other 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”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?

Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.

This differentiation in citizenship is recognised 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.

That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

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.

There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? 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? 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. They stand or fall together.

Next, let us look at the matter of land control.

Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do.

True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews -- and they are an extremely important group -- who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.

But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship -- or at least it appeared that way to me -- of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel.

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. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.

The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev -- currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.

Nevatim is not exceptional. 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 nationalised -- that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.)

Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.

Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”

If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively -- and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation -- how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends?

Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.

In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim.

Finally, let us consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.

As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way -- and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show.

That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. 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 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 apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their “abusive and unnecessary” treatment.

Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racal profiling.

The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al.

They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.

The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.

Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. 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.

Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals.

Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel -- and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources -- your land, water and labour -- is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder.

In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched -- it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.

Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled -- and more legitimate -- kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.

That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found -- in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba [Video]

Israeli apartheid week

MSA Resolution to Boycott Apartheid Israel, and to Stop Apartheid on Campus

DEARBORN BOYCOTTS ISRAEL

MSA Resolution to Boycott Apartheid Israel, and to Stop Apartheid on Campus

Photo:

Malcolm X, meeting with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964.

This was sixteen years after European Zionists invaded Palestine, destroying over 400 Palestinian villages.

It was an extremely violent ethnic cleansing operation.

It exiled the majority of Palestinians out of Palestine.

____________________________________________________________________

This Resolution has been proposed for an immediate vote by the Michigan Student Assembly, at the University of Michigan.

This Resolution then was torn up by the Assembly's General Counsel, as the "Michigan Daily" reporter watched:

http://dearbornboycottsisrael.blogspot.com/2008/09/attempted-resolution-proposal.html

But the Resolution was again presented to the Assembly for a vote.

This Resolution has also been proposed for a vote by the University's LSA Student Government:

Resolution to Boycott Apartheid Israel,

and to Stop Apartheid on Campus

Resolution Summary:

1. Boycott all Israeli products.
2. Take that $1 trillion you’re spending to kill Muslims, and spend it instead on re-building Detroit.
3. Stop 400 years of White Privilege—the University should admit every Black high school graduate.

1. Boycott all Israeli products

WHEREAS, White Supremacism, including Zionism, is the most genocidal force on Earth,

WHEREAS, Congress has paid $300 billion to Israel, according to Congressman John Dingell,

WHEREAS, Israel spent that money on a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinian people, which has culminated in the Israeli siege against Gaza,

WHEREAS, Israel has forced 1.5 million Palestinians into a concentration-camp existence in Gaza, where childhood malnutrition and anemia are rampant,

WHEREAS, Israel is threatening to unleash a “Holocaust” on Gaza,

WHEREAS, Malcolm X was right— the Zionists had no “legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves”

WHEREAS, Israel’s alliance with Apartheid South Africa was "more intimate and more extensive than anything similar in Israel’s history", according to Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,

WHEREAS, Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, which it tried to share with Apartheid South Africa,

WHEREAS, Israel is training its pilots to nuke Iran, a land of 76 million people who have never invaded anyone,

WHEREAS, Israel trained and oversaw SAVAK, the brutal force of torturers who kept the Shah of Iran in power,

WHEREAS, the United States has been bleeding Iran with economic sanctions, then with U.S.-imposed dictatorship, then with U.S.-fueled invasions, almost continuously since 1952,

WHEREAS, those economic sanctions still make it impossible for Iranians to get spare parts for any airplane, from anywhere in the world,

WHEREAS, Israel is demanding even crueler economic sanctions against Iran,

THEREFORE, the Michigan Student Assembly demands that Congress impose a total boycott against all Israeli products,

THEREFORE, we demand that Congress cut off all aid to the racist state of Israel, the last Apartheid State on Earth.

THEREFORE, we demand that the University of Michigan Board of Regents declare a boycott against all products imported from the racist state of Israel.

2. Take that $1 trillion you’re spending to kill Muslims, and spend it instead on re-building Detroit.

WHEREAS, Congress has spent $1 trillion to kill millions of Iraqis since 1991,

WHEREAS, Congress has killed over a million Afghans since the 1980’s, using a series of unbelievable excuses,

WHEREAS, the U.S. repeatedly bombs Somalia, using more unbelievable excuses,

WHEREAS, Senator Clinton threatens to “obliterate Iran”, and Senator McCain sings “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”,

WHEREAS, Senator Obama threatens to invade Pakistan, then President Bush launches military strikes directly on Pakistan,

WHEREAS, Congress’s trillion-dollar genocide against Muslim lands is conducted at the direct expense of Black America,

WHEREAS, Congress’s trillion-dollar occupation of Muslim lands is conducted at the direct expense of Black America,

THEREFORE, the Michigan Student Assembly demands that Congress immediately remove its trillion-dollar army of occupation from every nation on Earth, because that army only brings coups, torture, racism, and death to the planet;

THEREFORE, we demand that Congress immediately spend that trillion dollars, which was stolen from Black America, on the immediate rebuilding of Detroit, including mass transit that every Detroiter can walk to, including the best elementary, secondary, and university education in the nation, including the best neighborhood clinics, the best neighborhood libraries, and the best housing infrastructure in the nation, and including the necessary industrial facilities to build all of those things, and to employ every Detroiter of working age, with full union wages and benefits,

THEREFORE, we demand that Congress similarly rebuild every U.S. inner city, and that this rebuilding be directed by Black engineers, architects, professors, physicians, educators, and managers, and that this rebuilding be staffed by Black union labor, nationwide, until Black unemployment ceases to exist,

3. Stop 400 Years of White Privilege—

--the University should Admit every Black high school graduate.

WHEREAS, centuries of government policy, backed up by organized white violence at every level, has attempted to beat down African political power, financial power, industrial power, and landholding power, from the Congo to Chicago,

WHEREAS, Martin Luther King Jr. was right— the U.S. government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”,

WHEREAS, the U.S. has murdered and imprisoned African and African-American leadership on a mind-boggling scale, from Lumumba in the Congo, to Mandela in South Africa, to Fred Hampton in Chicago, to Marcus Garvey, to the Orangeburg Massacre, to the Jackson State Massacre, to the U.S.-Israeli-South-African invasion of Angola in the 1970’s, to the U.S.-Israeli-South-African creation of death squads across the African continent which have murdered millions and stripped Africa of unimaginable wealth,

WHEREAS, today’s white suburban power structure was built with a trillion-dollar federal highway subsidy, and with massive governmental subsidies to build all-white suburban settlements, which have sucked the wealth and political power of Black America into virtually all-white enclaves, while barring the bulk of Black America from entry,

WHEREAS, white political, economic, employment, and educational power has always been built on massive federal subsidies, from the railroads in the 19^th century, to the government-backed white academies created to suck away resources from any public educational system that might benefit Black students,

THEREFORE, the Michigan Student Assembly finds it obscene that a violent, 400-year steamroller of white privilege-- where whites use the riches of Black labor to perpetuate a closed circle of privileged white university admissions, a closed circle of white business connections, a closed circle of white jobs, perpetuated by a heavily subsidized white suburban political machine,-- is called a “meritocracy”, while the slightest effort to get Black students into the University is called “reverse racism”;

THEREFORE, the Michigan Student Assembly demands that the University of Michigan Board of Regents immediately guarantee admission, tuition-free, to every Black student who graduates from every Michigan high school, together with year-round tutoring for every new student who needs it;

THERFORE, we declare, in advance, a highly visible picket line and a 3-day student strike, if any state authority attempts to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to block the open admission of Black students to this University.

____________________________________________________________________

Photo:

In 1975, Israel had helped South Africa to invade Angola, sending military advisers and electronic equipment to the front.

The next year, you see the Prime Minister of Apartheid South Africa, John Vorster (second from right), meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (right), with future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (left), and with Moshe Dayan, in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds).

Landmark study finds Israeli control in occupied territories 'a breach of the prohibition of apartheid'

The following exclusive on an international report concluding that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories "has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid” was sent to us by journalist Ben White. Another stinging statement from the report: "The Wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent checkpoints suggest a policy permanently to divide the West Bank into racial cantons." (White's book 'Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide', will be published this summer. He can be contacted at ben@benwhite.org.uk.)

Tomorrow, an important new report, "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid: A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law", will be released at a special meeting at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. I have been passed a copy of the report’s Executive Summary, and it makes for vital reading.

What follows are some of the highlights of the Executive Summary, but first a few observations. Describing Israel or Israeli policies in terms of apartheid has become more common in recent times, but has also provoked a strong backlash. It is interesting to note, therefore, that this study is a measured assessment written by legal experts on the specific ways in which Israel’s policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) can be considered to be ‘colonialism’ and/or ‘apartheid’, as defined by international law. It is not, quite clearly and openly, saying Israel=South Africa.

The new report was carried out by the Middle East Project of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. The Middle East Project is:

an independent two year project of the HSRC to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy. Its funding was provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the Department of Foreign Affairs and the concerned international community.

Background

In January 2007, while addressing the UN Human Rights Council in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, South African law Professor John Dugard asked the following question:

Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT. At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law. What are the legal consequences of a regime of prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid for the occupied people, the Occupying Power and third States?

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (and specifically, their Middle East Project) “commissioned this study to test the hypothesis” put forward by Dugard. Beginning in February 2008, fifteen months of workshops, drafting, re-drafting and revision finally produced this report for publication.

Aim and focus

The aim of the project “was to scrutinise the situation from the nonpartisan perspective of international law, rather than engage in political discourse and rhetoric”. The conclusion is that “Israel, since 1967, has been the belligerent Occupying Power in the OPT, and that its occupation of these territories has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid”.

The study also focuses on “the responsibility of States as a result of internationally wrongful acts”, concluding:

Faced with a violation of the prohibitions of colonialism and apartheid, all States have three duties: to cooperate to end the violation; not to recognise the illegal situation arising from it; and not to render aid or assistance to the State committing it.

On the legal framework in the OPT:

“The occupied status of the West Bank was confirmed by the ICJ in the Wall advisory opinion. Israel’s ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip did not constitute the end of occupation because, despite the redeployment of its military ground forces from Gaza, it retains and exercises effective control over the territory.”

“...Israel’s administration of the OPT systematically breaches the law of armed conflict, both by disregarding the prohibition imposed on an Occupying Power not to alter the laws in force in occupied territory and by enforcing a dual and discriminatory legal regime on Jewish and Palestinian residents of the OPT. Israel grants to Jewish residents of the settlements in the OPT the protections of Israeli domestic law and subjects them to the jurisdiction of Israeli civil courts, while Palestinians living in the same territory are ruled under military law and subjected to the jurisdiction of military courts whose procedures violate international standards for the prosecution of justice. As a consequence of this bifurcated system, Jewish residents of the OPT enjoy freedom of movement, civil protections, and services denied to Palestinians. Palestinians are simultaneously denied the protections accorded to protected persons by international humanitarian law. This dual system has gained the imprimatur of Israel’s High Court and constitutes a policy by the State of Israel to sustain two parallel societies in the OPT, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, and discriminate between these two groups by according very different rights, protections, and life chances in the same territory.”

Findings on Colonialism:

“Although international law provides no single decisive definition of colonialism, the terms of the Declaration on Colonialism indicate that a situation may be classified as colonial when the acts of a State have the cumulative outcome that it annexes or otherwise unlawfully retains control over territory and thus aims permanently to deny its indigenous population the exercise of its right to self-determination. Five issues, which are unlawful in themselves, taken together make it evident that Israel’s rule in the OPT has assumed such a colonial character: namely, violations of the territorial integrity of occupied territory; depriving the population of occupied territory of the capacity for self-governance; integrating the economy of occupied territory into that of the occupant; breaching the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources in relation to the occupied territory; and denying the population of occupied territory the right freely to express, develop and practice its culture.”

“Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is manifestly an act based on colonial intent. It is unlawful in itself...”

“By thus partitioning contiguous blocs of Palestinian areas into cantons, Israel has violated the territorial integrity of the OPT in violation of the Declaration on Colonialism.”

“The economic dimension of self-determination is also expressed in the right of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which entitles a people to dispose freely of the natural wealth and resources found within the limits of its national jurisdiction. Israel’s settlement policy and the construction of the bypass road network and the Wall have deprived the Palestinian population of the control and development of an estimated 38 percent of West Bank land. It has also implemented a water management and allocation system that favours Israel and Jewish settlers in the OPT to the detriment of the Palestinian population...Moreover, it is significant that the route of the Wall is similar to the ‘red line’ that delineates those areas of the West Bank from which Israel can withdraw without relinquishing its control over key water resources that are used to supply Israel and the settlements.”

“This study demonstrates that the implementation of a colonial policy by Israel has not been piecemeal but is systematic and comprehensive, as the exercise of the Palestinian population’s right to self-determination has been frustrated in all of its principal modes of expression.”

Findings on Apartheid:

“The Apartheid Convention criminalises ‘inhuman 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’. The Rome Statute criminalises inhumane acts committed in the context of, and to maintain, ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.’ Both focus on the systematic, institutionalised, and oppressive character of the discrimination involved and the purpose of domination that is entailed. This distinguishes the practice of apartheid from other forms of prohibited discrimination and from other contexts in which the listed crimes arise.”

“It must be clear, however, that practices in South Africa are not the test or benchmark for a finding of apartheid elsewhere, as the principal instrument which provides this test lies in the terms of the Apartheid Convention itself.”

“...Palestinians are subject to legal systems and courts which apply standards of evidence and procedure that are different from those applied to Jewish settlers living the OPT and that result in harsher penalties for Palestinians.”

“Restrictions on the Palestinian right to freedom of movement are endemic in the West Bank, stemming from Israel's control of the OPT's checkpoints and crossings, impediments created by the Wall and its crossing points, a matrix of separate roads, and obstructive and all encompassing permit and ID systems that apply solely to Palestinians.”

“The right of Palestinians to choose their own place of residence within their territory is severely curtailed by systematic administrative restrictions on Palestinian residency and building in East Jerusalem, by discriminatory legislation that operates to prevent Palestinian spouses from living together on the basis of which part of the OPT they originate from, and by the strictures of the permit and ID systems.”

“Palestinians are denied their right to leave and return to their country... hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced to surrounding states from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 have been prevented from returning to the OPT...Palestinian residents of the OPT must obtain Israeli permission to leave the territory...Political activists and human rights defenders are often subject to arbitrary and undefined 'travel bans', while many Palestinians who travelled and lived abroad for business or personal reasons have had their residence Ids revoked and been prohibited from returning.”

“Israel denies Palestinians in the OPT their right to a nationality by denying Palestinian refugees from inside the Green Line their right of return, residence, and citizenship in the State (Israel) governing the land of their birth. Israel’s policies in the OPT also effectively deny Palestinians their right to a nationality by obstructing the exercise of the Palestinian right to self determination through the formation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank
(including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip.”

“Israeli military actions have included extensive school closures, direct attacks on schools, severe restrictions on movement, and arrests and detention of teachers and students...A segregated school system operates in the West Bank as Palestinians are not allowed to attend government funded schools in Jewish settlements.”

“Israel has divided the West Bank into reserves or cantons in which residence and entry is determined by each individual’s group identity. Entry by one group into the zone of the other group is prohibited without a permit. The Wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent checkpoints suggest a policy permanently to divide the West Bank into racial cantons. Israeli government ministries, the World Zionist Organisation and other Jewish-national institutions operating as authorised agencies of the State plan, fund and implement construction of the West Bank settlements and their infrastructure for exclusively Jewish use.”

“Israel has extensively appropriated Palestinian land in the OPT for exclusively Jewish use. Private Palestinian land comprises about 30 percent of the land unlawfully appropriated for Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Presently, 38 percent of the West Bank is completely closed to Palestinian use, with significant restrictions on access to much of the rest of it.”

“In sum, Israel appears clearly to be implementing and sustaining policies intended to maintain its domination over Palestinians in the OPT and to suppress opposition of any form to those policies.”

“The comparative analyses of South African apartheid practices...is there to illuminate, rather than define, the meaning of apartheid, and there are certainly differences between apartheid as it was applied in South Africa and Israel’s policies and practices in the OPT. Nonetheless, it is significant that the two systems can be defined by similar dominant features.”

“A troika of key laws underpinned the South African apartheid regime—the Population Registration Act 1950, the Group Areas Act 1950, and the Pass Laws—and established its three principal features or pillars...Israel’s practices in the OPT can be defined by the same three ‘pillars’ of apartheid.”

“The first pillar derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews... At the root of this system are Israel’s citizenship laws, whereby group identity is the primary factor in determining questions involving the acquisition of Israeli citizenship...Israeli law conveying special standing to Jewish identity is then applied extra-territorially to extend preferential legal status and material privileges to Jewish settlers in the OPT and thus discriminate against Palestinians.

“The second pillar is reflected in Israel’s grand policy to fragment the OPT for the purposes of segregation and domination....That these measures are intended to segregate the population along racial lines in violation of Article 2(d) of the Apartheid Convention is clear from the visible web of walls, separate roads, and checkpoints, and the invisible web of permit and ID systems, that combine to ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory.”

“...the policy of geographic fragmentation has the effect of crushing Palestinian socio-economic life, securing Palestinian vulnerability to Israeli economic dominance, and of enforcing a rigid segregation of Palestinian and Jewish populations.”

“The third pillar upon which Israel’s system of apartheid in the OPT rests is its ‘security’ laws and policies. The extrajudicial killing, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians, as described under the rubric of Article 2(a) of the Apartheid Convention, are all justified by Israel on the pretext of security.

“This study does not contend that Israel’s claims about security are by definition lacking in merit; however, Israel's invocation of 'security' to validate severe policies and disproportionate practices toward the Palestinians often masks the intent to suppress Palestinian opposition to a system of domination by one racial group over another. Thus, while the individual practices listed in the Apartheid Convention do not in themselves define apartheid, these practices do not occur in the OPT in a vacuum, but are integrated and complementary elements of an institutionalised and oppressive system of Israeli domination and oppression over Palestinians as a group; that is, a system of apartheid.”

“This discriminatory treatment cannot be explained or excused on grounds of citizenship, both because it goes beyond what is permitted by ICERD and because certain provisions in Israeli civil and military law provide that Jews present in the OPT who are not citizens of Israel also enjoy privileges conferred on Jewish-Israeli citizens in the OPT by virtue of being Jews. Consequently, this study finds that the State of Israel exercises control in the OPT with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid.”

Implications and Recommendations:

“The legal consequences of these findings are grave and entail obligations not merely for Israel but also for the international community as a whole.”

“Israel bears the primary responsibility for remedying the illegal situation it has created. In the first place, it has the duty to cease its unlawful activity and dismantle the structures and institutions of colonialism and apartheid that it has created. Israel is additionally required by international law to implement duties of reparation, compensation and satisfaction in order to wipe out the consequences of its unlawful acts.”

“Breaches of peremptory norms, which involve a gross or systematic failure by the responsible State to fulfil the obligations they impose, generate derivative obligations for States and intergovernmental organisations of cooperation and abstention. States, and intergovernmental organisations, must cooperate to bring to an end any and all serious breaches of peremptory norms.”

“States must not recognise as lawful situations created by serious breaches of peremptory norms nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation. In particular, States must not recognise Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem or its attempt to acquire territory in the West Bank through the consolidation of settlements, nor may they bolster the latter’s economic viability. Should any State fail to fulfil its duty of abstention then it risks becoming complicit in Israel’s internationally wrongful acts, and thus independently engaging its own responsibility, with all the legal consequences of reparation that this entails...If a State aids or assists another State in maintaining that unlawful situation, knowing it to be unlawful, then it becomes complicit in its commission and itself commits an internationally wrongful act.

“States cannot evade their international obligations by hiding behind the independent personality of an international organisation of which they are members.”

“Accordingly we respectfully suggest that, in accordance with Article 96 of the Charter of the United Nations and pursuant to Article 65 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, an advisory opinion be urgently requested on the following question:

Do the policies and practices of Israel within the Occupied Palestinian Territories violate the norms prohibiting apartheid and colonialism; and, if so, what are the legal consequences arising from Israel’s policies and practices, considering the rules and principles of international law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and other relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions?

Fascist fashion statement in Israel

Fascist fashion in Israel

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When the ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means...

--Bruce Cockburn, "The Trouble With Normal"

This really speaks for itself, does it not?

Ha'aretz has the whole story.

Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism

By Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondents


Racism against Israel's Arab citizens has dramatically increased in the past year, including a 26 percent rise in anti-Arab incidents, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel's annual report.

Author Sami Michael, the association's president, said upon the release of the report that racism was so rife it was damaging civil liberty in Israel.

"Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of
expression and privacy," Michael said. The publication coincides with Human Rights Week, which begins Sunday.

"We are a society under supervision under a democratic regime whose institutions are being undermined and which confers a different status to residents in the center of the country and in the periphery," Michael said.

The number of Jews expressing feelings of hatred toward Arabs has doubled, the report stated.

According to the June 2007 Democracy Index of the Israel Democracy Institute, for example, only half the public believes that Jews and Arabs must have full equal rights.

Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel and 78 percent oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government. According to a Haifa University study, 74 percent of Jewish youths in Israel think that Arabs are "unclean."

The ACRI says that bills introduced in the Knesset contribute to delegitimize the country's Arab citizens, such as ones that would link the right to vote and receive state allowances to military or national service.

They also include bills that require ministers and MKs to swear allegiance to a Jewish state and those that set aside 13 percent of all state lands owned by the Jewish National Fund for Jews only.

"Arab citizens are frequently subject to ridicule at the airports," the report states.

It says that Arab citizens "are subject to 'racial profiling' that classifies them as a security threat. The government also threatens the freedom of expression of Arab journalists by brandishing the whip of economic boycott and ending the publication of government announcements in newspapers that criticize its policy."

Hadash Chairman MK Mohammad Barakeh said that the report "did not take us by surprise and neither should anyone be surprised by it. Its results are the natural consequence of a racist campaign led by political and military leaders, as well as the result of the anti-Arab racist policies implemented by consecutive governments."

Pentagon hires South African Apartheid-era racist butchers as mercenaries in Iraq

S. Africa's silent war in Iraq

Apartheid-era hired guns drawn by money


PRETORIA, South Africa


Andre Durant, a burly policeman from this leafy African capital, was kidnapped 10 months ago by unidentified gunmen in Iraq. Apart from one brief phone call, in which Durant managed to shout a strangled "I love you" to his wife, he hasn't been heard from since.

Yet there are no yellow ribbons trimming Durant's quiet suburban Pretoria house, as hopeful ribbons might adorn the home of a U.S. soldier missing in Iraq. There has been no drumbeat of sympathetic news coverage about his case, as one would expect when a local man gets sucked into a global story in the world's most notorious war zone. Indeed, Durant's family, like the families of three other South Africans who were snatched with Durant in a Baghdad ambush in December, has maintained an anguished and puzzling silence for the better part of a year.

And in that hush lies a clue to this African nation's murky and angst-ridden participation in America's military adventure in the Middle East: Durant is one of thousands of South African police officers and soldiers, most of them white veterans of the old apartheid regime, who have left their jobs to work as private security contractors in Iraq -- a semiclandestine exodus of hired guns that has alternately embarrassed and alarmed the pacifist government here.

"Maybe in the States soldiers' wives can talk about these things to ease their loss," said Lourika Durant, who has kept a low profile for months not only to safeguard negotiations for her kidnapped husband's release, but because of the stigma attached to operatives who freelance in a war deeply unpopular in South Africa. "Here we must suffer alone, without making waves."

The Sept. 16 killings of up to 11 Iraqi civilians by guards from the security firm Blackwater USA have rekindled intense debate in the U.S. over the propriety of outsourcing security responsibilities in Iraq to scores of private companies. But the acrimony in America can't begin to match the political hand-wringing that surrounds the issue in South Africa.

Sensitive to its apartheid-era reputation for exporting soldiers of fortune to wars across Africa, the young, black-led government in Pretoria recently drafted the harshest anti-mercenary bill in the world, a measure that would criminalize virtually all of its citizens working in Iraq.

And as the war grinds through its fifth year, there is growing concern that Iraq's drain on skilled police and military personnel may be crippling the nation's elite security services. Local media reports warn that tactical police units in major cities are being thinned by the stampede of officers to Baghdad. And a former South African military officer who runs his own security firm conceded that most of the nation's best special forces trainers now are on the U.S. contracting payroll in Iraq.

South Africa's national police force, meanwhile, has begun offering its most experienced staff monthly bonuses of about $900, in part to stanch the flight of talent.

"We don't deny that there has been an exodus," said Selby Bokaba, a police spokesman. "We simply can't compete with the obscene salaries that our officers are being offered in Iraq."

Wages for private contractors who work as bodyguards, convoy escorts and oil field security workers in Iraq average about $10,000 a month -- more than 10 times the pay of a South African army or police captain.

Up to 10,000 in Iraq

Nobody knows how many South Africans have signed up for such hazardous duty. The foreign affairs ministry puts the number as high as 10,000, though industry experts and U.S. contracting firms say the figure is far smaller, more like 2,000 to 3,000 men. Still, even the lower estimate would make South Africans the third-largest contingent of armed foreigners deployed in Iraq after Washington's closest military ally, Britain.

A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, said no South Africans were currently employed by her security firm in Iraq. She said the company's main contract, guarding State Department officials, requires a U.S. security clearance. Industry sources said most of South Africa's guns for hire rent their services to British companies, or U.S. companies with strong South African ties.

Their presence in Iraq certainly isn't new. Beefy South Africans armed with submachine guns were guarding Washington's first proconsul, Jay Garner, within days of Saddam Hussein's fall. Up to 30 of its citizens have died in Iraq, the South African government says.

"The Americans like us because we're well-trained and used to working in rustic conditions," said Alex de Witt, who spent 18 months in Iraq protecting construction sites run by KBR, the U.S. engineering giant. "But there's a political cost to going. The government here doesn't like it."

The root of that distrust dates to the mid-1990s, when thousands of white officers abandoned South Africa's security agencies during the transition from apartheid to majority black rule. Many unemployed soldiers and police joined private security companies that became embroiled in African wars from Angola to Sierra Leone.

In 2004, more than 60 South Africans -- in this case mostly black veterans of a covert unit that once fought in the apartheid government's border wars -- were arrested on allegations that they plotted to invade oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. That incident prompted one exasperated South African minister to label her country "a cesspool of mercenaries," and Parliament tightened existing anti-mercenary rules to make it all but impossible for South Africans to work in conflict zones overseas. The new bill has been awaiting President Thabo Mbeki's signature for months.

"It may never be signed into law because it will be challenged in court," said Sabelo Gumedze, a military analyst at the Institute for Security Studies, a Pretoria think tank. "Its definition of mercenary is so broad that even private humanitarian groups working in war zones would be affected."

Still, the mere threat of a tough new law has driven South Africa's shadowy community of Iraq contractors even further underground than it already was. Indeed, While Fiji, Nepal, Colombia and other nations supply large contingents of guards to the U.S. war effort somewhat openly, gaining access to South Africa's army of private soldiers can seem like infiltrating a secret fraternity.

"I've got a letter of commendation from Gen. Petraeus," said Hendrik, a 33-year-old ex-policeman, referring to praise he received from the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, for his work training Iraqi police. "I'm probably the only South African with one, but that's not something you talk about in South Africa."

Like most contractors who agreed to be interviewed for this article, he asked that his full name not be used for fear of future legal repercussions under the anti-mercenary act.

Desperation cracks silence

That silence is cracking, however, with the case of the so-called "Baghdad Four," the South African men, including policeman Durant, who were abducted while escorting a food convoy through a phony Iraqi police checkpoint north of Baghdad. Desperation has driven the four families to speak out about their sense of isolation.

"I didn't even know what Shiites and Sunnis were," said Durant's wife, Lourika, 36, naming the two dominant Muslim sects battling for power in Iraq. "I think South Africans should think very hard before going there. I don't care what they earn. It really isn't worth it."

She said her 6-year-old son, Xandre, had recently packed a bag and announced he was going to Iraq to look for his father. The night before, she added, he declared that he wanted to die.

"We need a support network in South Africa because we're on our own," said Daniel Brink, 38, who worked as a bodyguard for the U.S. security company DynCorp. "Our guys have no way to deal with the bossies" -- the Afrikaans term for post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. "When I first saw my wife, I told her to leave me. I didn't even want her to see me."

A bluff, wheelchair-bound man who owns an SUV with vanity plates that proclaim "Baghdad," Brink lost a leg and fingers in 2005 to a mine that exploded under his armored vehicle in Baqouba, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency. Since returning to South Africa, he has been trying to encourage his wounded colleagues to apply for U.S. worker's compensation under the U.S. Defense Base Act, which applies to all workers, American or foreign, who are subcontracted in war zones by Washington.

As he met one recent afternoon with another ex-contractor in suburban Pretoria, there unfolded a scene that could happen only in South Africa.

The house's resident, Deon Gouws, is a former police sergeant who had received an amnesty under South Africa's famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for human-rights abuses, including assassinations, he committed under the old apartheid regime.

Now he was one of the few public voices warning his countrymen about the dangers of Iraq. Gouws' right arm, left eye and toes were blown away by a suicide bomber who had driven an explosives-packed ambulance into his Baghdad hotel. Brink was advising him on how to file for U.S. worker's compensation.

"I'll buy a farm if I can collect on my claim," said Gouws, 45, an unlucky man who has survived a mugger's bullet and a train collision since returning to South Africa. "But I don't recommend this method of getting a farm to anyone else."

There may be little need.

According to security industry experts, the golden era of freelance work in Iraq may wane as Iraqi companies take over in the wake of the Blackwater shootings and as the U.S. draws down its troops.

Still, as several South African contractors said, there is always Afghanistan.

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