Adalah lawyer Suhad Bishar: “This legislation makes clear in very blunt fashion that the thrust of policy in Israel is towards maintaining segregation in housing between Jewish and Arab citizens.”
apartheid
Let’s not be naive: We all know that Arabs are the ones who burned down the Carmel forests. Not one Arab, not two, not a thousand. The Arabs burned the Carmel… The Arabs burned down the Carmel because they are bad people. It’s as simple as that.
Jews must not rent homes to “gentiles”. That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then “ostracise” fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.
Approximately 86 percent of Israeli Jews believe any final Knesset decision regarding the country’s future political arrangement must be approved by a Jewish majority, according to a poll by the Israel Democratic Institute.
“The smokescreen called a medical school obscures an evil scheme: to establish a refugee camp for psychotic, sadistic and debased Arabs, whose deceptiveness is, and always has been, aimed at tempting [Jewish women] and cruelly abusing them. On orders of the great rabbis of Safed, may they be blessed with a long life, we declare our protest and vehement resistance, and reiterate that it is forbidden under the law of the Torah to offer these people apartments for sale, rent, work or any form of entry. Our city will not succumb to wanton behavior – go back to your own locales and do not defile our camp.”
Haneen Zoabi: “We are struggling for a normal state, which is a state for all of its citizens, [in] which the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews can have full equality. I recognize religious, cultural and national group rights for the Israelis, but inside a democratic and neutral state.”
Israel’s apartheid movement is coming out of the woodwork and is taking on a formal, legal shape. It is moving from voluntary apartheid, which hides its ugliness through justifications of “cultural differences” and “historic neglect” which only requires a little funding and a couple of more sewage pipes to make everything right – to a purposeful, open, obligatory apartheid, which no longer requires any justification.
Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name “Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill,” an Israeli parliament committee finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If this legislation is approved by parliament, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law.
Carmiel Deputy Mayor: “Carmiel is a Jewish city, plain and simple. It was founded for the purpose of Judaizing the Galilee. In my opinion it is not proper for Arab families to live here. In recent years, there are attempts by our [Arab] neighbors in the Western Galilee villages to migrate into Carmiel, and we must not ignore this phenomenon.”
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.”
“There is no doubt that the occupation is the biggest festering sore in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Futile negotiations over the last two decades have led to its intensification rather than mitigation. The only way forward is an ongoing campaign to put an end to it, without having anything to do with the diplomatic process or with the one-state, two-states, debate.”
Is Israel an apartheid state? The notion of apartheid may be applicable in different ways to different components of the system. While Israel clearly is different from South African historical apartheid, in crucial respects it has affinities with apartheid in its generic sense.
Part II of a two-part essay. Read Part I HERE
“There is no doubt that the occupation is the biggest festering sore in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Futile negotiations over the last two decades have led to its intensification rather than mitigation. The only way forward is an ongoing campaign to put an end to it, without having anything to do with the diplomatic process or with the one-state, two-states, debate.”
Is Israel an apartheid state? The notion of apartheid may be applicable in different ways to different components of the system. While Israel clearly is different from South African historical apartheid, in crucial respects it has affinities with apartheid in its generic sense. (Part I of a two-part essay.)
Haneen Zoabi: “It’s not surprising that a country that strips the fundamental rights of its Arab citizens would revoke the privileges of a Knesset member who loyally represents her electorate… You are punishing me out of vengeance… When you threaten the Arab MKs and the Arabs’ protectors, you threaten democracy and co-existence between Jews and Arabs.”
Yousef Jabareen: “It’s a feeling of frustration and of not belonging … That the … state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal… In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid that should raise a lot of concern about the future.”
Young Israeli Jew: “It’s a kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave.”
Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.
Both [South Africa and Israel] certainly needed friends. Settler colonies – which both these were, Israel no less than South Africa – invariably do. Usually their biggest friends are the colonial powers that planted them in the first place, on whom they depend… especially in places overwhelmingly populated by ‘others’, and even more especially when those ‘others’ have been crudely dispossessed. Left to their own resources, such colonies are bound to be terribly vulnerable, with most historical examples… being destroyed as a result.
Defense Minister Peres, 1974: “This cooperation [Israel – South-Africa] is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it.”
President Peres on judge Richard Goldstone: “A small man, devoid of any sense of justice.”
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.
