It
has been a few years since the publication
of Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid," which
was met with a well-orchestrated and sustained
campaign of Israeli disinformation and condemnation
of President Carter. For
simply describing, in detail, Israeli policies
that were consistent with apartheid, the
former president and 2002 recipient of the
Nobel Peace Prize was labeled an anti-Semite.
South African anti-apartheid
activists Bishop Desmond Tutu, Blade Nzimande
and John Dugard also identified apartheid
in Israeli practices toward Palestinians
in the occupied territories and described
the privilege of one group over another,
detention without trial, control of movement
through checkpoints and the wall, and deportation
as undisputable apartheid by Israel and
noted that the imposed practices are much
worse than the apartheid they experience
themselves in South Africa that ended in
1990.
At a peace rally, in early
June 2009 in Washington D.C., they described
a number of cases where Israel has used
fully armed F-16 fighter jets and Apache
helicopter gunships in residential areas.
There have been countless numbers of documented
accounts of home demolitions, arrests of
families of supposedly suspected
"militants" with no trial and
no records of arrests, and segregation of
roads to separate access for Jewish settlers
at the expense of the indigenous population.
A European journalist covering
the settlers of Kiryat Arba near Hebron
on Dheisheh refugee camp, described the
attack against the village by settlers and
the Israeli military. She commented that
prior to seeing the event with her own eyes,
she never would have believed anyone describing
this level of brutality by the Israeli soldiers
and the fully armed Jewish settlers. Instead
of stopping settlers from shooting at unarmed
Palestinian population, Israeli Army was
assisting them in their attack against Palestinians.
The photographs of both
Israeli army and the Jewish settlers, armed
to the teeth, was undeniable and the faces
of the Israeli settlers was something awful,
brutal and that of an angry mob with one
goal in mind: to kill Palestinians or throw
them out of their lands and take over their
homes. The large photographs clearly showing
the fanatical mob was very graphical and
forced most people at the peace rally to
cover the eyes of their own children accompanying
them.
At the rally, a Palestinian
mother started describing her childhood:
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When I was a small
child we had nothing better to do other
than sit around and listen to our elderly
talk. They used to sit and talk about
their daily life in occupied Palestine
and as children we would sit and listen
to their stories and their pain. When
they described their suffering, quickly
it was also our pain. They talked so
often of their daily life describing
things they had seen as children and
they would tell us how they grew up
knowing their family lost everything
because of the Israelis and the U.S.
support in both military, economic,
and Veto support at UN. That the reason
for all our misery and the terrible
conditions in which we all live in are
the Israelis. We were all refugees who
lost everything. We would sit and hear
people taking about the house they were
forced to leave behind, or the land
they had just harvested before settlers
taking over with guns, or the fruit
fields they so much loved and cherished
but were taken from them, or worse,
the stories of their beloved ones killed
by the Jewish settlers or the Israeli
military raiding Palestinian towns and
villages. As children we also saw for
ourselves the Israeli occupation and
what occupation was doing to us, and
see Israel taking everything from us
and gave us nothing but suffering and
humiliation. The experiences that our
elderly shared with us was what we were
witnessing as children ourselves. Palestinians
have been accused, unjustly, of all
sorts of incitement, through the American
and Israeli media. These accusations
are based on the lies and fabrications
of the Israeli and U.S. governments
with the help of propaganda-style studies
funded by Jewish organizations such
as The American Enterprise Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, and various
members of the Council for Foreign Relations
- and the biggest of all - the American-Israeli
Public Affairs Committee. |
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Within Israel itself, state
policies explicitly privilege Jewish citizens
over Muslim and Christian citizens and as
such are reminiscent of the Jim Crow south.
In a December 2006 poll, 50 percent of Israeli
Jews expressed the wish that the state encourage
Palestinian citizens to leave. This is indeed
ethnic cleansing wishes of the people of
Israel and delivered by the apartheid occupying
forces of Israel.
It makes me very sad to
contemplate the assistance given to the
occupation of Palestine by Israel and the
indifference shown by Western governments.
At a later time in future, our children
will look back and view this injustice the
same way we now see the era of slavery in
U.S. and segregation policies of our own
government. It further saddens me to realize
that this will never be discussed or debated
in the Jewish owned Western mainstream media.
I still believe that if more people actually
understood what is happening that it might
be possible to curtail unconditional help
for the state of Israel. Given their penetration
of the western media and political systems,
however, this is unlikely, to say the least.
Israel's apartheid and exclusivist
policies must be replaced by equal citizen
rights irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity
and gender.
There
is no freedom on earth or in any star for
those who deny freedom to others.
ELBERT
HUBBARD (1856-1915)
I know many Jews will be
angry with my post here and believe that
I should be fighting the cause of Israel,
the country that I served all my life and
the country that served my interests by
depriving others of their rights which has
allowed me to go to college and be educated.
But can we not have a world
where there is justice for all? Must I support
those that have done wrong to others, and
still continue to do wrong, just because
they have done good to me? And what is good
... having more opportunities because others
have been deprived of their rights? I should
be proud of that as an Israeli?
Even being born in Israel
and having lived there and served in the
military is not enough for me to have my
own objective opinion without being labeled
a self-hating Jew - specially if you advocate
equal opportunities for all. The opponents
will quickly condemn me for not apparently
recognizing that many Jewish people died
in the Holocaust to allow all Jewish people
to have the current state of Israel (as
if that was true).
What does this have anything
to do with Palestinians producing cheap
labor force while the Jewish class remain
the investor-owner class of the society
with the full backing of the Israeli government
and the backing of the US, British, and
French governments to carry it its apartheid
of the indigenous people of Palestine.
But I believe that apartheid
is not necessary and, in the long term,
ineffective. Allow a truly free society
in Israel, and allow a new nation to be
named, Palestine for the Palestinian people
and Israel for Israeli people. Nobody has
to live in an apartheid and nobody has to
live under conditions of slavery, with little
or no rights as an equal citizen. Then prosperity
will prosper and we can all win. Right now
only the few win, and the masses remain
in fear. Fear of terrorism or fear of continuity
of injustice and inequality.
Despite my views, sadly
and unfortunately segregation and political
and economic discrimination continues today
in occupied territories and deliberately
engineered in order to create economic prosperity
for some Jewish people (the big-money investors
in particular) while Palestinian people
are used as slaves so that the rich stay
rich and the poor have to go to work for
low wages.
We should not excuse ourselves
or the injustice that is going on in Israel
as history will judge us harshly.
Shouldn't we all want and
ask for equality and justice for all?
He who excuses
himself accuses himself. |
(last 30 days)
