Mar 5, 2010

Israeli Apartheid Week

Qusay Politics 10 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while now, and what better time to actually write it and publish it than during the Israeli Apartheid Week.

Let me be clear, I do not hate Jews. I’ve had Jewish friends, we talked, we ate , we celebrated, we got into heated debates about this and that, we helped each other on homework and projects and I have some good memories of some of them, and bad memories of others. I have never subscribed to the idea of grouping people into one category, and I was never comfortable with generalizing a whole community and demonizing or exemplifying them.

Now that I have that out of the way, Israel is an apartheid, just like South Africa was, and worse in my opinion.

Many years ago, when I was not even in high school, I read about Israel not accepting the African Jews of Ethiopia into the Israeli society and imposing restrictions not imposed on Jews of other nationalities who get almost free admission into the settlements, and let’s not forget that they push the people who’ve lived on the land for hundreds of years off the land to build the settlements and call upon Jews from all over the world to come and get the Jewish aliya (literally “ascent”).

One of the reason I’ve loved blogging is because it gave a voice to people, those who I’ve never heard of, saying it like it is. Israel hates Arabs so much that they not only attack Arabs and treat them bad, but they also treat their Jewish people with disdain for looking like Arabs, this is a post by an Iraqi-Jewish-Israeli scholar, Ella Shohat telling it like he lives it. “The discrimination Mizrahi Jews face, like their Palestinian bretheren, is a testament to the racist nature of the state of Israel.”

I saw a 60 minutes report a few months ago, some good Jewish people who work for the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem in a remarkable project called Shooting Back. They live on the land gave some poor Palestinians video cameras so they can video the attacks (watch this), and then they take the footage from them and upload the videos for the world to see. I have to say that I am proud of them, I hate discrimination, I even wrote a post about it, and these people stood up against it, thank you.

I really do not care who governs the land, but what Israel is trying to do is copy what has been done to the Native Americans and the Aboriginals and the Africans, but they were a few hundred years late, plus the area was not living in the stone age so they can not just push the natives off the land (which somehow humans intend to do even to inhabitants of distant planets if they have the chance, seen the movie Avatar?).

I write this post, to include my voice in a global movement that I hope will change the situation for an uncountable number of people to the better, and raise awareness.

In a previous post I said I hope I have the courage to speak up against any discrimination I see, and I could not resist to speak up on this one.

The Arab stance was once that as written in a letter by Prince Faisal Hussaini King of Syria and Iraq to Felix Frankfurter in 1919, which I quote here “We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.” (full letter and correspondence)

It started with a welcome, and went through many genocides, I hope it ends soon.

Haile Selassie in his eternal 1963 Speech delivered to the United Nations and popularized in a song called War by Bob Marley said it well “That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained”

The Israeli minister was grilled on apartheid issues that “he made a confounding claim that Israeli Arabs may have “full citizenship,” even if they do not enjoy “full rights.”

There is no excuse for this type of discrimination to keep going on at all.