Israel continues to lurch and stagger in the darkened bog of tribal chauvinism. The Jewish state's further descent into the bellicose murk is being felt by the country's minorities. Home destructions and deportations are portentous of a bleaker future for non-Jews in Israel.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have lived under an Israeli apartheid regime for decades now. Over the years, Israel has demolished homes, kidnapped thousands of political prisoners, transferred 500,000 settler-colonists onto the West Bank, conducted massive military operations in civilian areas, hoarded the vast majority of Palestinian water, and committed a host of other crimes under the apartheid banner.
Today, the Zionism which has destroyed so many occupied lives is turning inwards. Israel is being corroded by the ideology underpinning its existence. The Zionist state's latest victims are Palestinian-Israelis and migrant workers.
The Guardian's "Ethnic cleansing in the Israeli Negev," depicts a hulking mass of baklava-clad riot guards descending on Al-Araqib in the pre-dawn morning. The village's Bedouin residents were forcibly extracted from their homes while a bulldozer bulldozed their lives. Incredibly, the village was destroyed to make room for a national forest. It seems that against all morality, the desert will continue to bloom.
That the destruction of a Palestinian-Israeli village requires an audience is only slightly shocking. Groups of Jewish Israeli citizens were bused in to cheer the spectacle of the state-sanctioned "ethnic cleansing." What's very shocking is that the Jewish state enlisted the services of young Jews in wreaking destruction. Teenage volunteers with the police civilian guard emptied the Palestinian-Israeli houses and "smashed windows and mirrors in their homes and defaced family photographs with crude drawings."
Elsewhere in Israel, non-Jewish youths learned that they were unfit to remain in country of their birth. Four-hundred migrant children -- most of them born in Israel -- will be deported soon. Ironically, their expulsion has been spearheaded by parliamentarians from the rightwing Yisrael Beiteinu party, many of whom are Russian immigrants to Israel.
Weighing in on the topic, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that, "this is a tangible threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel."
Many of Israel's staunchest supporters are baffled by what's happening in the small Mediterranean state. Regrettably, they fail to understand that Israel is following the natural evolution of a country founded on a race-exclusive basis.
Israeli pundits frequently insist that their state is both Jewish and democratic. They say that minorities in Israel have equal rights and representation in state apparatuses. That's not true, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is that roughly 20% of Israelis are not Jewish. And those non-Jews are meeting one another, falling in love, and having children. To borrow Netanyahu's words, it is these children that are a "threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel."
Zionism -- the idea that Jewish people ought to have a Jewish state in mandate Palestine -- is anachronistic in the 21st century. The idea that non-Jews who have lived on the land for generations before the creation of the state of Israel should be relegated to second-class citizenship because they're not Jewish is illiberal. It's also racist.
These people, Palestinian-Israelis and other native non-Jews, have no way of entering the mainstream of political and cultural life in Israel. The only reason they can't is because they're not Jewish.
Is it possible for a non-Jewish person to become the Prime Minister of Israel today? And what about Minister of Defense? What does it mean for the Jewish state if the 20% minority grows to 50%, then 70%? Is it still the Jewish state?
For too long Western liberals have engaged in willful denial about the true nature of Israel. Israel is the Jewish state -- of that I have no doubt. But can the Jewish state be squared with liberal and democratic values when one out of every five citizens isn't Jewish? I don't think so.
Israel is already an apartheid state. The separation of the people -- their enforced apartness -- arises not out of security considerations, but racial ones. In short, Israel cannot be both the Jewish and democratic state. That's because Zionism is fundamentally anti-democratic in a mixed-race society. The important questions now are how will Israel prevent the growth of its non-Jewish minorities? And how long will Western liberals continue to pretend that Zionism is compatible with liberalism?
Follow Ahmed Moor on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ahmedmoor
Citizenship can be defined as love of one's own.
"For sharia compliant Muslims, Islam is a nation that commands the loyalty of "love of one's own" and a state with its own constitution and legal system. Hence the conflict the observant Muslims feel between their faith and their citizenship.”
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100719_geopolitics_nationalism_and_dual_citizenship?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1007020&utm_content=readmore&elq=8f755c0fde414680a908db9ba23617b9
You should consider submitting it to the UK Guardian.
It is 'just up their street'.
Don't other wealthy democracies (US included) limit immigration? Why should it be any different for Israel?
israel is deporting migrant children born in israel.
it is not right.
israel is wrong.
deafening silence from israelis.
U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants demand the end of deportations.
many, many americans agree and make their voices heard.
THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE.
Not true.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129129391&ft=1&f=1004
So what IS the difference? That in spite the fact the law is the same, to your opinion many/some Americans protest it and none/not enough Israelis do? Since these are all subjective statements one cannot compare, but there is an outcry in Israel about it, including PM publishing calls to hide the children and their families from the police over the daily papers and human rights organizations trying to coordinate it.
Yes, many wealthy countries including the US limit immigration.
But the US would have to change its constitution [there have been calls for that to happen] before it could legally deport the US-born children of migrants.
Israel not only does not limit immigration for one sort of people it actually encourages it ie for Jews.
"The ILA said the evacuation was conducted after many years of legal - and physical - battles against the Aturi tribe. The ILA said it demolished 46 illegal buildings, 11 made of cinderblock and 11 shacks. It also said it uprooted 850 trees that were transferred for replanting elsewhere.
The ILA said the Bedouin invaded the area, which is state land, in 1998 and in 2000 a court order was handed down banning them from entering the area. But the tribe moved in and planted trees. The ILA offered to rent them the land at a price of NIS 2 per dunam, but they refused to pay. The ILA received a court order to evacuate the residents in 2003 and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court."
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/police-destroy-dozens-of-buildings-in-unrecognized-bedouin-village-in-negev-1.304443
There is money here, plenty of it, and those who have it are not hesitant to flaunt it.
New cars, beautiful residences, fancy stores and restaurants will startle any outsider arriving here with his head filled by the mainstream media in the West about the misery of the West Bank occupation by Israelis.
" Israel cannot be both Jewish and Democratic."
to
"Israel will cease to be Jewish or Democratic if it gets Arab majority.
And no amount of fairy tales and posturing will change that.
Palestinian leadership ( which includes its current version) who rejected 65% of the land to turn to violence is not ready for peaceful co existence.
Proof-- election of Hamas. Abbas incoherent posturing.
Arafat wasn't ready for peace in 2001.
Those who elected Hamas and covertly finance various Brotherhoods and Jihads aren't ready now.
And those who dance on Iranian and Syrian puppet strings we won't even talk about.
When Clinton-Barak-Arafat concluded the TABA summit in 2001, there was a general agreement on the framework to resolve many of the biggest issues. (There were still disagreements, of course, between the two parties).
But the subsequent implementation of the TABA agreement was ultimately derailed, primarily by Israel: 1) there was an election coming up that Barak was preparing for in 2001; 2) Bush was just newly elected, which gave Israel a reason to revisit what was previously discussed; 3) Ariel Sharon became PM in Feb 2001 and he practically rejected most of what was agreed upon in Taba. Does this mean was Sharon was not ready for peace in 2001?
"Arafat’s rejection of my proposal after Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions."
Bill.Clinton, Bill. “My Life.” Vintage (2005). p. 938.
""I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being. "
Bill Clinton, My Life: The Presidential Years (Chapter 25)
Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar Ibn Sultan:"If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won't be a tragedy, it will be a crime."
BTW, Clinton-Barak-Arafat was Camp David. Clinton was not involved with Taba. Amd there was no agreement at Camp David unfortunately. When Clinton offered his bridge plan (bridge the gap), the Israelis accepted it with some reservations but Arafat effectively rejected it. That's what Clinton is referring to in the quotes in the post below.
Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens — ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority — creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers — apartheid.
The double standards and hypocrisy between what Israel tries to present itself as, a bastion of democracy in a hostile world of terror (of its own making) and what it actually practices, the subjugation and terrorizing of the Palestinian people by the IDF and the government are not American values or morals and to try and align them with the US as Likud and AIPAC work so feverishly to do is will not work anymore in the 21st century.
American values don't include confiscating land from Palestinians, throwing thousands of Palestinians in jail without trial, carving up the occupied territories with separate roads, a wall, hundreds of check-points and ethnically cleansing millions of Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homes.
America's values are "one person, one vote," - not the reality in Israel today and that is certainly not what Bibi has in mind.
Those shared values are increasing called into question and we shouldn’t be giving Israel several billion dollars each year in economic and military aid and provide it with consistent diplomatic protection, in the face of events like the Gaza War or the pummeling of Lebanon in 2006.
Every country has lots of skeletons in its closet. It doesn't make the settlements and occupation right. But let's forego the hypocrisy of self-righteousness.
As far as peace and the treatment of the Palestinians? Israel has had 60 years to resolve its differences, and the group with the self-proclaimed highest IQs in the world can't figure it out? The Vietnamese did better than this.
In a 2001 video, Netanyahu, reportedly unaware he was being recorded, said: "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]... I said I would, but [that] I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I'm concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue." Netanyahu then explained how he conditioned his signing of the 1997 Hebron agreement on American consent that there be no withdrawals from "specified military locations," and insisted he be allowed to specify which areas constituted a "military location" - such as the whole of the Jordan Valley. "Why is that important? Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo Accords," Netanyahu affirmed.
However, this is consistent with Rabin's October 1995 statement to the Knesset on the ratification of the interim Oslo agreement: "B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords#Remarks_from_Benjamin_Netanyahu
Palestine OR Isreal?
Evidence.
1937–1939 Irgun conducted a campaign of violence against Palestinian Arab civilians resulting in the deaths of at least 250.
November 6, 1944 Lehi assassinated British minister Lord Moyne in Cairo.
July 26, 1946 The bombing of British administrative headquarters at the King David Hotel, killing 91 people — 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 others.
October 31, 1946 The bombing by the Irgun of the British Embassy in Rome.
July 25, 1947 The Sergeants affair: Irgun kidnapped two British sergeants, the hostages were murdered. Afterwards, their bodies were taken to an orange grove and left hanging by the neck from trees. An Improvised Explosive Device was set. This went off when one of the bodies was cut down, seriously wounding a British officer.
I can go on, but you get the point...
Why don't you guys just admit you don't want Israel to exist. We all know it. You are wasting everyone's time.
After WWII, as the degree of the Holocaust atrocity became manifest, the Jews increasingly had violent conflicts with the British as the Jews tried to bring as many Holocaust survivors to (Israel) as possible, without regard to very strict immigration limits the British had imposed in 1935. Both the Jews and the Arabs demanded sovereign states. The place had become a chaotic violent tinderbox. The Brits brought the matter to the Un, which in 1947 adopted a resolution dividing the area into 2 states -- Israel and Palestine. The Palestinians and Arabs rejected thre partition, and war broke out.