Yes, Q&A, Israel is an Apartheid State

Tonight's Q&A program raised the issue of Israel as an apartheid state, but unfortunately neither of the pro-Palestinians on the panel (The Greens' Lee Rhiannon and Fairfax journalist and author Paul McGeough) seemed particularly well equipped to explain exactly why Israel should be so described.

Allow me, therefore, to introduce (yet again*) the definitive study on the subject of Israeli apartheid: the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa's report, Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.

In its report, the HSRC finds:

a) that, although Israel has clearly been in military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) since 1967, according to international humanitarian law it has no right whatever to annex or permanently control these territories;

b) that Israel's policy and practices in the OPTs (fragmenting, annexing, appropriating land and water, merging economies, dominating Palestinians etc) are colonialist and therefore violate the Palestinians' right of self-determination, one of the essential principles of international law;

c) Israel's laws and policies in the OPTs fit the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression & Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (aka the Apartheid Convention).

Here is that definition: "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."

In South Africa, apartheid had 3 key features:

1) laws which demarcated the population into racial groups and accorded superior rights, privileges and services to the white group;

2) the segregation of the non-white group into fragmented geographic 'reserves' (black homelands) and their confinement to same;

3) a matrix of draconian security laws and policies to suppress any opposition to the regime and reinforce the system of racial domination, by providing for administrative detention, torture, censorship, banning, and assassination.

In the OPTs, the privileged Jewish settlers are the 'whites' and the occupied Palestinians the 'non-whites'; the besieged, non-contiguous and invariably shrinking Palestinian enclaves (along with the blockaded Gaza Strip) are the new fragmented black homelands; and Israel's mantra of security, used to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of expression, assembly, association and movement, is designed to mask its intent to suppress resistance to its system of domination over Palestinians as a group.

To summarise, Israel has been found to be an apartheid state by South Africa's pre-eminent national social science council, the HSRC, because in the OPTs it privileges Israeli Jews over occupied Palestinians legally and materially; confines them to reserves; and, in the name of security, pauperises, humiliates, imprisons, tortures and murders them in order to keep them from challenging its rule.

And that's just Israeli apartheid in the OPTs. For apartheid within Israel (im)proper see my 16/7/10 post Howes: Apartheid? No Way!

[* See my 21/9/09 post Israeli Apartheid: The Jury's In]

Who's Fooling Who?

What the British and the Palestinians knew in Palestine back in 1948:

"[T]he Arab knows the Zionist Jew a good deal better than most other people. He has had the opportunity to see through all the propaganda and all the smokescreen, at the naked spectacle of Zionist aggression on his country as it really is." (Sir Henry Gurney, Chief Secretary (1946-48) of the Palestine Government, writing in his diary on 27/3/48; quoted in Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948, AJ Sherman, 1997, p 224)

What the faithful heard in Washington last Friday:

"House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Friday blamed a hateful Palestinian culture for the bloody half-century long Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. 'Sadly it's a culture filled with resentment and hatred', Cantor said at the [Christian Coalition's] Faith & Freedom Conference... 'It is that culture that underlies the Palestinians' and broader Arab world's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, and this is the root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians... It's not about the 1967 lines', said Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress." (GOP leader: Palestinian culture 'filled with resentment & hatred', Sahil Kapur, rawstory.com, 3/6/11)

What the Palestinians saw and heard in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem last Wednesday:

"Dozens of right-wing activists marching through Jerusalem Wednesday were filmed chanting inflammatory messages and singing provocative songs in the capital [!], including 'Muhammad is dead', 'May your village burn', 'Death to leftists', 'Butcher the Arabs'. The disturbing utterances were made during the traditional 'Flag Dance' on the occasion of Jerusalem Day, which drew tens of thousands of Israelis to the capital to celebrate its unification following the 1967 Six-Day War." (Rightests in Jerusalem: Muhammad is dead, butcher Arabs, Yair Altman, ynetnews.com, 2/6/11)

Every Move You Make...

Every step you take
Every rap you do
We'll be watching you

"What are some examples of highly offensive words that must be censored from radio? For British state broadcaster BBC, they are not all of the 4-letter variety. The BBC appears to find not just the phrase 'Free Palestine' but even the geographical entity of the Gaza Strip itself unutterable on a cultural show.

"A controversy has broken out over the BBC's anti-Palestinian bias after its digital radio channel BBC 1xtra, which largely plays hip hop, grime and other 'urban music' genres, censored on air references to Palestine.

"First, it censored rapper Mic Righteous's on air free styling on 1xtra when he uttered the phrase 'Free Palestine' - drowning out the two unspeakable words.

"On May 25, the BBC released a statement trying to justify the censorship after a flood of complaints. Its one sentence response said it had 'a responsibility to be impartial when dealing with controversial subjects and an edit was made to the artist's freestyle to ensure that impartiality was maintained'.

"On May 26 Independent.co.uk blog post, Jody McIntyre said that just after releasing its statement, the BBC was caught in another example of anti-Palestinian censorship on 1xtra in which the words 'Gaza strip' were blanked out in a rapper's freestyle. McIntyre said: 'On the very same radio segment, 'Fire in the Booth' with DJ Charlie Sloth, just a couple of months after the Mic Righteous freestyle, rapper Bigz made a guest appearance. Over a commercial hiphop beat, he rhymes: 'Come on Joe, who you know as hard as this? Bringing more fire than the -- And then silence. The term he used at the end of the line, 'Gaza Strip', has been censored out. Not a political statement, not a humanitarian statement, but the name of a geographical piece of land. A simple description of a place that does exist.

"MacIntyre said: 'The BBC seem intent on completely eradicating any recognition of Palestine's right to exist from their radio broadcasts, but their actions have had the opposite effect. In a strong show of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, the BBC 1xtra Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with page upon page of comments protesting against the blatant censorship. Every single time the radio station make any 'status update' online now, even if its content is completely unrelated, the floodgates are opened. 'Free Palestine!', 'Don't censor Palestine!' Many are demanding to hear [British hip hop artist] Lowkey's popular single 'Long Live Palestine' on radio; despite once reaching number one in the iTunes hip-hop chart, the song was consistently ignored by BBC radio.'

"McIntyre pointed out the hypocrisy at work: 'On the very same show, DJ Charlie Sloth played a Bigz track entitled 'I Just Want the Paper'. In the song he raps: 'Chilling on a beach... Tel Aviv'. Guess what, the words 'Tel Aviv' are not censored out'." (BBC censors ban Palestine references, Stuart Munckton, Green Left Weekly, 1/6/11)

Not to mention every word you speak:

"So when Hamas fires rockets and 13 Israelis are killed, they are part of the problem, but when Israel attacks Gaza and over 1,000 Palestinians are killed, then this is the sort of thing that happens when military action takes place. It can be seen that journalists who do try to feature both sides of the conflict are facing something of an uphill task. There is less to fear in criticising the Palestinians, but to criticise Israel can create major problems. Journalists spoke to us of the extraordinary number of complaints which they receive. We have presented our findings to many groups of media practitioners. After one such meeting a senior editor from a major BBC news programme told us: 'we wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis'. He then said that the main issues they would face were from how high up had the call come (eg., a monitoring group, or the Israeli embassy), and then how high up the BBC had the complaint gone (eg., to the duty editor or the director general). He described how journalists had checked with him minutes before a programme was broadcast on which words to describe the conflict should now be used." (More Bad News From Israel, Greg Philo & Mike Berry, 2011, p 2)

Ditto for our ABC and SBS. It really is past time for our public broadcasters to grow a spine and give Israel's fifth columnists and agents the bum's rush.

And the 2012 Sydney Peace Prize Winner is...

You might be aware by now that Noam Chomsky is this year's choice for the Sydney Peace Prize and that, as a night-follows-day kind of result, Murdoch's Australian is on another of its crusades. You know the sort of thing: Chomsky has the hots for Pol Pot, bin Laden and Gaddafi, and anybody who disagrees hates, nay loathes, himself.

Anyways, its editorialist has dished out the following priceless advice to the Sydney Peace Foundation:

"If the SPF wants to turn its back on the usual puerility, it should consider awarding next year's prize to The Australian's Greg Sheridan, whose cogent case against continuing the war in Afghanistan made Chomsky's rantings look pedestrian." (Perfect choice for peace prize: Noam Chomsky panders to self-loathing among the Left, 3/6/11)

Never let it be said that The Australian hasn't got a sense of humour.

Great Moments...

... in Judeo-Christianity:

"If Noah had run into the modern nanny state, or a few of the other obstacles that Johan Huibers has been facing, the animal kingdom might look a lot different today. Huibers, 60, the successful owner of a big construction company, has spent the past few years building an ark, using the measurements for the one Noah is said in the book of Genesis to have built... He even discusses the ark with business associates in Israel, where his construction company is active. 'The Israelis are curious', he says. 'But they say it's not a Christian ark, it's a Jewish ark. They say I stole it'." (Black sheep not about to go two by two on Johan's ark, John Tagliabue, New York Times/Sydney Morning Herald, 1/6/11)

Typical Israeli chutzpah! Why didn't you remind them that they stole it from the Babylonians, Johan?

The Tell-Tale Heart

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd's heart bleeds for the people of Syria:

"'I believe it is high time the Security Council now consider a formal referral of President Assad to the International Criminal Court', Mr Rudd said... He was particularly angered by images of the mutilated body of a 13-year-old boy who reportedly had been tortured then murdered as part of the crackdown by the regime, which has killed about 1100 civilians and led to 10,000 arrests. 'When you see such large-scale directed action by a head of government against his own civilian population, the deepest questions arise in the minds of the people of the world as to whether any claim of legitimacy remains', Mr Rudd said of the Assad regime." (Put Assad on trial for atrocities, says Rudd, Phillip Coorey, Sydney Morning Herald, 2/6/11)

But it barely skipped a beat when Israel was slaughtering 1,400 Palestinians, including 313 children, from December 2008 to January 2009.

SMH Letters Editor No Einstein 2

Whatever happened to basic fact-checking, elementary logic, and a modicum of editing?

Here's a letter on Palestine/Israel, from a Michael Ross of Abbotsford, that falls down on all of these scores, but which the Sydney Morning Herald letters editor, who recently emasculated a letter exhibiting all of these criteria (See my 22/5/11 post SMH Letters Editor No Einstein), thought fit to publish. No wonder the pollies and the punters are confused:

"The intransigence of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership over the adoption of a two-state solution is heartbreaking to those of us who more than 40 years ago worked in the left of politics to remind the world of an obligation to recognise Palestinian rights."

While Israeli intransigence is, of course, a given, Mr Ross, could you please enlighten us on the subject of what you call Palestinian intransigence, considering that the PLO long ago, and both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for years now, have agreed to settle for a Palestinian state on a mere 22% of historic Palestine? Could you also explain how it is that, although you were supposedly supporting Palestinian rights 40 years ago, when the PLO was calling for a secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine, you now believe that Palestinians should compromise over what are but two remnants of same, namely the West Bank and East Jerusalem?

"President Barack Obama deserves huge credit for clearly pointing a spotlight on a solution: the recognition of 1967 boundaries as a starting point for negotiation, and the agreement by Israel that Jerusalem must be a joint capital, East and West, for Palestine and Israel."

Pointing a spotlight on a solution? How easily pleased you are, Mr Ross. All Obama has to do to earn your praise is operate a bloody spotlight! What about doing something practical like turning off the money tap, Mr Ross? And as for those 1967 "boundaries," as you call them, did it not occur to you that Obama's gift to the Israelis of "mutually agreed swaps" will allow them to play games till the proverbial cows come home? Oh, and Obama did not refer to the sharing of Jerusalem in his speech. You really haven't read the damn thing, have you?

"The creation of a nation state of Israel based on biblical righteousness is historically false."

Biblical righteousness? Don't you mean biblical nonsense, Mr Ross?

"The Zionist movement of the 19th century, which succeeded in the 'British solution' Balfour Declaration in obtaining [obtaining?] Israel, had negotiated before with many countries, including Australia, Papua New Guinea, Uganda and French Madagascar."

Oh, so the Zionist movement negotiated with 4 countries that didn't even exist in the 19th century. Right... Moving right along then.

"The citizens of Israel are right to fear a Palestinian demand that a 'law of return' should or would entitle any Palestinian to resume their Palestinian land title or even a right to co-exist within the borders of Israel."

Er, slight problem, Mr Ross. Your law of return is actually an Israeli law, designed to open the gates of Israel to Jews from all over, but keep them closed to Palestinians who, like all refugees in international law, have a right of return to their homeland. As a person claiming to champion Palestinian rights 40 years ago, you didn't champion the most fundamental of all Palestinian rights - the right of return? Are you sure it was Palestine you were working for back then? Yes? So why are you now supporting Israel's refusal to allow them to return?

"But the Jewish people were given reparation payments by Germany - and Swiss banks - and so should Israel and its Western allies make reparation to all aggrieved, proven Palestinian cases of dispossession from their original homes and farms. Without justice these notional claims fester generational hatred and jihadism even now in Middle Eastern refugee camps."

Oh, so Israel should refuse to allow the Palestinian refugees to return (for reasons you don't specify) but should compensate them for their losses? Give me one good reason why Israel shouldn't both allow them to return and compensate them as well. Oh, and seeing Australia's a 'friend' of Israel, I guess you wouldn't be averse to the Australian taxpayer helping its friend discharge its debt to around 5 million odd Palestinian refugees.

"Let all join hands in building two co-existing states guaranteed by the United Nations, with an intitial peacekeeping force overseeing mutual preservation for 25 years, fully funded by the UN to provide boundary [boundary?] integrity."

Someone sack the letters editor.