Anony Mous : How is Israel an apartheid state? The West Bank and Gaza is self-ruled
... after Israel GAVE them
the territories.
The Apartheid Convention gives us some indications of whether apartheid is being practiced, in other words "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".
I would encourage you to read the report "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?" by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, who surprisingly do know something about apartheid, but I will summarise some of their findings. Article 2 of the Apartheid Convention cites six categories of 'inhuman acts' comprising the 'crime of apartheid'.
It found that Israel practiced three of these categories, namely (a) the denial of the right to life and liberty of
person, (b) denial of basic human rights and freedoms, and (c) division of the population along racial lines.
Please read the document for the support of these assertions under the heading "E. Findings on Apartheid".
Israel’s practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories can be defined by three ‘pillars’ of apartheid.
The first pillar derives from Israeli laws and policies that
establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential
legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews. The product of
this in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is an institutionalised system that privileges Jewish
settlers and discriminates against Palestinians on the basis of the
inferior status afforded to non-Jews by Israel. At the root of this
system are Israel’s citizenship laws, whereby group identity is the
primary factor in determining questions involving the acquisition of
Israeli citizenship. The 1950 Law of Return defines who is a Jew for
purposes of the law and allows every Jew to immigrate to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The 1952 Citizenship Law then grants automatic citizenship to
people who immigrate under the Law of Return, while erecting
insurmountable obstacles to citizenship for Palestinian refugees.
Israeli law conveying special standing to Jewish identity is then
applied extra-territorially to extend preferential legal status and
material privileges to Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and thus discriminate
against Palestinians. The review of Israel’s practices under Article 2
of the Apartheid Convention provides abundant evidence of discrimination
against Palestinians that flows from that inferior status, in realms
such as the right to leave and return to one’s country, freedom of
movement and residence, and access to land. The 2003 Citizenship and
Entry into Israel Law banning Palestinian family unification is a
further example of legislation that confers benefits to Jews over
Palestinians and illustrates the adverse impact of having the status of
Palestinian Arab. The disparity in how the two groups are treated by
Israel is highlighted through the application of a harsher set of laws
and different courts for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories than for Jewish
settlers, as well as through the restrictions imposed by the permit and
ID systems.
The second pillar is reflected in Israel’s grand policy to fragment the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the purposes of segregation and domination. This policy is
evidenced by: Israel’s extensive appropriation of Palestinian land,
which continues to shrink the territorial space available to
Palestinians; the hermetic closure and isolation of the Gaza Strip from
the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories; the deliberate severing of East Jerusalem from the
rest of the West Bank; and the appropriation and construction policies
serving to carve up the West Bank into an intricate and well-serviced
network of connected settlements for Jewish-Israelis and an archipelago
of besieged and non-contiguous enclaves for Palestinians. That these
measures are intended to segregate the population along racial lines in
violation of Article 2(d) of the Apartheid Convention is clear from the
visible web of walls, separate roads, and checkpoints, and the invisible
web of permit and ID systems, that combine to ensure that Palestinians
remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews
are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of
movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory.
The third pillar upon which Israel’s system of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
rests is its ‘security’ laws and policies. The extrajudicial killing,
torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrest
and imprisonment of Palestinians, as described under the rubric of
Article 2(a) of the Apartheid Convention, are all justified by Israel on
the pretext of security. These policies are State-sanctioned, and often
approved by the Israeli judicial system, and supported by an oppressive
code of military laws and a system of improperly constituted military
courts. Additionally, this study finds that Israel’s invocation of
’security’ to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of
opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement also often
purports to mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its
system of domination, and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a
group
Anony Mous : Read the history, not just what the media tells you. There is no Palestine, never was ...
In the first place, I don't need to read what the media tells me. I was there. I could see how Israelis treated Arabs. I had walked from one apartheid state into another. No one needed to tell me that.
Secondly, history shows that Jews made up 7% of the population of Palestine in 1914. with Moslems comprising the largest segment of the population. To say "there is no Palestine, there never was" displays such ignorance I cannot believe you were ever one of Jehovah's Witnesses. The reason the number of Jews in Palestine increased was the Balfour Declaration during the First World War which allowed for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine in exchange for support from the Zionists.
