http://archives.gophercentral.com/newsletter_28.html
Editor's Note:
Anybody with the most simple knowledge of demographics
understands that if Israel were to believe in the notion
of one person – one vote, the "Jewish" state would cease
to exist.
Israel is not a religious state for Jews. It is a state
for anybody who has Jewish relatives. It is based upon
one's genetic disposition. So one can be an Atheist "Jew".
Like former PM Golda Meir and Ariel Sharon and have no
claim to religion. The founding father of Israel, David
Ben Gurion was similarly an atheist.
What makes somebody "Jewish" according to Israeli law is
not one's religion. Most people do not know this. It is
really based upon one's heritage. And a heritage that is
RACIALLY BASED.
Hence, one can choose racism as a construct or democracy...
So far Israel has chosen a racist creed at its core.
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It's peace or apartheid
-By GWYNNE DYER
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the
Annapolis summit on November 27, where President George
W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian
peace talks.
More importantly, last week was also the 60th anniversary
of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled
Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.
That promised Arab state still doesn't exist, of course,
but if the peace talks fail to produce it, then Israel is
"finished," Olmert told the newspaper Haaretz.
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses,"
Olmert said, "and we face a South African-style struggle
for equal voting rights for Palestinians in the [Occupied]
Territories, then the state of Israel is finished. "The
Jewish organizations that are our power base in America
will be the first to come out against us, because they
will say they cannot support a state that does not support
democracy and equal voting rights for all."
It was an extraordinary thing for a right-wing Israeli
politician to say. Israelis usually erupt in fury if
anybody suggests a comparison with apartheid-era South
Africa.
However, Olmert wasn't talking about the country as it is
now – 7 million people, of whom about 5.5 million are Jews
– but about the country that would exist if 4 million
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories remained under
Israeli control indefinitely.
The Arab population both within Israel and in the Occupied
Territories is growing much faster than the Jewish
population, even counting Jewish immigration. Sometime
soon, there will be more Palestinians than Jews within
the borders of the former British mandate of Palestine
(between the Jordan River and the sea) for the first time
since the war of 1948-49.
For a long time, the "demographic question" did not trouble
Israelis much.
There were still far fewer Palestinians in the late 1980s,
when Yasser Arafat persuaded the Palestine Liberation
Organization to adopt the goal of a Palestinian state
within the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem
(an area considerably smaller than what it was given under
the UN partition plan of 1947).
Now the Palestinians are within sight of becoming a
majority in the whole of the territory between the Jordan
and the sea, and some of them are starting to abandon that
compromise goal.
Let us have a single democratic state in all of these
lands, they say, and we don't mind if Israel never returns
to its 1967 borders.
We will just demand our equal democratic rights within this
larger country that includes all the land now controlled
by Israel. Our votes will change Israel from a "Jewish
democracy" to a multi-ethnic, post-Zionist democratic
state. Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has already
adopted this strategy.
That is the spectre that haunts Ehud Olmert and every other
thinking Israeli. If you cannot make the two-state solution
work, then you get the one-state solution.
Israel has the military power to deny the vote to
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories indefinitely, but
it will look more and more like apartheid-era South Africa,
with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as its Bantustans.
Even on the right, many Israelis are concluding that a
Palestinian state is essential to the long-term survival
of a Jewish state. But many others still think that a two-
state deal is either undesirable or impossible, and hope
that the current round of peace talks fails. They will
probably not be disappointed, for Olmert's cabinet would
collapse if he made any major concessions on Jerusalem or
Palestinian refugees.
His negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas, only controls half
of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories.
Eighty-three per cent of Israelis think there will be
no peace deal in the next year. Expectations among
Palestinians are even lower. But if not now, when?
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose
articles are published in 45 countries.
And one more short article:
Israel's New Heights Of Racism
- By Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury
Author Sami Michael, president of the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel, said upon the release of the
organization's annual report that racism was so rife
it was damaging civil liberty in Israel.
"Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that
damages freedom of expression and privacy," Michael said.
The publication coincides with Human Rights Week, which
begins Sunday.
The report's key points include a 26-percent rise in the
number of racist incidents against Arabs and twice as
many Jews reporting a feeling of hate toward Arabs.
"We are a society under supervision under a democratic
regime whose institutions are being undermined and which
confers a different status to residents in the center of
the country and in the periphery," Michael said.
According to the June 2007 Democracy Index of the Israel
Democracy Institute, for example, only half the public
believes that Jews and Arabs must have full equal rights.
Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that
the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel and
78 percent oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties
in the government. According to a Haifa University study,
74 percent of Jewish youths in Israel think that Arabs are
"unclean."
The ACRI says that bills introduced in the Knesset
contribute to delegitimize the country's Arab citizens,
such as ones that would link the right to vote and receive
state allowances to military or national service.
They also include bills that require ministers and MKs to
swear allegiance to a Jewish state and those that set aside
13 percent of all state lands owned by the Jewish National
Fund for Jews only.
"Arab citizens are frequently subject to ridicule at the
airports," the report states.
It says that Arab citizens "are subject to 'racial
profiling' that classifies them as a security threat. The
government also threatens the freedom of expression of
Arab journalists by brandishing the whip of economic
boycott and ending the publication of government announce-
ments in newspapers that criticize its policy."
Hadash Chairman MK Mohammad Barakeh said that the report
"did not take us by surprise and neither should anyone be
surprised by it. Its results are the natural consequence
of a racist campaign led by political and military leaders,
as well as the result of the anti-Arab racist policies
implemented by consecutive governments."