From: wmuhanna@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Waleed A Muhanna)
Subject: Re: Israel Apartheid???? [LONG]
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 21:02:04 GMT

In article <1992Nov10.044345.12199@cs.brown.edu> dzk@cs.brown.edu (Danny Keren) writes:
>Ahmed El-Habbash writes:
>#Danny Keren writes:
>
>##1) The law of return has no relation to race, only to religion. you
>##   better check out before you make such accusations.
>
>#When we talk about race, normally we consider human races, but this
>#situation is different, humanity and human rights are not considered at
>#all.
>
>So you agree it has nothing to do with race or what? Sorry, I don't
>understand the context of your comment.

I don't wish to speak for Ahmed, but I think he is referring to the common 
usage of the term `racism'.  You seem to rely on the biological definition of 
the term `race' and argue that since Jews are not a (biological) race, that 
laws such as the "Law of Return" (which embodies the fundamental tenet of 
Zionism) cannot be considered racist.   You are clearly entitled to your 
own definition, but then you cannot turn around and say that 
"anti-Semitism" is a form of racism (because Jews - afterall - are not 
a `race').  You just can't have it both ways.

The fact is that any state that discriminates against a portion of its
population on the basis of race, religion, color, or ethnic heritage
can be judged `racist' in the common usage of the term.   The LoR (among
others; more details below) is a blatant example of this sort of 
discrimination (20% of Israeli citizens - people within the 1948
borders - are not Jews).  

>
>#I don't know what would you describe this situation when people who are
>#born in Palestine are driven out to be replaced by people who never seen
>#that land before.
>
>I do not support driving anyone out and I have not seen too many
>Palestinians driven out of Israel recently (I think 66 since the
>Intifada started?). 

Do you support the return of those Palestinians who were driven out?
While 1948 and 1967 are seemingly not "recent" enough for you to "remember,"
exile is a daily living hell for millions of dispossessed Palestinians 
terrorized or expelled during the successive "ethnic cleansing" campaigns 
of zionist forces and bombed almost daily in Lebanon.  A minimum of 750,000
civilians were driven out and denied their right of return in 1948.  These 
exiles were joined by at least 300,000 (if I remember correctly) in 1967.  
Don't these people have a right of return to their homeland?   It is,
whether you like it or not, simply racist to believe that an American or 
Russian citizen who happen to be Jewish has more right to move and 
settle in Palestine/Israel than a stateless Palestinian who was driven 
out from his/her own homeland (or whose parents were driven out) in 1948 
and after.  Any law that codifies this belief is therefore decidedly racist.

>Compared to the 300,000 that were kicked from
>Kuwait... as was mentioned many times, 800,000 Jews left the
>Arab countries. many of them were "encouraged" to leave. 

Comparative morality stinks.  Is your moral case so flimsy and weak that 
you find it necessary to point at other injustices?   Is Anti-semitism any 
less evil because the Holocaust happened?  Is the Holocaust somehow less of 
a crime because of what Pol Pot did later in Cambodia?

Moreover, what happened in Kuwait is criminal, but the comparison with 
what happened in Palestine is not appropriate.  The Palestinians are
not a citizens of Kuwait, and Kuwait is not their homeland.  If
anything, the plight of the Palestinians in Kuwait and elsewhere
provides an even more compelling argument (in case you need more) 
of why they should be allowed to exercise their inalienable right to 
return to their own homeland, where they can live in peace and with 
dignity in a state that treats all its citizens equally.


>...

The LoR is only part of the problem.  The following article (a summary of 
things I and others have posted to TPM) explains what I mean.

Israel, Democracy, and Apartheid

	Zionists and Israel's supporters continue to describe Israel as
a bastion of Western democracy and as the "only democratic state
in the Middle East."  Other states in the Middle East have made nothing 
more than farcical claims to "democracy," and amateurish attempts at denying
their records of human rights abuses, and very little additional
effort is necessary to establish their abusive nature.  Israel, on 
the other hand, repeatedly describes itself as a democracy.  The 
reality is unfortunately very different.

	Most of us understand a democracy to be a state by and for its 
citizens, all of its citizens without any distinctions.  As such, even
from a theoretical point of view, Israel cannot lay claim to democracy 
when it understands and has declared itself to be the "state of the 
Jewish people," not the state of the Israeli citizens, 20% of whom are 
not Jews.  The US changing its constitution to declare itself a White state,
or the state of the Christian people everywhere, would be an 
appropriate analogy.  The assertions in Israeli law that "Israel is
the Jewish state" and that "Israel is the state of the Jewish people"
can mean only one thing: that non-Jews are considered second-class
citizens; that non-Jews have no place in the "Jewish state."

	In practice, the Zionist state is a state where "citizenship" 
is distinguished from "nationality".  In every democracy, a citizen is 
also a national of the state.  Under Israeli law, however, there is no 
such thing as Israeli nationality.   Mere citizenship in the state of 
Israel does not bestow upon the individual equal rights.   In his book 
Facts & Myths: The Arab-Israel Conflict, Clifford Wright explains that:

	Arabs possess `Arab nationality' in Israel but cannot, of course, 
  possess `Jewish nationality'.  Since Israel is a Jewish state, Jewish 
  nationals are able to accrue special rights which non-Jews cannot do.
  Logically, an Arab national has no place in a `Jewish' state.  The way 
  in which Israel describes the differences between `Arab nationality' 
  and `Jewish nationality' in a Jewish state shows that in practice, the 
  two nationalities reduce to the distinction between `citizenship' and 
  `nationality'.  Arabs have `citizenship' in Israel but they are not 
  citizens `by return', as stipulated by the Law of Return, and therefore 
  can never be `nationals', nor take advantage of rights accorded to Jews 
  by the virtue of their being Jews in a Jewish state.

	Non-Jews in Israel, "the state of the Jewish people", are 
therefore left permanently disadvantaged.  Indeed, discrimination against 
non-Jews is institutionalized and sanctioned by Israeli laws (Israel has 
no written constitution and no Bill of Rights).  For example, the 1950 
Law of Return declared that Jews, regardless of their nationality or place 
of birth, can immigrate and become Israeli citizens automatically.  Meanwhile,
Palestinians who were expelled en masse by the Zionists or fled since 1948 
and now live in the diaspora, many as stateless refugees, are not permitted
to return to the land of their birth and patrimony.

	A second fundamental law, the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency 
(Status) Law of 1952 (WZO/JA Law), codifies, in practice, the benefits 
accorded to Jewish over non-Jewish citizens of Israel.  Under the WZO/JA
Law, 93 percent of the land in Israel proper, much of it confiscated
from Arab owners, is reserved for exclusive use by Jews only.  Israeli 
Arabs, and all non-Jews, are not only unable, by law, to own the land, but
they cannot either lease it or work upon it.

	This sort of open discrimination and apartness takes many other 
forms. For example, most government jobs (about 1/3 of all jobs in Israel) 
are restricted to people who have served in the Israeli army.  This excludes 
by law all non-Jews (save some Druze and a few bedouins who serve in the army)
from most government jobs.  Government aid to Arab municipalities is
minuscule compared to aid given to Jewish municipalities.  The
land of Arab (non-Jewish) Israeli citizens is regularly being
confiscated by the Zionist state to settle Jews.  Just this month, the Israeli
Supreme Court essentially gave the green light for The expulsion of 
residents of Ramya, a village in the Galilee, and the confiscation 
of their land to build new housing for Soviet Jews.  In fact, Israel 
has an official land use plan which calls for the "Judaization of the 
Galilee!"

	Thus, what makes Israel patently undemocratic is not just the absence of
legal instruments guaranteeing equal rights, but rather the PRESENCE of 
apartheid-like laws institutionalizing discrimination.  Further, the 
Jewish exclusivist nature of the state cannot be changed through 
normal democratic processes.   A 1985 amendment to 'Basic Law: Knesset' 
includes the following text:

   "Clause 7 (a): A list of candidates shall not take part 
   in the Knesset elections if it entails one of the following, in its aims 
   or its actions, explicitly or implicitly:
   - NEGATION OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL AS THE STATE OF
   THE JEWISH PEOPLE [emphasis added];"


	As we can see, a party calling for Israel to be simply a 
liberal-democratic-style state of its current citizens 
(both Jews and non-Jews), giving no special status to Jewish immigration, 
say, would be excluded from running in Israeli elections.

	Israel's appearance as a democracy is an illusion because it is 
a democracy for Jews only.  If one is to consider Israel to be democratic,
one has to also consider Apartheid South Africa to be democratic too, for it 
is a democracy for Whites only.   Any state which specifies its citizens 
and codifies the differences in law, so that advantages accrue to 
one segment of the population and not the other, is patently undemocratic 
at best and can be judged racist.

	Sure, Palestinians who are Israeli citizens can vote in Israel, but
they cannot form parties that challenge the Jewish exclusivist character of 
the state. Their right to vote pales in comparison to their treatment 
as second class citizens and to the instituionalized economic apartheid under
which they suffer.  Those that Apartheid South Africa calls Asians and Coloured 
are a good analogy for Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship.
The so-called Asians and Coloured are able to vote too, though not for 
the white parliament so they cannot (or could not) have apartheid 
repealed.  Yet, their land has been confiscated by the apartheid state 
for exclusive use by whites, just like the land of Arab citizens of 
Israel has and is being confiscated by the "Jewish state" for exclusive 
use by Jews.

	Apartheid South Africa also rules over millions of Blacks who are
still being denied citizenship and voting rights, just as zionist Israel
rules over 1.8 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, who
are denied all political and national rights, not to mention basic individual
human rights.

	Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens; it is a 
Jewish exclusivist state that discriminates against its non-Jewish 
citizens.  Israel's form of government, an exclusivist form that has 
institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews, resembles more South 
Africa's apartheid than a western-style, modern, liberal democracy.

	Indeed, Zionists' arguments against equality, human rights for the 
Palestinians, and genuine democracy, and their defense of the Jewish 
exclusivist system in Israel are virtually identical to those the 
Afrikaner make in defense of South Africa's Apartheid.  The parallels are 
there for anyone to see.  The difference is 
that Apartheid has become a symbol which people around the world take for 
granted as being evil.  No one gives the time of day to assertions that 
white security must take precedence over Black (et. al) political rights,
that there is no democracy in most African countries, that S.A. is surrounded 
by hostile non-democratic states, that Blacks kill more Blacks than Whites,
that Blacks are "really recent immigrants", that the mostly European 
settlers are naturally superior to the indigenous inhabitants who do not 
know "democracy", that the resistance of the indigenous oppressed people 
is nothing more than "terrorism", and so on.

	All these arguments are treated as bunk (many are patently racist). 
Instead, the world is virtually united in insisting that the situation in 
South Africa must improve and that full, equal political rights be 
guaranteed for all.  Yet, all the above arguments are casually and regularly 
made by Israeli supporters in defense of Israel's Jewish exclusivist nature 
and its 25 years of repression in the occupied territories.  So in the name 
of the Zionist "ideal" of a Jewish exclusivist state, the 20% of Israelis who 
are not Jewish are condemned to a life as second class citizens.  Generations 
of Palestinians (1.8 million people now) are also condemned to a life of 
suffering and brutal repression under Israeli military occupation.

I. F. Stone, the award-winning American Jewish journalist, observed in 
an article in August 1967 in The New York Review of Books that:

  Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world
  Jewry.  In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the
  maintenance of  secular,  non-racial,  pluralistic societies.
  In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed
  marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and
  exclusivist.  Jews might fight elsewhere for their very security 
  and existence -- against principles and practices they find
  themselves defending in Israel.


	Historically, many Jews have in fact opposed political Zionism.  
Today, there are many Jewish critics of zionism and of Israel's 
cruelty and immoral policies towards the Palestinians.  It is 
those Jews who are, in my humble opinion, upholding the Jewish 
tradition of ethical dissent and moral leadership.  

	South Africa is finally closing the book on apartheid.  It is time
to press for an end to apartheid in Israel.  Perhaps Israel will have its 
own De Klerk soon.


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