Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Apartheid

Un'ottimo articolo nel guardian di oggi.  Ne copioincollo una parte.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1703244,00.html
Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between
their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the
racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel
itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every
aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid.
After four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from
Johannesburg before that, the Guardian's award-winning Middle East
correspondent Chris McGreal is exceptionally well placed to assess this
explosive comparison. Here we publish the first part of his two-day
special report
....
There are conspicuous differences, of course. Arab Israelis have the
vote, although they were prevented from forming their own political
parties until the 1980s. They are mostly equal under the law and these
days the Israeli courts generally protect their rights. Jews are a
majority in Israel; white South Africans were a minority. And Israel
spent the first decades of its existence fighting for its life.
But for some of those with a foot in both societies, the distinctions
are blurred by other realities. Some Jewish South Africans and Israelis
who lived with apartheid - including politicians, Holocaust survivors
and men once condemned as terrorists - describe aspects of modern
Israel as disturbingly reminiscent of the old South Africa. Some see
the parallels in a matrix of discriminatory practices and controls, and
what they describe as naked greed for land seized by the fledgling
Israeli state from fleeing Arabs and later from the Palestinians for
the ever expanding West Bank settlements. "Apartheid was an extension
of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land," said the
Jewish South African cabinet minister and former ANC guerrilla, Ronnie
Kasrils, on a visit to Jerusalem. "That is exactly what has happened in
Israel and the occupied territories; the use of force and the law to
take the land. That is what apartheid and Israel have in common."
Others see the common ground in the scale of the suffering if not its
causes. "If we take the magnitude of the injustice done to the
Palestinians by the state of Israel, there is a basis for comparison
with apartheid," said the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa,
Alon Liel. "If we take the magnitude of suffering, we are in the same
league. Of course apartheid was a very different philosophy from what
we do, most of which stems from security considerations. But from the
point of view of outcome, we are in the same league."
Perhaps the real question is how Israel came to be in the same league
as apartheid South Africa, whether by mirroring laws and political
strategies, or in the suffering caused. And how it is that the
government of a people who suffered so much at the hands of
discrimination and hatred came to secretly embrace a regime led by men
who once stood on the docks of Cape Town and chanted: "Send back the
Jews."
Torn between two struggles
In 1940, an Afrikaans-speaking Jewish boy called Arthur Goldreich was
living in Pietersberg, the brutally intolerant capital of the Northern
Transvaal. Goldreich was 11 and South Africa was at war with Nazi
Germany.
One morning, his secondary school headmaster announced that students
would be learning a foreign language, German. The implication was
clear: many Afrikaners, including some of their political leaders,
hoped and believed that Hitler would win the war. When Goldreich's
teacher distributed the German "textbook", the Jewish boy found himself
staring at a Hitler Youth magazine. He balked and wrote to the prime
minister, Jan Smuts, refusing to learn German and demanding to be
taught Hebrew. Goldreich got his way and was headed on a path that tore
his life between two struggles; against white domination in South
Africa, and for the survival of the Jewish state in Israel.
In 1948, both of Goldreich's worlds were transformed within a few days
of each other. Israel declared its independence on May 14, a fortnight
before the apartheid Nationalist party won South Africa's election and
the men who backed Hitler came to power. Goldreich had already
determined to go to Israel and fight to save it from strangulation at
birth. "The reason I went was the Holocaust and the struggle against
British colonialism but, of course, the Nats winning the election left
me in no doubt about what I had to do," he says.
Goldreich returned to South Africa in 1954 to join his other struggle.
After a few years of political agitation, he became an early member of
the African National Congress's military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, led
by Nelson Mandela. Goldreich wasn't known to South Africa's security
police, so he was installed with his family as the tenant of
Lillieslief farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, where the
underground leadership of the banned ANC met secretly.
Mandela wrote in his autobiography how he turned to Goldreich as one of
the few in the ANC's nascent guerrilla army who knew how to fight. "In
the 1940s, Arthur had fought with the Palmach, the military wing of the
Jewish National Movement in Palestine. He was knowledgeable about
guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding."
In July 1963, the police raided the farm and captured a slew of wanted
men, including Walter Sisulu, the ANC leader, and Goldreich. Five of
the 17 arrested at Rivonia were white, all of them Jewish. The captured
men and Mandela, who was already in detention, were charged with
sabotage and plotting violent revolution, which carried the death
penalty. efore he could be tried, Goldreich broke out of a Johannesburg
jail and eluded a much publicised nationwide hunt by fleeing to
Swaziland disguised as a priest. Goldreich now lives in the affluent
and tranquil city of Herzliya on Israel's Mediterranean coast. There
was a time when he believed the young Jewish state might provide the
example of a better way for the country of his birth. As it is,
Goldreich sees Israel as closer to the white regime he fought against
and modern South Africa as providing the model. Israeli governments, he
says, ultimately proved more interested in territory than peace, and
along the way Zionism mutated.
Goldreich speaks of the "bantustanism we see through a policy of
occupation and separation", the "abhorrent" racism in Israeli society
all the way up to cabinet ministers who advocate the forced removal of
Arabs, and "the brutality and inhumanity of what is imposed on the
people of the occupied territories of Palestine".
"Don't you find it horrendous that this people and this state, which
only came into existence because of the defeat of fascism and nazism in
Europe, and in the conflict six million Jews paid with their lives for
no other reason than that they were Jews, is it not abhorrent that in
this place there are people who can say these things and do these
things?" he asks.
Goldreich went on to found the architecture department at Jerusalem's
renowned Bezalel Academy, from where he saw architecture and planning
evolve as tools for territorial expansion after the 1967 war. "I
watched Jerusalem with horror and great doubt and fear for the future.
There were those who said that what's happening is architecture, not
politics. You can't talk about planning as an abstraction. It's called
establishing facts on the ground," he says.
Beyond the green line
There was a part of Johannesburg that most residents of the
apartheid-era city never saw. By the 1970s, the bulk of the black
population was already forced out under the Group Areas Act, which
defined living areas by race. The Sophiatown neighbourhood, once a
thriving corner of black life, was bulldozed and replaced by rows of
dreary bungalows for whites. But several hundred thousand black people
remained in Alexandra township, close to Johannesburg's most affluent
neighbourhood, Sandton. The traffic out of Alexandra was one-way. Its
residents left each day to work in the mines and shops or to clean
homes in Sandton. Whites rarely ventured the short drive off Louis
Botha avenue into the overcrowded, often squalid, unpaved back streets
of an Alexandra deprived of a decent water supply, adequate schools and
refuse collection.
The contrast between West and East Jerusalem is not as stark, but the
disparities between Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods are underpinned by
attitudes, policies and laws similar to those used against
Johannesburg's black population. Most of Jerusalem's Jews never cross
the "green line" - the international border that divided the city until
1967 - and many of those that do go only as far as the Wailing Wall to
pray. If more Israelis were to travel deeper into the city they claim
as their indivisible capital, they would encounter a different world
from their own, a place where roads crumble, rubbish is left
uncollected and entire Palestinian neighbourhoods are not connected to
the sewage system.
According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's
Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000
residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools
and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the
city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since
the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new
school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a
B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to
the city's Jewish areas."
Take the interior ministry offices on each side of the divide. In the
west, Jewish residents face a relatively short wait in an
air-conditioned hall. In the east, Palestinians begin queueing in the
middle of the night, or pay someone else to do so, to stand a chance of
being served. Once the sun comes up, they wait for hours in the heat in
front of an iron-grilled gate on the street for identity documents, or
to register the birth of a child or the death of a parent. In
Johannesburg, white people and black people were directed to different
entrances of the home affairs ministry and afforded service - or not -
according to their skin colour.
There is many a city in other parts of the world where minorities are
forced into poor, underfunded neighbourhoods and treated as unwelcome
outsiders. Where Israel's self- proclaimed capital differs is in
policies specifically designed to keep it that way, as in apartheid
Johannesburg. In Jerusalem and other parts of the occupied territories,
Palestinians face a myriad of discriminatory laws and practices, from
land confiscations to house demolitions, de facto pass laws and
restrictions on movement. "The similarities between the situation of
East Jerusalemites and black South Africans is very great in respect of
their residency rights," says John Dugard, the international law
professor widely regarded as the father of human rights law in South
Africa and now the UN's chief human rights monitor in the occupied
territories. "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East
Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of
consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of
who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or
hospital."
Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not
considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status,
which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South
Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as
citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a
distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian
residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at
the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem.
"The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were
born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating
these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing,
since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."
Israel says it has offered citizenship to anyone born in Jerusalem and
that few Palestinians take it up because doing so implies recognition
of Israeli sovereignty over the entire city. The government says that
by choosing not to become citizens, Jerusalem's Arabs subject
themselves to restrictions.
After the entirety of Jerusalem was brought under Israeli rule, the
Jewish state annexed about 70 sq km of Palestinian territory and
incorporated it within the new municipal boundaries - sometimes taking
land from villages such as Said Rhateb's, but leaving the people and
their homes outside the city. Israel then wrote laws to permit the
government to confiscate property wholesale with one purpose: to
transfer land and homes from Arabs to Jews.
Laws of division
"Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign
tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control
black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against
Palestinians in Jerusalem," says Scott Bollens, a University of
California professor of urban planning who has studied divided cities
across the globe, including Belfast, Berlin, Nicosia and Mostar. "In
South Africa there was 'group areas' legislation, and then there was
land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and
back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools.
They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing
that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it's fundamental to their
project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known
that since day one. They've been very explicit in linking the planning
tools with their political project."
At the heart of Israel's strategy is the policy adopted three decades
ago of "maintaining the demographic balance" in Jerusalem. In 1972, the
number of Jews in the west of the city outnumbered the Arabs in the
east by nearly three to one. The government decreed that that equation
should not be allowed to change, at least not in favour of the Arabs.
"The mantra of the past 37 years has been 'maintaining the demographic
balance', which doesn't mean forcing Palestinians to leave," says
Daniel Seidemann, a Jewish Israeli lawyer who has spent years fighting
legal cases on behalf of Jerusalem's Arab residents. "It means
curtailing their ability to develop by limiting construction to the
already developed areas, by largely preventing development in new areas
and by taking 35% [of Palestinian-owned land in greater East Jerusalem]
and having a massive government incentive for [Jews] to build up that
area."
The political decision to discriminate against Arabs was an open but
rarely acknowledged secret. The authors of a 1992 book on Jerusalem,
Separate and Unequal, laid bare the policy. The writers, two of whom
were advisers to the city's mayors, said that Israeli policy since 1967
was "remorselessly" pursued with four objectives: to expand the Jewish
population in the mainly Arab east of the city; to hinder growth of
Arab neighbourhoods; to induce Arabs to leave; and to seal off Arab
areas behind Jewish settlements.
In 1992, Jerusalem's deputy mayor, Avraham Kahila, told the city
council: "The principle that guides me and the mayor is that, in the
Arab neighbourhoods, the municipality has no interest or reason to get
into any kind of planning process. Thus, we encourage the building of
Jewish neighbourhoods in empty areas that have been expropriated by the
state of Israel. But so long as the policy of the state of Israel is
not to get involved in the character of existing Arab neighbourhoods,
there is no reason to require plans."
The mayor at the time, Teddy Kollek, was so identified with the city
that he was known as Mr Jerusalem. Talking in 1972 about East
Jerusalem, Kollek's adviser on Arab affairs, Ya'akov Palmon, told the
Guardian: "We take the land first and the law comes after."
At a city council meeting two decades later, Kollek was confronted by a
lone councillor outraged at the evident discrimination in limiting Arab
housing development. According to an Israeli newspaper report at the
time, Kollek responded that the council was adhering to a policy
"followed by all governments since 1967" of restricting the growth of
Palestinian neighbourhoods.
By then, discrimination was so entrenched that Kollek's statement drew
almost no attention, let alone criticism.
Of the 70 sq km of annexed Arab land around Jerusalem, the state
expropriated more than one-third to build homes for Jews without
constructing a single house for Palestinians on the confiscated land.
The Jewish population of East Jerusalem had fled or been driven out in
1948. A gradual return after 1967 turned to a flood as the settlements
ate into the east of the city. Today, the population of Jewish
settlements in and close to East Jerusalem has grown to nearly
two-thirds that of the Arab neighbourhoods.
"Houses were built for Israelis, but the lands were overwhelmingly
taken from Palestinians," says Seidemann. "This was the tool by which
Israel was able to consolidate its hold over East Jerusalem. This was
based on the law of expropriation for public purposes, but the public
bearing the brunt of this was always Palestinian and the public
benefiting from this was always Israeli."
One method of preventing further construction by Arabs in the east of
the city has been to declare many open areas to be "green zones"
protected from building. Bollens says about 40% of East Jerusalem is
designated as a green zone, but that this is really a mechanism for
land transfer. "The government calls it a green zone to stop
Palestinians building homes there, and then when the government wants
to develop an area [as Jewish] it lifts that green zoning miraculously
and it becomes a development place."
Jerusalem's mayor, Uri Lupolianski - who chaired the city's planning
and zoning committee in the 1990s - declined to be interviewed in
person on these issues, but responded to written questions. "We have to
keep a reasonable balance between residential areas and open green
zones. We've designated green zones in all parts of Jerusalem, not just
the eastern one," he wrote. "We're keeping the green zones in the
entire city free from construction, and we plan to keep it this way. We
believe that the development of parks and green zones in eastern
Jerusalem will improve the quality of life of the people living there."
During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built
in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes
or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a
demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,
routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society
enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society
to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until
1992, so did South Africa.
Land confiscation
Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and
Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city
on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having
its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of
apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government
from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim
quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's
yours is mixed if we happen to target it."
Israeli law permits wholesale confiscation of property inside Israel or
Jerusalem that is owned by Palestinians who live in areas defined as
"enemy territory", including the West Bank, which was occupied by
Jordan until it lost the war against Israel in 1967. "Any Palestinian
who was at any point in 'enemy territory' after 1967, forfeits his
property," says Seidemann. "But enemy territory includes the West Bank.
It's a remarkable situation. Any property that was ever 'abandoned' by
any Palestinian becomes state land and is then 'turned over to the
Jewish people'. Any property that once belonged to a Jew is 'recovered
to the Jewish people' and turned over to the settlers."
"I hate the term ethnic cleansing in the context of this," he says,
"because of the connotations of rape and pillage, which this is not.
But there was and is an active government effort using procedures such
as this to rid targeted areas of its Palestinian residents and turn it
into an exclusively or predominantly Jewish area. And I say, with
regret, that the efforts have been moderately successful."
The law is not applied in reverse: Jews who go to live in West Bank
settlements do not lose property they may own in Tel Aviv. Last year,
Sharon's government quietly confiscated thousands of acres of
Palestinian-owned lands within greater Jerusalem without compensation,
after a secret cabinet decision to use a 55-year-old law on abandoned
property against Arabs separated from their olive groves and farms by
the West Bank barrier. Previous governments decided not to apply this
law to East Jerusalem and the Sharon administration was embarrassed
enough to expropriate the lands in secret before dropping the policy
after an international outcry when it came to light. The Palestinians
called the confiscations "legalised theft".
"What stands out for Jerusalem and Johannesburg is that it was and is
such a prolonged use of planning in pursuit of a political objective,"
says Scott Bollens. "One distinction with South Africa is the racial
identifiers and the racial rhetoric was so blatant, and it was so
visible and it was so much part of apartheid South African language.
But, despite the difference in rhetoric, the outcomes are very, very
similar and the urban landscape Israel has created in the Jerusalem
region is just as unequal, just as subjugating of the Palestinians as
the 'group area' planning was in South Africa for the blacks."
In 2004, Jerusalem's council approved the first new masterplan for the
city since 1959. The plan acknowledges some of the injustices and
problems in East Jerusalem, provides for greater construction of homes
in some Arab areas, and criticises Jewish settlement in the east of the
city. But critics say that at its core is the same obsession with
demography and what the plan describes as "preserving a firm Jewish
majority in the city".
A former Jerusalem city councillor, Meir Margalit, says the process was
flawed from the start because the steering committee of 31 people who
put the plan together included only one Arab. "It is characteristic
everywhere of colonial regimes which believe that the 'natives' are
worthy neither of suitable representation nor of being masters of their
own fate. The planning team apparently sets out from the assumption
that, in any case, one is dealing with a Jewish city and therefore
there is no reason to ask the opinion of anyone who does not belong to
the Jewish people," he says.
'Grey racism'
"One cannot but receive an impression that behind the document lies an
attempt to restrict the natural increase of the Arabs in the east of
the city. With their historical experience, the planning team
understands that this cannot be achieved through doing away with all
the firstborn sons, but the plan assumes that by restricting the Arabs'
living space, they will be compelled to leave the city and move into
places in the periphery where they will be able to build without
restriction."
Margalit says that the measures used to bring this about, including
restrictions on Palestinians travelling into Jerusalem and preventing
women who marry men from the east of the city from moving there, amount
to "grey racism".
"This, in fact, is the strength of municipal racism. It is neither
brutal nor openly visible, preferring to take cover behind apparently
neutral formulations. Thus it is always carefully concealed behind
consensus-oriented wording, hidden beneath a thick layer of cosmetic
liberal language," he says. "This is how a unique term which does not
exist in the professional literature was born in our country: 'grey
racism'. This is not a racism stemming from hatred of the 'other', but
a 'lite racism' rooted in a Zionist ideology which strove to be
democratic but, in giving priority to Jewish interests, inevitably
deprived others of their rights. When there is no equality, there is
bound to be discrimination, and when all those discriminated against
are of the same nationality, there is no alternative but to call it
what it is - 'national discrimination' - which belongs to the same
family as the infamous racial discrimination."
Over the years since the 1967 occupation, Palestinian residents of
Jerusalem have made it easier for the Israelis by refusing to vote in
city council elections on the grounds that this would amount to
recognition of Israel's claim over the entire city. Uri Lupolianski,
the mayor, says that maintaining the demographic balance is no longer
as crucial under the new masterplan, but he acknowledges that Arab
neighbourhoods are disadvantaged. "The situation in eastern Jerusalem
does leave a lot to be desired. However, during the last two years,
we've taken significant measures to improve it and separate the needs
of the residents from political issues," he wrote. "A new central bus
station was opened, as well as the biggest Arab school in Israel. I've
ordered a new plan to rebuild the roads in those neighbourhoods. Also,
we've expanded the route of the light train that's currently in
construction to include Arab neighbourhoods. The largest Arab cultural
centre in Israel is being planned in the area.
"In the new masterplan, we have designated a wide area in eastern
Jerusalem for construction for the Arab residents. There are more than
10 building plans, initiated by the municipality, currently in the
works for eastern Jerusalem.
"There's no basis for comparison with South Africa. We do not separate
racially between the Jews and Arabs. We do, however, acknowledge the
fact that different areas are populated by different groups, and we
meet the needs of all groups. We keep the building and zoning laws
completely separate from any political issues."
According to the municipality's most recent annual figures, the council
issued 1,695 building permits in the city in 2004. Of these, 116 went
to Arab parts of East Jerusalem and, of those, 46 were to build new
homes. The balance was for extensions to existing houses. In 2004, a
total of 212,789 sq metres was built in all of Jerusalem; 7% was in
Arab neighbourhoods. Several months ago, Israel's cabinet minister for
Jerusalem, Haim Ramon, described the 33ft-high wall dissecting Arab
neighbourhoods - which the government has insisted is purely a security
measure with no political intent - as having the added advantage of
making the city "more Jewish".
The mask of equality
Israel's one million Arab citizens are on a firmer footing. They can
vote - the primary evidence, for many angered by the apartheid analogy,
that Israel is not the old South Africa - at least, within Israel's
recognised borders. But the Jewish state has long viewed its remaining
Arab population with suspicion and hostility, and even as the enemy
within, through the country's wars for survival against hostile
neighbours and in the competition for land. Until 1966, Israeli Arabs
lived under "military administration" which allowed detention without
trial and subjected them to curfews, restrictions on jobs and where
they could live, and required them to obtain passes to move around the
country.
Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land - often expropriated from
Arabs without compensation - for Jews through state ownership, the
Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and
then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites.
The Population Registration Act categorised South Africans according to
an array of racial definitions, which, among other things, determined
who would be permitted to live on the reserved land.
Israel's Population Registry Act serves a similar purpose by
distinguishing between nationality and citizenship. Arabs and Jews
alike can be citizens, but each is assigned a separate "nationality"
marked on identity cards (either spelled out or, more recently, in a
numeric code), in effect determining where they are permitted to live,
access to some government welfare programmes, and how they are likely
to be treated by civil servants and policemen.
Ask Israelis why it is necessary to identify a citizen as a Jew or Arab
on the card and the question is generally met with incomprehension: how
can it be a Jewish state if we don't know who the Jews are? The
justification often follows that everyone in Israel is equal, so it
does no harm. Arab Israelis will tell you differently.
Generations of Israeli schoolchildren were imbued with the idea that
Arabs did not belong on the land of Israel, that they were somehow in
the way. In the mid-1980s, the military was so concerned at the overt
expressions of racism and anti-Arab hatred from within its ranks,
sometimes cast within the context of the Holocaust, that it thought to
re-emphasise "moral values".
In 1965, the government declared some lands on which Arab villages had
stood for decades, or even centuries, as "non-residential". These
"unrecognised" villages still exist but they are denied basic services,
and subject to periodic demolitions and land confiscations.
The US state department's annual human rights report - not a document
known for being hostile to Israel - concluded that there is
"institutionalised legal and societal discrimination against Israel's
Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens". "The government," it says, "does
not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20% of the population, with
the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services
as Jews."
Unequal education
In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per
person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in
Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m
shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m)
budget to develop healthcare facilities.
Five per cent of civil servants are Arabs, and a high proportion of
those are hired to deal with other Arabs. The foreign and finance
ministries employ fewer than a dozen Arab Israelis between them, when
their combined staff totals more than 1,700 Jews. Until recently, the
Bank of Israel and the state electricity company did not hire a single
Arab.
Dan Meridor, a former cabinet minister in several governments and a
one-time rival to Ariel Sharon for the leadership of the Likud party,
blamed social factors and years of conflict - not an intent to
discriminate - for the low representation of Arabs in the civil
service. "I don't have the figures, but I think generally speaking it
may be true. One has to check whether it relates to the level of
education. If, for example, people in the government civil service are
of higher education than the general public and the Arab population are
generally lower in education than the general public, it may explain
some of the differences," he says.
"Some jobs may be less accessible. Not officially, but in fact. Take
the number of workers in, say, the electricity company that are Arabs
and it is much much smaller than the proportion in the country. There's
a historical reason for that. Jews fighting Arabs and Arabs fighting
Jews was not only with weapons. There were two communities fighting for
hegemony and power in the very broad sense of the word. This is the
ethos of the Jews versus Arabs in the electricity company, on the land,
in the labour market, in the building industry. Generally speaking,
there has been improvement, but there is still, I think, in some areas,
a lot to be done. Not on the legal basis - legally, everyone is equal -
but on the opportunity basis."
Arab Israelis who fail to find employment in the civil service because
of a lack of education say that this is the result of government
policy. Israel maintains separate schools for Arabs and Jews on the
grounds of language differences, but many Israeli Arab parents say this
is a cover for systematic discrimination against their children.
Separate and unequal education systems were a central part of the
apartheid regime's strategy to limit black children to a life in the
mines, factories and fields. The disparities in Israel's education
system are not nearly so great and the intent not so malign, but the
gap is wide. The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget
for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report
concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish
pupil as to each Arab child.
A Human Rights Watch report two years ago said the situation has not
significantly changed and there remain "huge disparities in education
spending" and that "discrimination against Arab children colours every
aspect" of the education system. The exam pass-rate for Arab pupils is
about one-third lower than that for their Jewish compatriots. In 2004,
a threat by angry Arab Israeli parents in Haifa to register their
children in Hebrew-language schools so shocked Jewish parents that the
authorities quickly took steps to improve Arab schools there.
The suspicion with which the state still regards its Arab citizens was
displayed by the recent revelation that the Shin Bet security service
places Jewish teachers into Arab-language schools to monitor the
activities of the other teachers. A Shin Bet official is also a member
of the committee appointing teachers.
Israel's education ministry failed to respond to requests for an
interview. Approached individually, a senior politician who formerly
had responsibility for education and who has acknowledged that
discrimination exists, and spoken against it, declined to be
interviewed, saying he did not wish to criticise his former ministry.
Asked for an interview to respond to specific allegations of
discrimination in the civil service, education and housing, the
government replied through the deputy director general of the Israeli
foreign ministry, Gideon Meir. He conceded that there had been de facto
discrimination but said it was rooted in historic conflicts and
suspicions, not an intent to subjugate.
"There was never an intention because if we really wanted to create
apartheid we could have done it. The fact is we have never done it,
there was never even a thought about discriminating," he said. "Yes,
during certain years there were less funds given to the Arabs. There
were also years after 1948 when the Arabs were under military control.
Slowly, slowly the Arabs made their way up. The Arabs today can go into
the civil service. The foreign ministry opened to Arabs only in 1989.
It took time to build trust. I have in my department today a Bedouin.
"The fact is that Arabs were always members of the Knesset, even those
who were delegitimising the Jewish state. They can participate. Is it
enough? No, it's not enough. Can we do more? Yes, we can do more. But
ask the Arabs who live in Israel if they want to be part of a
Palestinian state and they say no, they prefer to remain where they
are. Why?"
Sharon laws
Under Sharon's tenure as prime minister from 2001, new forms of
discriminatory legislation were passed, including the now notorious
Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, which bars Israelis who marry
Palestinians from bringing their spouses to live in the country. The
legislation applies solely to Palestinian husbands or wives. Hassan
Jabareen, a lawyer and director general of Adalah, the Legal Centre for
Arab Minority Rights in Israel, challenged the law before the supreme
court. He told the judges there was a parallel with a landmark case in
1980s South Africa - the Komani case - which successfully challenged
the pass laws that broke up black families by preventing spouses from
joining their husbands or wives in towns.
"As a constitutional lawyer, I find myself bringing landmark cases from
the apartheid era before the Israeli supreme court because comparative
cases from modern and democratic countries are not that helpful. You
have to bring harsh cases in order to warn the supreme court about
racist laws; not discriminatory, but racist," said Jabareen. "We had a
case two years ago which essentially said

Alon Liel.
Cioe' un coglione israeliano.  Gia' citati quindi.
Taglio il resto delle puttanate.
-Stefano

Toh, Torrieri ha un argomento nuovo.
Mamma come se l'e' legata al dito...pare Pomero che ha studiato.
MMAX
-- 
E' in discussione su it.news.gruppi la RFD 
di it.politica.internazionale moderato

 Mamma come se l'e' legata al dito...pare Pomero che ha studiato.
Sull'articolo non avete nulla da dire?  
GT

 Toh, Torrieri ha un argomento nuovo.
e tu reagisci da solito squadrista del ng.
-- 
 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 e tu reagisci da solito squadrista del ng.
E sopratutto non ha nulla da rispondere a un'articolo estremamente ben
scritto e argomentato.
La seconda parte, dove si esplora le similitudini fra Israele e
l'Apartheid in un contesto storico, e' qui:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1704036,00.html
GT


E' un'articolo cosi' ben fatto che a citarne una parte si fa peccato.
Questo, pero', non posso resistere:
--------------------------
But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and
the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the
isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly
that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John
Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist
Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.
Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting
Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South
African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's
past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews
murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals
shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful
coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired
instability and recklessness".
Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that
South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western
civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's
yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single
problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in
common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world
inhabited by dark peoples."
-------------------------------
Una delle vittime degli attacchi terroristici perpetrati dai servizi
segreti Sud Africani (usando tattiche molto simili a quelle che oggi
usa il Mossad, probabilmente sviluppate in collaborazione col Mossad)
era Ruth First, una donna di origini Ebraiche, militante dell'African
National Congress e del Partito Comunista Sud Africano.
Ruth First era un'Ebrea uccisa da ex-collaborazionisti Nazisti.  E
Israele non ha aiutato lei, ha aiutato quelli che la hanno fatto
saltare in aria.
Tanto per far vedere *quanto* Israele sia di aiuto alla sicurezza degli
Ebrei.
Un compagno di Ruth First, Ronnie Kasrils, pure lui Ebreo, pure lui
ex-dirigente ANC, e' oggi un ministro del governo Sud Africano.     Il
secondo ministro di origini Ebraiche della storia del paese, nel
secondo governo non razzista del Sud Africa (Il primo era Joe Slovo,
anche lui militante ANC, nel governo Mandela).
E cosa fa la comunita' Ebraica di Johannesburg?  Lo chiama "self-hating
Jew" per aver sostenuto che quello che sta succedendo oggi in Israele
gli ricorda l'Apartheid.
E il famoso "centro degli studi sull'Antisemitismo" dell'Universita' di
Tel Aviv, tanto caro a Tonibaruch, cataloga le sue affermazioni come
"antisemite".
http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2002-3/sth-africa.htm
Ora, chi sono i migliori rappresentanti della cultura Ebraica?  I
Sionisti che hanno fatto comunella e con i nazisti, o uno come Ronnie
Kasrils che ha speso la vita a combattere per la giustizia e contro il
razzismo?   Per me e' _antisemita_ dire che sono i primi.
GT

 razzismo?   Per me e' _antisemita_ dire che sono i primi.
Mioddio.
Maledetto antisemitismo russo. Come ha ridotto quel piccolo, fragile,
ometto.
A marciare con sti filosemiti qua:
----------
Antisemitic sentiments were in evidence at a pro-Palestinian demonstration
organized by local Muslim leaders in Port Elizabeth on 13 April, a sabbath,
and attended by about 600 people. Amongst the placards carried was one
reading Hitler six million Jews Why not more The organizers wanted to march
past the synagogue but were denied permission.
---------
O comincia seriamente a curarsi o un giorno lo troveremo col tubo del gas in
gola.


giustizia e contro il razzismo?
Contro il razzismo degli altri .... ma non contro il suo.
-Stefano