Israel’s Apartheid
Even members of the Israeli political elite use the term apartheid to describe the system they administer -- the latest being the current defence minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak who stated: "If there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state." more

Segregation of Jews and Arabs in 2010 Israel is almost absolute
Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name "Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill," the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee this week finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If indeed this legislation is approved by the Knesset plenum, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law. more

Bedouins deprived of right to vote
On 16 November 2009, the Israeli Knesset voted to pass a special amendment to the Regional Authorities' Law (Date of General Elections)–1994, which prevents the holding of elections in the Abu Basma Regional Council in the Naqab more

Arabs claim land reform is racist
Ahead of slated vote on privatization of state lands, Arab sector wages battle against the bill: 'We are citizens of the State, and not a security threat. Time has come for the State to change its approach and not to enact discriminatory laws' more

Israel's laws of persecution
Israel is using the country's legal system to segregate and penalise its Palestinian citizens and prohibit Arab dissent. more

The Kingdom of Lies
In a land in which the vast bulk of the population was not Jewish, a Jewish state could only be constructed by taking one inherently racist measure after another. If the state were to be Jewish so would land ownership and labor. The conditions written into the charter of the Jewish National Fund and other land-purchasing organizations stipulated that land once acquired could never be retained to non-Jewish hands. more

Can we talk? The Middle East "peace industry"
Any call for a "balanced" discourse on this issue -- where the motto "there are two sides to every story" is revered almost religiously -- is intellectually and morally dishonest, and ignores the fact that, when it comes to cases of colonialism, apartheid, and oppression, there is no such thing as "balance." more

Minister calls for housing partition
Israel’s housing minister called for strict segregation between the country’s Jewish and Arab populations last week as he unveiled plans to move large numbers of fundamentalist religious Jews to Israel’s north to prevent what he described as an “Arab takeover” of the region. more

The Disgrace of Hebron
Despite the encroachments of the settlers over the past four decades, Hebron remained an Arab city. Since 1997, however, when Yasser Arafat capitulated to combined US and Israeli pressure and sanctioned the creation of a Jewish enclave at the heart of an occupied city, Hebron has been subjected to a form of state-sanctioned racism that can only be called urbanicide. more

Soldiers Confirm Israel's War Crimes in Gaza
The squad commander said that Palestinian civilians were suppose to be given five minutes’ warning to leave their houses. However, many soldiers under his command challenged this, one soldier saying, “Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist”. According to the squad commander, that sentiment was backed up by other soldiers under his command who said, “We need to murder any person who’s in there ... any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist”. more

Aid Rots Outside Gaza
AL-ARISH, Egypt, Apr 15 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt's North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. more

Israeli university welcomes “war crimes” colonel
Jonathan Cook argues that the appointment of an Israeli officer who provided legal cover for war crimes in Gaza to a teaching post at Tel Aviv University adds weight to a growing campaign in Europe and the US to impose an academic boycott on Israel. more

Consent and Advise
On the first day of Operation Cast Lead, the air force bombed the graduation ceremony of a police course, killing dozens of policemen. Months earlier, an operational and legal controversy was already swirling around the planned attack. According to a military source who was involved in the planning, bombing the site of the ceremony was authorized with no difficulty, but questions were raised about the intent to strike at the graduates of the course. Military Intelligence, convinced the attack was justified, pressed for its implementation. Representatives of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General's Office at first objected, fearing a possible violation of international law. more

Israeli Elections: Solidifying Fascism
Well before the recent murderous Israeli attacks on Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Northern Command leader Gadi Eisenkot stated that "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction." more

Israeli Elections: The Death of 2 States and the Zionist Left
The other reason that the socialist Zionist parties have declined is that their ‘peace’ proposals were based on naked racism – the need to preserve the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. In other words, there were too many Arabs. That was the basis of their support for 2 States, in reality one state, Israel, and a Palestinian Reservation. Every racist aspect of Israeli society was pioneered by Israeli labour. It was not for nothing that the settlers in the West Bank could say that their right to settle in Ariel and Kiryat Arba was the same as the original settlement of Tel Aviv. Except whereas today’s settlers base their claims on the fact that god gave them the land, the ‘left’ Zionists claimed their right to settle was based on the bible, the existence of whose god they denied! more

Israeli Apartheid?
There is ample evidence that Israel practices institutionalized discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens. While whites in South Africa sought to control non-whites, Israel has since its establishment pursued various means of getting rid of its non-Jewish population altogether. more

Justice Forgotten. Whatever Happened to Palestine?
Thus has the anti-war movement abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians to the Israeli-U.S. pro-war machine. This abandonment is not new by any means; it just gets more and more unjust with time. United for Peace and Justice has always been chary of speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians. It organized a demonstration in June opposing the Israeli occupation timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the occupation, but this was such a pro forma event that the section of UFPJ's website dealing with its "Palestine/Israel Just Peace Campaign" has not been updated since mid-2004. Pax Christi regularly tackles nuclear disarmament, the School of the Americas, Iraq, immigration, Haiti -- as, of course, it should -- but Palestine? Rarely if ever. And so on, with a few notable exceptions, through the catalogue of peace movements. more

Despite It's Military Might, Israel is a Weak and Dying State
Israel has maintained total control over Gaza's borders, its air and sea space, its economy, its electricity, food and medical supplies. The people of Gaza have been starved, humiliated and constantly intimidated. However, whether the withdrawal was well-intended or not engages little with the reasons rockets are being defiantly shot at the Israeli towns of Sderot, Ashkelon and Beer Sheva. more

Twilight Zone / Non-Jews need not apply
The Israeli national flag flies high, defiant and arrogant over the Palestinian home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This flag has never looked as repulsive as it does in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood, above the home of a Palestinian family that suddenly lost everything. The head of the house, Mohammed al-Kurd, died 11 days after the eviction. Now his widow lives in a tent. The house is reached via a narrow alley: Here Moshe and Avital Shoham and Emanuel and Yiska Dagan live happily. They are the settlers who managed to expel the Palestinian tenants and take over another outpost, in the heart of East Jerusalem. House after house, the transfer here is especially quiet: The media barely report on these houses of contention. more

Green Light for Racism?
In 1965, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This convention defines racial discrimination as "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life." more

Redeeming the Land
The legal system of the State of Israel can be described as a weird mixture of advanced democracy and retrogressive discrimination, combined with clumsy attempts to hide the discriminatory reality. more

State of Denial: Israel, 1948-2008
For Israelis, 1948 is the year in which two things happened, one of which contradicts the other. more

Twilight Zone / Worse than Apartheid
I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. more

Separation as the New Transfer
Historically, the principles of separation and transfer have been both antagonistic and complementary in Zionist thinking, reflected in competing and reinforcing visions of Israel-Palestine's future as either an ethnically cleansed state (Ben Gurion) or as an apartheid state (Jabotinsky). more

The JNF: Charitable Tax Status for Racism?
It is the opinion of many individuals, including many Jews, that the JNF is a racist organization that discriminates against non-Jews. more

Anthology of Bigotry
The Israeli state is trying desperately to foreclose all exceptions to its unequivocally racist land laws. more

Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of the World Bank
In Palestine, the World Bank has played a key role in facilitating the cooperation of global capital and occupation. more

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