Showing posts with label Al Jazeera. Show all posts

07 July 2019

NELSON MANDELA'S GRANDSON SLAMS 'ISRAELI APARTHEID'

From Al Jazeera, 7 JULY 2019

Nelson Mandela's grandson slams 'Israeli apartheid'

Zwelivelile Mandela says Israeli apartheid is the worst form of apartheid ever witnessed.

by Gavin O'Toole

3 hours ago

Mandela sketched out a damning picture of the discrimination experienced by the Palestinian people [File: Leon Neal/Getty Images]

more on Palestine

London, United Kingdom - The grandson of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela has delivered a damning condemnation of "Israeli apartheid", in a high-profile expression of solidarity between South Africans and Palestinians.

Zwelivelile Mandela, an MP of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), made the comments on Saturday at the Palestine Expo, an annual event in London aimed at showcasing Palestinian history, heritage and culture. Last year, it attracted 15,000 visitors.

Addressing a large audience, Mandela said that the Nation-State Law passed in 2018 declaring Israel to be the historical homeland of the Jewish people "confirmed what we have always known to be the true character and reality of Israel: Israel is an apartheid state".

He also outlined what had constituted apartheid for black South Africans - from the creation of bantustan reservations to land expropriation and the daily assault on dignity.

"All these characteristics were present in apartheid Israel since its inception but have now been codified and given a constitutional status and expression by the Nation-State Law.

"Apartheid Israel perpetuates statutory discrimination through the very definition by the law as a Jewish state; by doing so it renders non-Jews as second-class citizens, alternately as foreigners in the land of their birth."

Anti-Semitism allegations

Also speaking at the event was Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who criticised efforts by the United States to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through investment.

He told the London audience that not only could the deal not be taken seriously, but if it were pursued it would put an end to "all Palestinian rights and aspirations", and added that, as a result, a global intervention was now required to put pressure on Israel.

"We need the world because Israel will not change by itself - as long as Israel and Israelis are not punished and don't pay for the occupation, for the crimes, don't expect any change. It will not come from within Israel."

Levy was also scathing about how Western politicians and media have succumbed to a "very efficient" campaign by Israel to label any criticism of the country's activities as anti-Semitic.

"Here we face now a new stage in which criticising Israel becomes not only impossible but almost criminal. I have never seen such a phenomenon in which struggling for justice becomes criminalised - this is unheard of.

"The formula is very formalised and very efficient, and we shouldn't let it be so efficient: you dare to criticise the occupation? You dare to criticise Israel? You dare to have some sympathy with the Palestinians, the victims? You dare to speak about justice? You know what you are: you are an anti-Semite. This paralyses everybody."

OPINION

Why aren't Europeans calling Israel an apartheid state?

by John Dugard

Ilan Pappe, a professor at the University of Exeter and director of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies, also blasted the mainstream media's coverage of Israeli activities and how these have been concealed behind the "fabrication of institutional anti-Semitism".

Pappe said it was important to acknowledge the historical context in which the treatment of Palestinians in areas such as Gaza had taken place.

"Unfortunately, the world doesn't know what goes on in Gaza. In this country, the mainstream media, whether it is Sky News or the BBC, or the main newspapers, don't mention the Gaza Strip.

"They mention every word that they think attests to institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party but they would not mention what happened yesterday when 49 young Palestinians were shot by Israeli snipers. Neither did they mention the 52 who were shot last week."

Home demolitions

Human rights activist Issa Amro, who is based in Hebron - which is at the sharp end of Israeli settler appropriation of Palestinian land - told attendees that the city had become the "micro-centre of apartheid, discrimination and segregation".

Amro described his activism trying to resist the growing scale at which Palestinian homes were being demolished by the Israeli authorities in order for settlers to take their land and resources.

Israel opens 'apartheid road' in occupied West Bank

He said demolitions had increased significantly since Donald Trump became the US president in early 2017, and current Israeli policy was to now even require some Palestinians to demolish their own homes.

"Don't be afraid of 'anti-Semitism' because the message of this conference should be that criticising Israeli human rights violations is not anti-Semitism," he said.

Daphna Baram, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions UK, outlined the scale of demolitions, pointing out that 201 Palestinian structures were demolished in June alone - bringing those destroyed since 1967 to 49,336.

"This is the daily grind of the occupation that is turning the life of the Palestinians impossible," she said. "This is not by accident, this is making the lives of the Palestinians impossible by design.

"This has been the design of the Israeli government for generations to get rid of the Palestinians and make them go away in various ways, shapes and forms, and one of the main ways to do this is by house demolitions."

Global south 'neglect'

OPINION

Love in times of Israeli apartheid

by Yara Hawari

Palestinian journalist and author Ramzy Baroud - who had just returned from a 10-day solidarity tour to Kenya - told the event in the UK capital that a new front in Palestinian activity should be aimed at the developing world.

Palestinian activism had neglected the "global south" because of the Oslo peace process and a changing discourse that had convinced people that their fate lay in the capitals of the developed world.

"But Israel has rediscovered the global south and they have penetrated Africa and South America and other places," Baroud said. "We need to go back there and we need to resurrect their solidarity.

"One thing about Africa that I noticed is that we don't have to contend with the tiny little bits of the discourse - nobody accuses you of anti-Semitism, it is not even on the agenda of African audiences: what they talk about there is national liberation."

SOURCE: Al Jazeera News

23 July 2018

ISRAEL DECLARES ITSELF AS A THEOCRACY

Knesset member Oren Hazan takes a selfie with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a Knesset session that passed the 'nation-state' bill in Jerusalem on July 19 [AP Photo/Olivier Fitoussi]

In Palestine, we are dealing with a complex situation: We have a settler-colonial project that denies its colonialism and argues it is a democracy and we have its victims whose victimisation has been dismissed for decades and whose national liberation struggle has been defamed.

The colonisers have been successful in manipulating the narrative on what is going on, rewriting history and whitewashing their crimes. Various countries around the world have bought into their lies and kept a "neutral" stance, claiming their positions are "balanced".

What is there to balance, when one side has one of the most advanced armies in the world, financed and supplied by an allied superpower, and the other side has been altogether abandoned by allies and well-wishers and has only the determination and strength of its people to rely on?

But these claims of "neutrality" and "balance" are no longer tenable. Israel has stopped playing the democracy pretence game and has revealed itself for what it really is: an apartheid state. On July 19, the Israeli Knesset voted to pass the so-called "nation-state law" which declares Israel "the national home of the Jewish people". It is now officially an exclusive ethno-religious state.

Unveiling the ethno-religious state of Israel

For us Palestinians, this law reiterates the obvious: namely, that the Zionist ideology is inherently racist and undemocratic.

The political goal of Zionism was to engineer a demographic shift in Palestine, making the minority Jewish population (which was just 7.6 percent in 1914) a majority through massive Jewish immigration and settlement building and expulsion of the Palestinians.

AL JAZEERA WORLD: Against the Wall - activists using non-violent resistance to oppose the construction of Israel's wall (47:31)

AL JAZEERA WORLD: Against the Wall - activists using non-violent resistance to oppose the construction of Israel's wall (47:31)

Inevitably, the expropriation of land went hand-in-hand with the violation of rights of the Palestinian majority. Zionists have always looked at Palestinians as invisible if not absent, or rather "present absentees". The identity of those who remained within the boundaries of what was to become Israel was erased through the term "Israeli Arab" and their rights curbed by a myriad of laws ("the nation-state law" being just the latest iteration).

This is because, contrary to modern liberal thinking, in Israel, citizenship and nationality are two separate, independent concepts. In other words, Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people. Thus Palestinians in Israel have Israeli passports but they do not have rights equal to those of Jewish citizens.

With the new "nation-state law", Palestinians in Israel are now considered "native aliens" or foreigners in their own homeland, because Israel is defined by its law as " the historical homeland of the Jewish people" i.e. not the state of all of its citizens. This is the direct result of Zionism and its ideology of racism.

It is also the direct result of prevailing undemocratic sentiments among Israel's Jews. The contradiction between professed ideals and actual behaviour, which has been the engine of political change in many places around the world, does not exist in Israel because the democratic creed, or civic democracy, is absent in Israeli society.

There is no promise of equality for all citizens in Israeli political culture and praxis. And there is no tradition of civil liberties in Israel because such a tradition is incompatible with Zionism.

Hence, one can understand the antagonism of the establishment to calls for the creation of one state for Palestinians and Jews, one secular democratic state run by parliamentary elections and majority rule in historical Palestine. This idea has been rejected outright by Israeli Jewish society because it would effectively mean the end of Zionism.

And as Israel effectively turns into an exclusive ethno-religious state, we have to ask uncomfortable questions: does this mean that Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc can also be the basis of modern states? And if we still insist that religion should be separate from state, then where is the international outrage? Why isn't mainstream media obsessing about the Jewish state, the way it was about the "Islamic state"? How is Israel different from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that sought to establish a state for Muslims only through violence and dispossession?

The fight against apartheid is on

The passing of the "nation-state law" should eliminate whatever doubt there still is among "neutral" observers that Israel is, in fact, an apartheid state.

Just as apartheid South Africa gave citizenship to white South Africans and relegated blacks to "independent homelands", Zionism gives all Jews the right to citizenship in the state of Israel, while denying citizenship to Palestinians - its indigenous inhabitants.

OPINION

Bulldozing Palestine, one village at a time

by Mariam Barghouti

While South Africa's apartheid used race to determine citizenship, the state of Israel uses religious identification to determine citizenship. Just as apartheid South Africa made laws criminalising free movement of blacks on their ancestral land, Israel controls every aspect of Palestinians' lives through a military occupation infrastructure composed of checkpoints, Jewish-only settlements and roads, and the Wall, combined with a web of legal regulations.

The parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa are infinite. And probably the only major difference between the two is that Israel gets away with its crimes with unprecedented impunity, as evidenced by its latest war crimes in Gaza.

So what is left for the Palestinian people after the approval of this blatantly racist bill? Well, we definitely are not foolish enough to expect anything from the so-called "international community".

Years of "negotiations" created only bantustans in the West Bank and a concentration camp in Gaza.

Palestinians are still at the receiving end of merciless assaults by racist Israeli troops hidden in their US-made helicopters and F16's.

What all US envoys to the region have been trying to do is reach a "solution" in accordance with Israeli conditions, disregarding Security Council resolutions and international law. Neither the current US right-wing administration nor the spineless EU has a fair plan for how to resolve the crisis in Palestine.

The only thing that we, Palestinians, can count on is the power of people, just as South Africans did when, through a sustained global campaign, they forced governments to boycott their apartheid regime.

We will continue to expand the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and will continue marching to the fence in Gaza until we bring this madness to an end. We will also continue working on an alternative model, both democratic and secular, which guarantees equality and abolishes apartheid, bantustans and separation in Palestine altogether. We will not give up the fight.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

Israel: A law that divides and discriminates

Inside Story

Israel: A law that divides and discriminates

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

04 September 2017

LETTER FROM GAZA: 'ALIVE DUE TO LACK OF DEATH'

Al Jazeera 2 September 2017

Letter from Gaza: 'Alive due to lack of death'

Gaza-born Jehad Abusalim describes the devastating effects of Israel's blockade on the daily lives of Palestinians.

'When the electricity goes out, the silence is deafening' [File: Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

By

Jehad Abusalim

In Gaza, entire families sit in the darkness of their living rooms, with candles generating the only light. Dozens of families have lost loved ones in house fires.

Propane is scarce, and small generators are unsafe and hard to come by. They are usually smuggled through tunnels and poorly made. One of my college professors lost three children (a 14-year-old and eight-year-old twins) after their generator exploded.

Gaza residents face so much hardship and pain, just to secure one of life's basic necessities.

When the electricity goes out, the silence is deafening. Everything grinds to a halt: refrigerators, televisions, hospital equipment, water pumps and fans. Modern life stops. The quiet allows us to imagine what the world was like before we were immersed in the noise of car horns and the hum and buzz of modern machines. Later, the quiet is replaced by a storm of sound as generators whir and screech back to life.

INTERACTIVE: 24 Hours in Gaza

I will never forget the afternoon when I asked my father how long he thought the blockade would last.

"A few months, my son. A few months. It won't take long," he answered.

A few weeks ago, more than a decade since the Israeli blockade of Gaza was implemented, I spoke with my father again and reminded him of what he said that day. I could practically feel his sorrow and grief through the phone.

"I don't know how many 10 years there are in one's life," he answered, crushed by the naivete of his statement all those years ago.

How is it acceptable that in 2017, Gaza's residents, including my own family, have to spend so much of their time worrying about water, light and food? What justifies a policy that causes toddlers like my younger brother to soak in sweat during the night and place their cheeks on the cool tile floor to escape the heat of Gaza's nights?

AL JAZEERA WORLD: Gaza - Surviving Shujayea (47:24)

No peace can come from forcing thousands of people to wait until dawn for their weekly share of water, while on the other side of the border, Israelis take dips in swimming pools and enjoy unlimited access to fresh water.

Nowadays, if you ask Palestinians in Gaza how they are doing, they might answer: "Alive, due to lack of death." This commonly used expression captures the dreadfulness of everyday life in Gaza.
It pains me to say this, but Gaza will inevitably fall apart. Every second in Gaza under Israel's blockade - where water and medical care are luxuries - is tainted by tragedy. Every time a family cannot afford to put food on the table, every time a house fire claims yet another victim, every time a cancer patient cannot acquire life-saving treatment or another desperate person ends their life, the horror of the blockade comes into full view.

26 January 2017

AL JAZEERA INVESTIGATES ISRAELI GOVERNMENT'S ATTEMPTS TO INFILTRATE THE UK GOVERNMENT

Al Jazeera Investigates:

About THE LOBBY

Al Jazeera Investigations exposes how the Israel lobby influences British politics. A six-month undercover investigation reveals how Israel penetrates different levels of British democracy.

Episode One: In part one, Al Jazeera Investigations reveals how pro-Israel groups are trying to influence Britain’s youth.

Episode Two: In part two, our undercover reporter joins a delegation from the Israeli embassy at last year’s Labour Party Conference.

Episode Three: In part three, our undercover reporter witnesses a heated conversation between two opposing activists. The evidence raises serious questions about whether accusations of anti-Semitism are used to stifle political debate.

Episode Four:

---------------------------------------------------

www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby/

07 July 2019