Friday, February 3, 2012

Israeli Apartheid Week: Call it as it is

The Never Before Campaign has released this video to explain in very few sentences and images why we say that Israel is an Apartheid state:


I think that, in its simplicity, the video obviates a number of deep issues like the fact that 85% inhabitants of Gaza and 35% of the West Bank (as well a very large amount in other states, notably Lebanon and Jordan) are refugees from the brutal ethnic cleansing by the then nascent state of Israel. Or how the "Israeli citizens" of local roots, the "Arab Israeli" who managed to avoid the 1948 genocide, still dominant in Gallilee and most of the Negev but present in all the Israeli territory, are discriminated against, with segregated neighborhoods in which basic services are lacking, with segregated schools in which the curricula denies their viewpoint of history, with systematic abuses (even if not as extreme maybe as at the other side of the Wall of Shame), not allowed to marry freely because that could harm the genocidal policies. Or how Palestinians of Jerusalem, unilaterally annexed by Israel decades ago, are being discriminated against, their historical neighborhoods demolished arbitrarily and themselves deported to Gaza with any red tape pretext.

Never mind that not even Jews are equal within Israel. To the historical deeply rooted mistrust and discrimination between European (Ashkenazi) Jews (top tier) and African or Asian (Sephardi) Jews (lower tier), now Ethiopian Jews are being discriminated against much more dramatically because of their skin color.

And there is more. Israel, far from being, as the Hasbara goes, "the only democracy of the region" (what happened with Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus?) it is the only clearly racist regime still standing on Earth (with permission of Malaysia).

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