It just blows my mind as to how blind and deaf people can be when it
comes to defending their actions. I'm sure that if we didn't have
religion, people would find some other basic difference to fight over,
but my contention is that in our history as "civilized people"
religion has been where we focus our differences, and kill one another
with great gusto. Just take away the labels and every aggressor looks
and acts the same. In the Middle East, Israel is the bully boy, using
exactly the same tactics that gained an entire continent for those
Pilgrims who "settled" on the shores of the Land Given to Them by God
Almighty.
Anyway, we invented Capitalism, and we invented God in His various
forms. Neither invention has done well for the "down trodden"...the
Working Classes of the World. In America, Capitalists control
Americans through their Book called "the holy bible". And in that
holy book, God practices and condones Capitalism. While He tells the
common folk that "Thou shalt not kill", He makes big exceptions for
His Chosen Ones. And the one that cracks me up, "Thou shalt not
steal" is so disregarded by the Ruling Class that it should be
stricken from the holy book. But what is really at work here is the
conditioning of the masses to the point that they are unable to think.
Any thinking person would arrive at the understanding that they are
being tricked into submission.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/18/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Palestinians march along the wall marking the edge of the Israeli
settlement
in the West Bank. (photo: Abbas Momani/AFP)
Why the UN Branded Israel an Apartheid State
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
17 March 17
A shouting match has been provoked this week by the United Nations
Economic
and Social Commission for Western Asia, which issued a report this week
concluding definitively that Israel is guilty of Apartheid practices toward
the Palestinians. The report is careful to say that it is not using the
term
merely as a pejorative but is rather appealing to a body of international
law with precise definitions, definitions that Israel's policies toward the
Palestinians easily and transparently meet. Here's the short blog version
of
the report, which runs to 76 pages.
Apartheid is a Dutch word meaning "apartness" and was used to describe the
system of racial segregation deployed by the ruling Afrikaner minority in
South Africa 1948-1991. In international law, however, it has been
generalized to any government practicing systematic racial domination.
Article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and
Punishment
of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) defines it this way:
"The term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies
and
practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern
Africa, shall apply to. inhuman acts committed for the purpose of
establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over
any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."
The 2002 Rome Statute, which has 150? signatories among the nations of the
world, and which established the International Criminal Court, contained a
definition of Apartheid.
'The crime of apartheid' means inhumane acts . . . committed in the context
of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by
one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with
the intention of maintaining that regime.
Apartheid is one of the listed "crimes against humanity" along with
enslavement, torture, war rape, and forcible deportation. A crime against
humanity is the systematic and continuous commission of war crimes
Because of these international law instruments (the Rome Statute is a
multilateral treaty), Apartheid now refers to a generalized crime, not just
the policy of the old South African government.
As a result, the Court can under some circumstances charge individual
politicians with the crime of Apartheid. Those circumstances are that 1)
the
country has signed the Rome Statute or 2) that the UN Security Council has
forwarded the case of a war criminal to the ICC. Neither of these
circumstances fits Israel, since it is not a signatory and the US would
veto
any attempt to charge a major Israeli politician at the International
Criminal Court. This inability to bring Israeli officials to the Hague,
however, is merely procedural. As a matter of law, Israel can still be
guilty of Apartheid practices.
The UN report is concerned with specific legal infractions as spelled out
by
international law, and with the intention behind those infractions. Intent
to dominate another people is important to the definition of Apartheid.
The report points out that:
"The Israel Lands Authority (ILA) manages State land, which accounts for 93
per cent of the land within the internationally recognized borders of
Israel
and is by law closed to use, development or ownership by non-Jews."
Going back to the colonial Jewish National Fund, there has been a practice
that once land is owned by Zionist institutions, including the Israeli
state, it can never be sold to a non-Jew- it is permanently taken off the
market on a racial basis.
The Law of Return is another discriminatory practice. Any Jew anywhere in
the world can emigrate to Israel. But no Palestinian family expelled in
1948
can return to their ancestral homeland.
Jewish councils may reject applications for residence from
Palestinian-Israelis. An Israeli Jew who married an American Christian is
allowed to bring the spouse to Israel; but an Israeli Jew who married a
West
Bank Palestinian may not.
The report argues that in the Israel-Palestinian context, Palestinians are
a
"race." I would add that the exclusion of Palestinian spouses of Israeli
citizens underlines this definition, since one characteristic of race is
endogamy or marrying within the in-group.
Other UN decisions have recognized the Palestinians as a people entitled to
self-determination (and indeed such recognition goes back to the
correspondence of League of Nations states overseeing the British Mandate
over Palestine in the 1920s).
The document says:
"This report finds that the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian
people is the principal method by which Israel imposes an apartheid regime.
It first examines Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the
Question of Apartheid how the history of war, partition, de jure and de
facto annexation and prolonged occupation in Palestine has led to the
Palestinian people being divided into different geographic regions
administered by distinct sets of law. This fragmentation operates to
stabilize the Israeli regime of racial domination over the Palestinians and
to weaken the will and capacity of the Palestinian people to mount a
unified
and effective resistance."
As for the specifics of Apartheid in the Occupied West Bank, the UN
document
observes that this territory is virtually a textbook case in Apartheid
governance:
"Domain 3 is the system of military law imposed on approximately 4 .6
million Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestini an territory, 2 .7
million of them in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip. The
territory is administered in a manner that fully meets the definition of
apartheid under the Apartheid Convention: except for the provision on
genocide, every illustrative "inhuman act" listed in the Convention is
routinely and systematically practiced by Israel in the West Bank.
Palestinians are governed by military law, while the approximately 350,000
Jewish settlers are governed by Israeli civil law. The racial char acter of
this situation is further confirmed by the fact that all West Bank Jewish
settlers enjoy the protections of Israeli civil law on the basis of being
Jewish, whether they are Israeli citizens or not. This dual legal system,
problematic in itself, is indicative of an apartheid regime when coupled
with the racially discriminatory management of land and development
administered by Jewish - national institutions, which are charged with
administering "State land" in the interest of the Jewish population."
The Executive Summary is here.
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