Richard Falk was the main author of the report. He was the UN rappateur for
Paletine for several years. He is Jewish and American, and has written several
books. Somewhere, on some podcast, I heard him discuss the report. He is
thoughtful and chooses his words carefully. This was not a UN report, but a
report done at the request of one of the UN organizations. The story of
Palestine and how the truth has been buried under layers of lies,
rationalizations, and fantasy, is an example of what human beings are capable
of, and it explains, for one thing, how this present campaign against Russia
and the use of it to attempt to unseat Trumpc could happen.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2017 10:33 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Why the UN Branded Israel an Apartheid State
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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