Israeli Apartheid Week, March 1 - 8, 2009

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RAMALLAH, Mar 3 - "Standing United with the People of Gaza" is the theme of this week's Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which kicked off in [b]Toronto and another 39 cities across the globe[/b] Sunday.

A movement to boycott Israeli goods, culture and academic institutions is [b]gaining momentum[/b] as Geneva prepares to host the UN's Anti-Racism Conference, Durban 2 next month amidst swirling controversy.

Both Canada and the U.S. are boycotting the Durban 2 conference in protest over what they perceive as a strongly anti-Israel agenda.

The first UN Anti-Racism conference, held in the South African city Durban in 2001, saw the Israeli and U.S. delegates storm out of the conference, accusing other delegates of focusing too strongly on Israel.

U.S. and Canadian support might have offered some comfort for Israel. However, international criticism of Israel's three-week bloody offensive into Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded, most of them civilian, [b]has breathed fresh life into a Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.[/b]

The BDS campaign followed a 2005 appeal from over 170 Palestinian civil society groups to launch a divestment campaign "as a way of bringing non- violent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law."

In the wake of the BDS campaign, critics of Israel have lashed out at what they see as parallels between South Africa's former apartheid system and Israeli racism.

They point to Israel's discriminatory treatment of ethnic Palestinians within Israel who hold Israeli passports, and the extensive human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories by Israeli security forces.

During the apartheid era, ties between Israel and South Africa were extremely strong, with the Jewish state helping to train South Africa's security forces as well as supplying the regime in Pretoria with weapons.

Meanwhile, [b]Toronto, where the Israel Apartheid Week movement was born,[/b] will hold forums, film shows, cultural events and street protests to mark IAW week. One of the guest speakers is former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.

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The message of Apartheid week is simple; Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) are the non-violent tools organizers are asking the world to use to end Israeli oppression. The call for BDS stems from Palestine itself initiated by 171 civil society organizations, and resembles the international support that helped end South African Apartheid a decade and a half earlier. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions is the tactic chosen in recognition that Israel, a small state depends on international support in order to maintain the subjugation of the Palestinian people. Calling on the international community to support BDS is simply asking the world to look at Palestinian suffering and say no more.  While BDS has been spreading slowly, mostly through grassroots efforts, recently major colleges, universities and unions have adopted BDS resolutions in a wave of support that will hopefully mark the beginning of the end of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Israeli Apartheid is of course not identical to South African Apartheid. As recognized by former American president Jimmy Carter, Israel Apartheid is in some ways worse, and no one is trying to claim that there are no differences in details. Israel Apartheid week highlights Israel’s particular system of ‘apartness,’ and shows how it manifests a constant state of oppression for the Palestinian people in a way the civilized world already said was unacceptable.  Holding Israeli policy in Palestine under the magnify glass makes it clear that the settlements, Jewish only roads, checkpoints, military zones, walls, and border controls, have no doubt become a permanent system of separation. Israel is not benevolently trying to protect its citizens, but purposefully setting into action a system to control large portions of Palestinian lands while subjecting the Palestinian people to a form of citizenship devoid of rights or security, in others words, Apartheid. Making the comparison between Israel and South Africa is becoming less and less controversial with not only President Carter speaking out but South African anti-Apartheid leaders Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Karils, Israeli academics Illan Pappe and Uri Davis, UN General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, and other leaders and human rights advocates joining the chorus as well.  Thanks in part to campaigns like Israel Apartheid Week this information is finally reaching the public.

[url=http://www.counterpunch.org/mandelzys03042009.html][color=mediumblue][u]... Mandelzys[/u][/color][/url]

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Apartheid, meaning "apartness" in Afrikaans, was a term used to describe the legislated racial segregation of pre-1994 South Africa. Under the regime of "grand apartheid," and especially with the introduction of the 1950 Group Areas Act, white South Africans forced the displacement and denationalization of large numbers of indigenous black South Africans. The subsequent concentration of these black South Africans into a series of cramped, nominally autonomous "Bantustans" led to the creation of a white majority "democracy" within the remaining 87 per cent of the South African state.

This story is all too familiar to Palestinians who, during the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, saw the forced expulsion of 800,000 of their own people and the destruction of over 430 towns and villages. Today, Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories-the West Bank and Gaza-confront a complex network of checkpoints, walls, roadblocks, curfews, Jewish-only roads, and other tools designed to Bantustanize and ghettoize over 3.5 million Palestinians into less than 20 per cent of their historic homeland.

The establishment of this system of grand apartheid in Israel, which mirrors the South African system, has managed to create a Jewish majority in Israel and thereby artificially construct an ethnic "democracy" by displacing the majority indigenous population. The roughly 1.2 million Palestinians who remain nominal "citizens" of Israel face legislated discrimination in land-ownership, family law, and citizenship rights, while over three million Palestinian refugees expelled from historic Palestine continue to be denied the right to return.

Some have argued that the title of apartheid belongs solely to the case of South Africa. However, this is not true as the United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted in 1976, defines apartheid as a universal crime that could be committed by other states as well. Uri Davis' book Apartheid Israel provides an in-depth analysis of the links between South African and Israeli apartheid. It is very telling that colonial states with surviving indigenous populations-like Israel, Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand-all refused to sign on to the apartheid convention insisting that the crime only applied to South Africa.

[url=http://www.thevarsity.ca/article/18328][color=mediumblue][u]Apartheid is not dead[/u][/color][/url]

Canadians who contribute to Zionist fundraising campaigns for Israel may be interested to see how some of their money is being used.

Like for example "Canada Park" in the occupied West Bank.

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As spring sets in early, Israelis have been pouring into one of the country’s most popular leisure spots. Visitors to [b]Canada Park[/b], a few kilometers north-west of Jerusalem, enjoy its spectacular panaromas, woodland paths, mountain-bike trails, caves and idyllic picnic areas.

A series of signs describe the historical significance of the landscape, as well as that of a handful of ancient buildings, in terms of their Biblical, Roman, Hellenic and Ottoman pasts. Few, if any, visitors take notice of the stone blocks that litter sections of the park.

But Eitan Bronstein, director of Zochrot (Remembering), is committed to educating Israelis and foreign visitors about the park’s hidden past — its Palestinian history.

[b]“In fact, though you would never realise it, none of this park is even in Israel,”[/b] he told a group of 40 Italians on a guided tour this past weekend. [b]“This is part of the West Bank captured by Israel during the 1967 war.[/b] But the presence of Palestinians here — and their expulsion — is entirely missing from the signs.”

Zochrot also seeks to remind Israelis of the Nakba, the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.

Its tours are not popular with most Israelis, suggesting, he says, [b]how far they still are from understanding the territorial compromises needed to reach the kind of peace agreement with the Palestinians currently being promoted by the new US administration....[/b]

The 2,000 Palestinians living there, along with the 3,500 inhabitants of two other villages, Yalu and Beit Nuba, were expelled as the Israeli army captured this area of the West Bank from Jordan. Today, they and their descendants live as refugees, mostly in East Jerusalem and near Ramallah.

[b]In place of the three villages, a park was created by an international Zionist organization, the Jewish National Fund, paid for with $15 million in charitable donations from Canadian Jews....[/b]

Similar parks across Israel have been established on the ruins of other Palestinian villages but, in those cases, the destruction was a result of the war of 1948 that founded Israel....

[b]But Canada Park is far more sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally recognized borders.[/b] The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Mr Bronstein said, was a [b]premeditated act of ethnic cleansing[/b] of villagers who put up no resistance....

Uzi Narkiss, a leading general in the 1967 war, vowed that the Latrun salient would never be returned. Establishing Canada Park was Israel’s way of secretly annexing the territory, Zochrot says....

Zochrot is considering widening its campaign by [b]alerting Canadian donors to the fact that their money has been used – in contravention of international law — effectively to annex a section of the West Bank to Israel.[/b] Mr Bronstein believes many are unaware of the use their donations have been put to.

[url=http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/palestinian-villages-become-israel... Cook[/u][/color][/url]

Ronnie Kasrils spoke at several events in Canada during Israeli Apartheid Week.

You can see and hear the speech he gave in Vancouver March 8 [url=http://workingtv.com/ronnie.kasrils.html][color=mediumblue][u]online here.[/u][/color][/url]