i don't see why everyone is on trent lott about segregation. anyone who supports the state of israel is supporting the most segregationist state on earth. jews and muslims don't go to school together. arabs can't serve in the military. arabs can't buy homes on israeli govt land (the israeli govt owns 85-90% of the land in israel).
Israel: An Apartheid State
amazon.com
by Uri Davis
Quotes from Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State, Zed Books, London 1987.
users.cyberone.com.au
Peter Myers, November 22, 2000; update December 5, 2002. My comments are shown {thus}.
{p. 8} {quote ... } are willing to listen. He arrived in al-Duwayma immediately after its occupation. The conquering army was Battalion 89 . . . They killed some 80-100 Arabs, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with clubs. There was not a single house without dead. The second wave of the army consisted of the Battalion of the soldier who gave this eyewitness report . . . In the village there remained Arab men and women who were put in the houses without food or drink. Then the sappers came to blow up the houses. One officer ordered a sapper to put two old women into the house he was about to blow up. The sapper refused, and said that he would obey only such orders as were handed down to him by his immediate commander. So the officer ordered his own soldiers to put the old women in, and the atrocity was carried out. Another soldier boasted that he had raped an Arab woman and then shot her. Another Arab woman with a day-old baby was employed in cleaning jobs in the yard . . . She worked for one or two days in the service, and then she was shot together with her baby . . . Cultured and well mannered commanders who are considered good fellows . . . have turned into low murdeners, and this happened not in the storm of the battle and blind passion, but because of a system of expulslon and annihilation. The fewer Arabs remain the better . . " (quoted in Eyal Kafkafi. 'A Ghetto Attitude in the Jewish State', Davar, 6 September 1979). {end quote}
Al-Duwayma, prior to its destruction in 1948, was a large Palestinian Arab village some l7 kilometres west of Hebron, with a population of some 2,700. 1n 1955 Kibbutz Amatziyah was established on the site by a nucleus of Israeli-born Jews and new Anglo-Saxon Jewish immigrants. The settlement has since altered its status to that of a co-operative smallholder moshav.
The impact of the Deir Yasin massacre in 1948 was subsequently assessed by Israel Eldad (Scheib), who together with the future Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir and Nathan Yalin-Mor (Friedman), led the LEHI. As noted above, the LEHI and the Irgun together both planned the attack and perpetrated the massacre as Deir Yasin. Speaking at a closed discussion in the summer of 1967, as subsequently transcribed and published in the influential journal De'ot ('Opinions') in the winter of the following year, Eldad commented:
{quote} I have always said that if the deepest and profoundest hope symbolizing redemption is the re-building of the Jewish Temple . . . then it is obvious that those mosques [al-Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa] will have, one way or another, to disappear one of these days . . . Had it not been for Deir Yasin - half a million Arabs would be living in the state of lsrael [in l948].The state of Israel would not have existed. We must not disregard this, with full awareness of the responsibility involved. All wars are cruel. There is no way out of that. This country will either be Eretz Israel with an absolute Jewish majority and a small Arab minority, or Eretz Ishmael, and Jewish emigration will begin again if we do not expel the Arabs one way or another . . (Eldad. 'On the Spirit That Was Revealed in the People', De'ot, Winter 1968; as quoted in Davis and Mezvinsky (eds.) Documents from Israel (1967-1973, pp.l86-7). {end quote}
It is against this historical background that MK Aharon Yariv, former military intelligence chief and Minister of Information, stated at a public seminar in the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the
{p. 9} Hebrew University in Jerusalem that:
{quote} There are opinions which advocate that a war situation be utilized in order to exile 700-800 thousand Arabs. These opinions are widespread. Statements have been voiced on the matter and also instruments (apparatuses) have been prepared (Haaretz, 23 May 1980)
Israel and Palestinian Return
Israel was established as a Jewish state. It was not intended as a state for all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike. Rather, it was primarily envisaged as a state for Jews, that is, a state of which every Jewish individual throughout the world would be a potential citizen. Thus, when the state was unilaterally established on 15 May 1948, it became imperative for its legislative body, the Knesset, to define in law those persons who would qualify as actual or potential citizens, and those who would be excluded - that is, non-Jews in general, and Palestinian Arabs in particular. This was done without undue delay. In 1950 the Israeli Knesset passed two laws: the Law of Return, defining the boundaries of inclusion ('every Jew has the right to immigrate into the country') and the Absentee Property Law, defining the boundaries of exclusion ('absentee'). Under these laws, every Jew throughout the world is legally entitled to become a citizen of the state of Israel upon immigration into the country, while some two million people, the 1948 Palestinian Arabs and their descendants, who were exiled as a consequence of the 1948-9 and the 1967 wars, are denied the rights of citizenship. Nevertheless, their right of return is universally recognized in international law and in repeated UN resolutions (beginning with Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948). They clearly exist. Yet, they are defined in Israeli law as 'non-existent', and as 'absentees', and they are excluded by law from actual or p~aential citizenship in the Jewish state. (See Appendix III for David Ben Gurion's speech introducing the Law of Return to the Knesset, 1950.) {included below}
The Law of Return (1950) is the cornerstone of the Israel Nationality Law (1952). The details of the Law of Return (1950), the Absentee Property Law (1950), the Israel Nationality Law (1952), and the legal mechanisms of exclusion that are codified in this body of legislation will be discussed in detail below. It is important to note here, however, that the Israeli Knesset, having elevated the attribute of 'being Jewish' to the status of a legally determining principle of exclusion from, or inclusion in, the constituency of actual or potential citizens of the state of Israel, has brought into sharp focus the crisis of modern secular Jewish identity which the Zionist movement claimed to have solved. Under this body of legislation, as amended over the past three and a half decades, it is not only the Palestinian non-Jew - first and foremost the Palestinian Arab 'absentee' - who is excluded from his or her right to undisputed citizenship. Large categories of Jews are similarly excluded: Jewish bastards, Jewish persons born to non-Jewish mothers, Jewish persons born to
{p. 10} Jewish mothers who converted to another religion, and non-Jews converted to Judaism by conservative or reform rabbis (only the Jewish onhodox conversion procedure is effectively recognized in Israel The question of 'who is a Jew has bedevilled Israeli political practice and legislation since the passage of the Law of Return in 1950. As Akiva Orr noted:
{quote} First, Zionism did not believe in the existence of God the movement was secular, not religious . . . Zionism insisted that suffering in exile was a result of minority status, not of sin. Zionism preached that the Jews must act on their own behalf to create their state in Zion, rather than wait till God did it for them. Finally, Zionism argued that when Jewish independence was resurrected the Jews would become "a nation like all other nations" or "normalized" as some put it (Orr, The unJewish State, p.6). {end quote}
And yet, by every conventional criterion, the state of Israel is a theocracy. Civil marriage is not permitted under Israeli law, and marriage can be legally consecrated only by Rabbinical, Church or Shari'a courts. The same applies to divorce. Under Israeli law (Jurisdiction of Rabbinical Courts (Marriage and Divorce), 1953), religious courts are state courts and the religious judiciary (Rabbinical, Church and Shari'a) are paid by the state.
Political practice and legislation have been similarly bedevilled by the question of 'who is an Israeli' in the state of Israel. Clearly, the terms 'Israeli' and 'Jew' are not coterminous. Seven hundred thousand of the over four million citizens of the state of Israel (some 17 percent) are non-Jewish. They are Palestlnlan Arabs, the descendants of the remnants of the Palestinian people who have remained In Palestine under Israeli rule (some 150,000 in 1948-9). Much of this volume will be devoted to the analysis and explication of the politlcal and legal mechanisms in terms of which the state of Israel confers a priori exclusive and privileged access to national resources and services on its Jewish citizens, to the exclusion of its non-Jewish, mainly Palestinian Arab citizens.
In this context, however, it is necessary to remember that Israeli legislation is not directed against those non-Jews who are legally incorporated, albeit in terms of extreme legal discrimination, into the Israeli body politic as citizens of the Jewish state. Rather, the most damaging manifestation of Israeli legislation is directed against those non-Jews who are legally excluded as 'absentees' from the body of Israeli polity: two million Palestinian Arab displaced persons conventionally referred to as 'refugees'.
Thus, each Israeli Jew has a shadow: the Palestinian Arab refugee of 1948. Israeli Jewish homes are built on the ruins of their homes. Israeli Jews cultivate their land.
The Palestinian Arab refugee of 1948 is today a soldier in the Palestine Liberation Army: a fida'i. All human beings will rebel, must rebel in such circumstances, to reconstitute their full human existence, to reclaim their rights, if necessary by armed struggle, inside every part of the homeland from which they have been excluded. And in this struggle the Palestinian Arab deserves our full moral and material support.
{p. 11} Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue
For Israeli-Palestinian dialogue to succeed, it must be based on truth and on critical awareness. Hypocrisy and duplicity in this context mislead and misdirect.
The first truth on which, in my view, Israeli-Palestinian dialogue must be based is that as long as the 1948 refugees are excluded from any part of their homeland, including Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Beer Sheba, and reduced to the misery of refugee camps and exile, they are right to reassert their presence in the homeland from which they are excluded, if necessary by military means and armed struggle, and that we must support them morally and materially in this struggle.
The second fundamental point is that an Israeli-Jewish people has been created in the process of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. This people must be guaranteed full rights to cultural autonomy: Hebrew schools, newspapers, clubs, etc. It cannot and must not be allowed a state of its own for the single reason that the continued existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state must necessarily entail the continued exclusion of the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees from all and any parts of their homeland. If all 1948 refugees are allowed to return and all UN Assembly resolutions are implemented, including the 1947 Partition Plan and Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, stipulating the return of all Palestinian Arab refugees or the payment of compensatlon, there can be no Jewish state.
The third truth of the Israeli Palestinian dialogue is critical awareness. It is in terms of this critical awareness that the limitations of the Israeli Peace Now movement are assessed in this study, and the work of Uri Avinery and Isam Sartawi is subjected to scrutiny.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Professor Israel Shahak, Chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights for the reference 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from original Hebrew sources are the author's own. ...
{p. 24} the mandate on which they had been elected to the Assembly. They violated the stipulations of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, thereby contravening the UN Charter and international law, and they failed to fulfil the purpose for which the Assembly had been elected, namely, to adopt a constitution for the newly established state. Instead, the Constituent Assembly passed the Transition Law (1949) transforming itself into the First Knesset, namely, into Israel's legislative Parliament. As Member of the Knesset, Advocate Shulamit Aloni pointed out:
{quote} The Minutes of the First Knesset contain long sections dealing with the controversy over this question. But the Minutes do not tell all. It does not appear anywhere in the records, for instance that Mr Hillel Cook, a delegate to the Constituent Assembly, cried out: "This is a political putsch! The Constituent Assembly must either adopt a constitution or disband!" (Aloni, Israel Has Na Constitution - Why?, undated pamphlet (c. 1970) ). {end quote}
The task of formulating a constitution for the state of Israel has been delegated by the Israeli Knesset to its Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. To date, thirty-eight years after the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel, the Committee has failed to present a constitution to the Knesset.
Having successfully aborted the UN requirement for a democratic constitution, the newly established state of Israel was then enabled to act without constitutional legal restriction in violation of the specific terms of the said Declaration. Thus, holy places, religious buildings and sites are not preserved, and rights in respect of holy places and religious buildings and sites are systematically denied. To cite but a handful of many thousands of cases of violation under this legal category: the mosque of the city of Safad in the Galilee has been transformed into an art gallery, while the mosque of the village of Ain Hud in the Haifa district has been transformed into a restaurant and bar. The mosque of the village of Caesaria similarly serves as a restaurant and bar. The central mosque of Beer Sheba serves as the city museum. The Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel and the adjacent park, named Independence Park, are built on the site of a Muslim cemetery. The Jerusalem Plaza Hotel and the adjacent park, also named Independence Park, are likewise built on the site of a Muslim cemetery.'
Religious and minority rights have similarly been subject to outright and radical violation. For example, freedom of conscience and of worship are not available in Israel. Unfortunately, a fuller treatment of the subject is outside the scope of this work. It is in order, however, to cite one area of violation of religious and minority rhzhts to illustrate the case.
The state of Israel, through the Ministry of Religious Affairs, recognizes only one of the three contemporary Jewish confessions, namely, the minority orthodox Jewish confession. Not only is atheism not recognized (the secular registration of marriage, divorce or death is not available in Israel), but the majority conservative and reform Jewish confessions are likewise denied recognition in Israel. Thus, conservative and reform Jewish Rabbis can legally officiate in marriage, divorce, conversion and burial throughout the world, with the exception of the territory of the Jewish state. In the state of Israel,
{p. 25} conservative and reform Jewish Rabbis cannot legally carry out their public official duties. Only private congregational services are permitted without risking legal prosecution.
But most significantly, the state of Israel is guilty of flagrant violation of the constitutional principle regarding citizenship as stipulated by the UN General Assembly in the 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine. There is no question that under the stipulations of the said Plan all the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants, by now some two million people defined under Israeli law as'absentees', are constitutionally entitled without qualification to Israeli citizenship. The persistent denial of Israeli citizenship to this Palestinian constituency is an act of mass denationalization, and a blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law.
All students of the Palestinian-lsraeli conflict, Zionist apologists or otherwise, acknowledge that the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution recommending the partition of Palestine was highly controversial. The state of Israel and the legitimacy of its continued existence as a Jewish state were (correctly, I submit) challenged at the outset, both in the field in Palestine and in the Middle East, and in all international, diplomatic and political arenas. It was, therefore, politically impossible for the newly established state of Israel immediately to contravene the terms of the UN Charter by passing open and explicit apartheid legislation. For the newly established government of Israel it was both morally and materially imperative to present Israel to the West as an advanced form of democracy and social progress.
Israel and South Africa: Two Forms of Apartheid
The Republic of South Africa is not the creation of the United Nations Organization, and it can survive as a 'white' supremacy state for a considerable period of time, though by no means indefinitely, with the aid of its diamond, gold, uranium and other abundant resources, in the face of international isolation, and the moral and material boycott of the international community. Israel is much more vulnerable in this, as in other respects. Whereas the Republic of South Africa does not critically depend on enlightened public opinion in the West, as institutionalized in the United National Organization and the UN Charter, Israel does.
Formally speaking, the Israeli procedure of denationalization is far more radical and far-reaching than its South African equivalent. The Republic of South Africa, in the framework of its apartheid policy, devised a legal mechanism to deprive some 75 per cent of its inhabitants - the majority of its black people - of their South African citizenship. Under the Bantu Laws Amendment Act (1970) (amended as the Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act (1974)) every black person with South African citizenship becomes a 'citizen' of one of ten ethnic homelands. Originally constituted as part of the Republic of South Africa, since 1976 four homelands (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei) have been granted independence, thereby depriving eight out of the
{p. 26} twenty million black citizens of the Republic of South Africa of their South African citizenship.
In the Republic of South Africa, the principle of apartheid is applied under the categories of 'white', 'coloured', 'Indian', and 'black'. Under the new 1984 Constitution, a stratified hierarchy was established inside the Republic recognizing the minority of 25 per cent of the 'white', 'coloured' and 'indian' inhabitants of South Africa as citizens of the Republic (though segregated politically in three separate Houses of Parliament, 'white', 'coloured' and 'Indian respectively) while denying access to South African citizenship to the majority of 75 per cent of the inhabitants of South Africa, namely, its twenty million black people.
It still remains the case, however, that South African apartheid recognizes the legal personality of its black inhabitants in a way that Zionist apartheid with regard to the Palestinian Arabs does not. While aiming to exclude its black inhabitants from citizenship in the Republic of South Africa, South African apartheid still recognizes them as legal persons (albeit inferior), and thus predicates the legal mechanism of their exclusion on the replacement of their citizenship in the Republic of South Africa with an alternative citizenship, namely, citizenship in one of the ten bogus ethnic 'new independent states'. Through this mechanism the majority of the inhabitants of the Republic of South Africa, its black people, are rendered aliens in their own homeland, but they are not defined out of legal existence.
In the case of Israel, Zionist apartheid is applied under the categories of 'Jew' versus 'non-Jew'. Of the almost three million non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs who are today entitled, under the constitutional stipulations of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, to Israeli citizenship, less than 25 per cent (approximately 700,000 persons) are Israeli citizens. Under the Absentee Property Law (1950), the state of Israel has similarly denationalized 75 per cent of its non-Jewish Palestinian Arab inhabitants (over two million persons classified as 'absentees'). However, having classified them as 'absentees' in the eyes of the law, it has thereby not only defined them as aliens in their own homeland, hut has cast them outside legal existence altogether.
Jewish Presence - Arab Absence
Registration of Births, Citizenship and Residence Registration of Births: The registration of births in the state of Israel was regulated until 1965 by the Registration of Inhabitants Ordinance (1949), and as of 1965 by the Population Registry Law. Registration is administered by the Population Registry Division at the Ministry of the Interior. However, the birth certificates issued in the state of Israel for newly-born Jewish and non-Jewish babies differ in a number of important ways. Birth certificates for Jews list the following categories: Religion (dat); Nationality (leom); Citizenship (ezrahut) of the infant at the date of birth. Birth certificates for non-Jews (Palestinian Arabs in our case) list the following categories: Religion and confession (al-din
{p. 27} wa-al-taifa); Nationality (al-qawmiyya); Citizenship (al-jinsiyya) of the infant at the date of hinh. Thus, the first important variation between the registration of the births of Jewish versus non-Jewish infants in the state of Israel is revealed. In the case of the Jewish infants, the registration of religion alone is stipulated. The registration of confession (orthodox, conservative or reform) is not required, presumably in order not to undermine the effective state-supported monopoly of the orthodox Jewish confession in Israel. (As we have already noted, conservative and reform Jewish Rabbis, who may legally lead their congregations in all parts of the world outside the territory of the state of Israel, cannot legally officiate in the Jewish state.)
In the case of non-Jewish Palestinian Arab infants, however, the registration of confession (for example, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim) is mandatory, in line with the supreme policy of all Israeli governments to consolidate confessional divisions within the non-Jewish population.
The examination of Jewish versus non-Jewish - in our case, Jewish versus Arab - birth certificates, however, reveals a much more shocking practice: whereas the citizenship of the Jewish infant is registered as Israeli at the time of his or her birth, the citizenship of the non Jewish Arab infant is left indefinite at the time of his or her birth.
The documents reproduced below are facsimiles of the birth certificates of Mirah Doberzinsky, of Jewish religion and nationality, born on 14 May 1956 in Kefar Sava, and Mahmud Fazwi Aghbariyya, of Sunni Muslim religion and Arab nationality, born on 23 March 1957 in Umm al-Fahm. As will he noted by those who can follow the Hebrew, the citizenship of Mirah Doberzinsky at birth is Israeli. The citizenship of Mahmud Fawzi Aghhariyya at birth is indefinite (blank).
Both babies were born in the state of Israel. Both birth certificates were issued by the State of Israel, Ministry of the Interior, Population Registry Division. For the clerk at the Population Registry Division at the Ministry of the Interior a Jewish infant in the state of Israel has Israeli citizenship at birth, but an Arab infant in the state of Israel is devoid of citizenship and is, therefore, stateless at birth.
{p. 32} Law of Return (Amendment No.2), 1970
Addition of Sections 4A and 4B
1. In the Law of Return (1950), the following sections shall be inserted after section 4:
"Rights of members of family
4A. (a) The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh under the Nationality Law, (1952), as well as the rights of an oleh of any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.
(b) It shall be immaterial whether or not a Jew by whose right a right under subsection (a) is claimed is still alive and whether or not he has immigrated to Israel.
(c) The restrictions and conditions prescribed in respect of a Jew or an oleh by or under this law or by the enactments referred to in subsection (a) shall also apply to a person who claims a right under subsection (a).
Definition 4B. For the purpose of this Law, "Jew" means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or who has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion" (emphasis added).
{p. 33} Amendment of the Population Registry Law (1965)
3. In the Population Registry Law (1965) the following section shall be inserted after section 3: "Power of registration and definition
3A. (a) A person shall not be registered by ethnic affiliation or religion if a notification under this Law or another entry in the Registry or a public document indicates that he is not a Jew, so long as the said notification, entry or document has not been controverted to the satisfaction of the Chief Registration Officer or so long as declaratory judgement of a competent court or tribunal has not otherwise determined.
(b) For the purpose of this Law and of any registration or document thereunder, "Jew" has the same meaning as in section 4B of the Law of Return (1950) (emphasis added).
(c) This section shall not derogate from a registration effected before its coming into force."
{p. 34} ... under Israeli law, any Jew throughout the world has the right of immediate immigration into, settlement in and citizenship of the state of Israel after an alleged forced absence of 2,000 years. On the other hand, the displaced Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948 and their descendants - some two million people - are denied the same right, in violation of international law and United Nations resolutions, although their forced absence is less than forty years.
{p. 35} The Absentee Property Law (1950), having defined the mass of the Palestinian Arab refurees from the territories that came under Israeli rule and occupation in 1948-49 out of existence as 'absentees', not only denies them the right of citizenship in the Jewish state as stipulated by the 1947 UN Resolution, but at the same time denies them the right to their vast properties inside Israel. It is imponant to note that the status of 'absentee' is inherited. Children of 'absentees', whether born inside or outside the state of Israel, are similarly classified as 'absentees'.
{p. 49} Histadrut, Kibbutz, Moshav: The Masquerade
It is conventional in the West to refer to the efforts of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel in the domain of cooperative and trade union organization as one of the outstanding modern contributions to the development of modern socialist or social-democratic achievements. Most prominent among these achievements are considered to be the collective kibbutz and smallholder moshav.
This conventional reference to the Histadrut, the kibbutz and the moshav as positive Zionist contributions to socialist or social democratic achievement is plainly wrong. It is predicated on cultivated ignorance of the legal and political structures that inform Zionist and Israeli organization and settlement policics, and is directed to veil the reality of radical legal apartheid masquerading as 'socialist Zionism'. |
