Under apartheid, blacks were not citizens of their own country. Since they were not citizens of any country they could not get passports to go elsewhere. Not that many blacks had enough money to go anywhere. There was no legal black infrastructure and the only way to make any money was to work for whites. They could not vote in elections or hold any public office. They could not use white hospitals, schools, parks, transportation.
Every Israeli citizen has the same rights and responsibilities as every other Israeli citizen, regardless of religion, race, gender, sexuality. There are laws against discrimination just like any other advanced democracy. Israelis can leave the country any time and live somewhere else if they want.
Citizens of Palestine have limited rights, especially women, homosexuals, Christians. Palestine is not a democracy. Their president’s term ended in 2009, yet he continues to rule unelected. Most Palestinians cannot legally leave the country, except to go into Israel, and if they go somewhere else they are usually forced into refugee camps and never allowed to assimilate into that country. Palestine’s infrastructure is the responsibility of the Palestinian government, though they get a great deal of assistance from Israel. Some people used to complain that Israeli funded hospitals in Palestine were occupation. But when Israel completely pulled out of Gaza those same people complained that Israel was hindering Palestinian access to health care.
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4 comments:
In all of my study and reading I have never heard the words Israel and Apartheid together.
worthy of a long and careful read. will post later.
presumably this globe and mail report is wrong then. globe and mail is a bit left, like Haaretz.
Many Israeli Jews support apartheid-style state, poll suggests
Palestinians should be denied the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank and should be required to live separately – in effect creating apartheid-style state – according to a poll published in Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper.
The poll exposes strong support for institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians. But the poll's questions and terminology, and Haaretz's publication of it seem intended to stir the emotional debate about the future shape of Israel during an election campaign.
The survey used the racially-charged term “apartheid” in seeking respondents’ views about separating populations. In publishing the results, Haaretz noted that the survey firm Dialog acknowledged “perhaps the term 'apartheid' was not clear enough to some interviewees.” Apartheid, an Afrikaans term for forced racial segregation, defined the repressive South African society that treated non-whites as inferior.
Whether or not they fully appreciated the nature of the term, Haaretz reported that less than a third of respondents “objected to calling Israel an "apartheid state.’”
Arab-Israelis, about 20-percent of the population, currently have full rights, including the right to vote. However, the Dialog survey found nearly a third of Jewish respondents wanted to take voting rights away from Arabs. Even more disquieting, “almost half – 47 percent – want part of Israel's Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority,” Haaretz said. More than four in ten Jewish respondents said they didn’t want to live in a building with Arab residents or have their children in schools with Arab children.
The survey, conducted last month, interviewed 503 Jewish Israelis.
Haaretz didn’t break down the sample's subsets but did report that the ultra-Orthodox Jews were the most strongly in favour of separating the two peoples.
“The ultra-Orthodox, in contrast to those who described themselves as religious or observant, hold the most extreme positions against the Palestinians,” Haaretz reported, noting that more than two-thirds favour transfer of Palestinians away from Jewish population centers.
Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper which publishes in English and Hebrew usually backs left-wing and secular positions. It acknowledged that the survey "questions were written by a group of academia-based peace and civil rights activists” suggesting that they may have been intended to provoke outrage if – as expected – many conservative and religious respondents endorsed separateness or apartheid.
In an accompanying commentary, Gideon Levy, said the poll “lays bare an image of Israeli society, and the picture is a very, very sick one. Now it is not just critics at home and abroad, but Israelis themselves who are openly, shamelessly, and guiltlessly defining themselves as nationalistic racists." Mr. Levy, who has long been controversial for his unflinching reporting from the occupied territories, added: “We're racists, the Israelis are saying, we practice apartheid and we even want to live in an apartheid state.”
Haaretz said the poll results exposed “anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews.”
Many Palestinians contend they already live with systemic discrimination both in Israel and in the West Bank where Jewish settlements are linked by a network of special roads and have their own access to scarce water supplies.
Although roughly half of respondents – 48 percent – remain opposed to annexation of the West Bank, nearly 40-percent now back annexation, clear evidence that many Israelis now believe the long-stalled peace process aimed at a two-state solution won't be successfully revived.
Debate over annexation will increase in the three months before elections.
It is wrong and poorly written. Haaretz is the most liberal newspaper in Israel. They are not above publishing poorly worded polls that support their views. Then again, what newspaper is?
I'm pretty sure that 47% of 503 people is not the majority of Israelis. It's unlikely that all Israelis want nothing to do with Arabs since many Israelis are Arab. But even if every single Jew in Israel wanted nothing to do with our Arab neighbours that still wouldn't make any of Israel's laws or policies apartheid.
All Israeli citizens are treated as citizens. Blacks were not citizens under apartheid. No questionable poll can change that.
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