Court orders IDF to reopen road closed for Palestinian use (full article…)

Any time I see a story like this I can’t help laughing… So the court rules that this single road cannot be part of the apartheid structure? Big deal. What about the hundreds of others illegally constructed roads in the West Bank that have been designated “Israeli only”?

The only difference between AIPAC and J-Street, is that J-Street thinks apartheid is bad for Israel. That is the only debate among Zionist when it comes to Palestine… Killing Palestinians is fine, but if we want to preserve our racially exceptionalist entity, then apartheid makes that just too darn difficult.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel’s case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolized rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines – even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. (more…)

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a report confirming that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). (more…)

Palestinians families who suffered property damage during riots that followed 2008 evacuation of ‘disputed house’ to receive total of $63,000 restitution payments. (more…)

Tzipi Livni, another so-called centrist, holds similar discriminatory views. On January 23, 2002, she urged members of the Knesset to reject an equal-protection clause according to which equality is the right of every citizen in the state regardless of his or her nationality, religion, or views. The proposed bill was rejected, and formal equality remains outside the Israeli book of laws. Livni also supported bills in the Knesset that would grant settlement and allocation of land for Jews only, such as the one submitted by MK Rabbi Haim Druckman on February 18, 2002. Finally, she repeatedly argued that Israel will never be the national home for its Palestinian citizens and averred that, if they have a collective aspiration, they should look for it elsewhere.

In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that “conveyed outright bigotry against … the Jewish people.” (more…)

The White House offered no further details. But last week a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to Obama congratulating him for deciding to boycott the meeting, which is scheduled to begin Monday. (more…)

The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. “This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,” a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. “His message was clear: ‘This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists. The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.’” (more…)

We scholars, inspired by the wishes of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace. (more…)

Report: Israel dropped from new Durban II draft

Israel on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court. (more…)

“It’s incredible, but it seems that an Israeli law forbids Jews to adopt non-Jewish children!” he exclaimed. “This apartheid measure must be denounced by the worldwide media, and the international community should apply pressure against Israel to protest this abjectly racist law so the Israeli government will cancel it.” (more…)

Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

“This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality,” I was told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders this past summer. “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.” (more…)

The outspoken president of the General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, who recently described Israeli policies in the occupied territories as tantamount to “apartheid”, says his life is under threat. (more…)

Falk Asks “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” (more…)

When he uses the word ‘apartheid,’ he means that Israel ought to be subject to the same kind of sanctions, boycott and isolation that were applied to apartheid South Africa. (more…)