Dear friends,
a recent poll conducted by the Israel War and Peace Index revealed that 57% of Israeli's thought that "national security" was more important that human rights (see: Israeli news website, YNET http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3851567,00.html).
Today's Haaretz has reported that in another poll, half of Israel's high school students do not believe Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship should be entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel. This percentage when broken down further revealed 82% of religious Jewish students held this view, compared to 39% of "secular" Jewish students (the poll surveyed both Jewish and Palestinian Arab students).
The poll went onto reveal that 56% of students believed that Palestinian with Israeli citizenship should be denied the right to run for Parliamentary office in Israel - with the further break down being similar to the above responses.
According to a YNET article on the same poll (which lists the 48% as 46%), 21% also think that "Death to Arabs" is a legitimate expression (with 45% of religous Jews agreeing with this and 16% of secular Jews). YNET also notes that 1 out of 6 Israeli students do not want to study with Eithopian Jewish students or Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
According to one Israeli academic quoted in the Haaretz article: "There is a combination of fundamentalism, nationalism, and racism in the worldview of religious youth"
in solidarity, Kim
***
March 11, 2010
Poll: Half of Israeli high schoolers oppose equal rights for Arabs
By Or Kashti
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1155627.html
Nearly half of Israel's high school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel, according to the results of a new survey released yesterday. The same poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.
The survey, which was administered to teenagers at various Israeli high schools, also found that close to half of all respondents - 48 percent - said that they would refuse orders to evacuate outposts and settlements in the Palestinian territories.
Nearly one-third - 31 percent - said they would refuse military service beyond the Green Line.
The complete results of the poll will be presented today during an academic discussion hosted jointly by Tel Aviv University's School of Education and the Citizens' Empowerment Center in Israel. The symposium will focus on various aspects of civic education in the country.
"Jewish youth have not internalized basic democratic values," said Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, one of the conference organizers.
The poll was commissioned last month by Maagar Mochot, an Israeli research institution, under the supervision of Prof. Yitzhak Katz. It took a sampling of 536 Jewish and Arab respondents between the ages of 15-18.
The survey sought to gauge youth attitudes toward the State of Israel; their perspective on new immigrants and the state's Arab citizens; and their political stances.
The results paint a picture of youth leaning toward political philosophies that fall outside the mainstream.
In response to the question of whether Arab citizens should be granted rights equal to that of Jews, 49.5 percent answered in the negative. The issue highlighted the deep fault lines separating religious and secular youths, with 82 percent of religious students saying they opposed equal rights for Arabs while just 39 percent of secular students echoed that sentiment.
The secular-religious gap was also present when students were faced with the question of whether Arabs should be eligible to run for office in the Knesset. While 82 percent of those with religious tendencies answered in the negative, 47 percent of secular teens agreed. In total, 56 percent said Arabs should be denied this right altogether.
The survey also delved into the issue of military service and following orders that are deemed politically divisive.
While an overwhelming majority (91 percent) expressed a desire to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces, 48 percent said they would not obey an order to evacuate outposts and settlements in the West Bank.
Here, too, researchers note the religious nexus. Of those who would refuse evacuation orders, 81 percent categorize themselves as religious as opposed to 36 percent who are secular.
"This poll shows findings which place a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth," said an Education Ministry official.
The survey, which also revealed that a relatively high number of youth plan on voting and that democracy is still the preferred system of government, indicates "a gap between the consensus on formal democracy and the principles of essential democracy, which forbid the denial of rights to the Arab population," the official said.
"The differences in positions between secular and religious youth, which are only growing sharper from a demographic standpoint, need to be of concern to all of us because this will be the face of the state in another 20-30 years," said Bar-Tal. "There is a combination of fundamentalism, nationalism, and racism in the worldview of religious youth."
*********************
YNET
11 March, 2010
Poll: 46% of high-schoolers don't want equality for Arabs
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3861161,00.html
Some 81% of religious students said they would refuse to evacuate settlements, versus 36% of secular counterparts. Every second student is opposed to granting right to vote to Arabs, and 32% don't want Arab friends
Yaheli Moran Zelikovich
Published: 03.11.10, 10:42 / Israel News
Racism and refusal to evacuate alongside support for a democratic system of government – these are the jumbled sentiment of Israel's high school students, according to a recent poll.
They support a democratic form of government, but more than half of them believe that Arabs should not be allowed to vote in Knesset elections. One out of every six students would not want to study in the same class with an Ethiopian or an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and 21% of them think that "Death to Arabs" is a legitimate expression.
Nearly every second student would refuse orders to evacuate settlements. They mostly prefer Shimon Peres as prime minister over Ehud Barak and Avigdor Lieberman.
The students were asked questions regarding their viewpoints on the IDF and insubordination. Some 91% of secular high school students said they want to enlist in the IDF, versus 77% of religious students. Eighty-one percent of the religious students said they would refuse orders to evacuate outposts and settlements in the West Bank, versus 36% of secular students. Overall, 43% of the students polled said they would refuse orders.
The teens were asked about the rights of Arab Israelis. Here, too, there was a gap in the opinions of religious and secular students. While 82% of religious students responded that they don't believe Arabs should be granted equal rights as Jews, 36% percent of seculars responded that they do not believe in equal rights for Arabs and Jews. Overall, 46% students believe there should not be equality between Jewish and Arab citizens of the State of Israel.
The poll showed that many students believe the phrase "Death to Arabs" is racist, and, therefore, not legitimate. Forty-five percent of religious students and 16% of secular students, however, believe it is a legitimate statement.
Some 82% of the religious students believe Arab Israelis should not be allowed to vote in Knesset elections, versus 47% of seculars. Overall, 56% of the high school students polled believe Arabs should not be allowed to vote.
Students were asked if they would be willing to have an Arab friend who is the same sex and age as they are. Out of the religious students polled, 81% said they would not be willing, versus 23% of secular students who would not want to have an Arab friend. Overall, 32% of students said they would not want to have an Arab friend.
'Don't want immigrants in our class'
The poll showed that secular high school students tend to be more willing to accept immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. When asked if they would want Ethiopian students to study in the same class as them, 16% of secular students and 23% of religious students answered in the negative.
When asked about their willingness to study with a classmate from the former Soviet Union, 12% of secular students answered that they would not, versus 32% of religious students.
Regarding their opinions on the character of Israel's government, the students were asked which type of government they would prefer. Eighty percent chose democracy; 16% chose dictatorship; and 4% responded that they did not know.
Seventy-five percent of Jewish students, versus 64% of Arab students think Israel is considered a democratic country. Some 20% of Arab students responded that they believe it is legitimate to forcefully oppose government policies to which they are opposed – about two times the percentage of Jewish students who believe so.
In the political sphere, the teenagers (38%) responded that there preferred prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu. Next in line were Tzipi Livni with 24%, Shimon Peres – 19%, Avigdor Lieberman – 13%, and Ehud Barak – 6%.
The survey was conducted by the Maagar Mochot research institute on 536 youth between the ages of 15 and 18 from the Jewish and Arab sectors on the topic of today's youth and the face of tomorrow's Israel.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Why Israel is a racist state
By Kim Bullimore
Direct Action, No 11, May 2009
www.directaction.org.au
The Australian Labor government joined the all-white boycott of the UN’s Durban Review Conference held in Geneva on April 20-24. Labelled by Israel and its supporters a “hate fest”, the conference was boycotted by Australia, along with Canada, Germany, Italy, Israel, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland and the US because the conference’s draft “outcome” document reaffirmed the Declaration and Program of Action (DPA) adopted by the UN’s 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. At the end of the Geneva conference the draft document was approved by delegates representing 182 countries out the UN’s 192 member-states.
The Durban conference’s 341-paragraph DPA included a paragraph stating: “We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.” In 2002, by a vote of 134 for to two against (Israel, United States), with two abstentions (Australia, Canada), the UN General Assembly endorsed the Durban conference’s DPA.
World Conference Against Racism logo
The April 4, 2008 Tel Aviv Haaretz daily reported that Israel and the US had “decided a few weeks ago to boycott the Durban II conference scheduled for early 2009… According to a senior government official, the joint decision was made after discussions among senior US State Department and local Foreign Ministry officials, and after being raised in talks between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice… Israel and world Jewish organizations have begun a campaign against the upcoming conference, although it still has no final date or location.”
The campaign against the Durban Review Conference was stepped up by Israel and its supporters in the wake of the Zionist state’s 22-day war on Gaza over December and January, during which the Israeli military killed 1417 Palestinians, only 236 of whom were resistance fighters. In the wake of widespread condemnation of Israel’s war crimes expressed in large demonstrations on the streets of cities all over the world, the Zionist state has been struggling to present itself as the victim of Palestinian “terrorism”. Fearing that the Durban Review Conference might criticise Israel’s war crimes, the Israeli and US imperialist rulers stepped up their campaign to present the conference as an “anti-Semitic hate fest”. They encouraged other imperialist states, including Australia, to threaten to boycott the conference if its “outcome” document had any, even the mildest, criticism of Israel.
This was not the first time Washington had boycotted UN anti-racism conferences. The US government boycotted the UN’s anti-racism conferences in 1978 and 1983 objecting not only to the inclusion of any references to the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel but also to a focus by the conference participants on South Africa’s brutal apartheid policies. In 2001, after dragging its feet as to a decision of whether or not it would participate in the Durban conference, US government officials walked out of the conference on the third day, objecting to both the inclusion of calls for an apology and reparations to victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and any mention of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
At the 2001 Durban conference, pro-Israeli Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Bnai Brith, Hadassah and the Wiesenthal Center, attempted to have a paragraph included in the final declaration that equated any criticism of Israel as a “contemporary form of anti-Semitism”. This included labelling Israel’s policies against the Palestinian people as “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”. As Badil, the Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights based in Bethlehem noted in a paper for the Durban conference, had this paragraph been adopted, it “would have meant that any human rights critique on the State of Israel could be labelled as ‘anti-Semitism’”.
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been an openly racist state, founded by European colonial settlers and using both legally sanctioned discrimination and military force to ethnically cleanse and oppress the indigenous Palestinian people. While Palestinian citizens of Israel are supposedly afforded full citizenship rights, Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, notes that the Israeli state systematically discriminates against its Palestinian citizens, who account for more than 20% of Israel’s total population. According to Adalah, Israel has never sought to integrate its Palestinian citizens and instead resorts to “treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state [has] practiced systematic and institutionalised discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture and political participation.”
Repeated surveys in Israel have recorded the racism that is endemic in Israeli society. For example, a March 2007 survey by the Israeli Centre Against Racism found that more than half of the Jewish population in Israel believes that marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to “national treason”. Seventy five per cent of Israeli Jews polled did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty per cent said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home, 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites” and 30.7% felt hatred when they heard Arabic being spoken on the street.
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where 5 million Palestinians live under Israel’s brutal military occupation, Zionist racism is even more overt. Subject to more than 700 military laws, Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem not only have their legal identity controlled by Israel, they are also subject to laws that control their movement and that prevent them from using roads or entering areas reserved for Jewish colonial-settlers. Israeli military law allows for the Zionist state to confiscate Palestinian property, land and water resources in order to redirect them for Jewish-only use, preventing Palestinians from accessing land that their ancestors had owned and cultivated for centuries. Under the Israeli military regime, Palestinians living in the West Bank have no legal protection against the Israeli state’s human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and detention without charge or trial, or the demolition of their homes.
Since 1948, Israel’s ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression against the Palestinian and other Arab peoples of the region have had the consistent backing of successive US governments. All of these governments have sought to ensure that US corporations control the extraction and export of the vast energy resources (oil and natural gas) that exist in the Middle East. Israel has become US imperialism’s chief ally in the region, the US-Israel alliance being based on shared political interests — opposition to any form of Arab radicalism that would threaten imperialist economic domination of the region.
Washington’s imperialist role in the Middle East was the focus of the speech given by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban Review Conference. Far from being an “anti-Semitic rant”, as Israel and its supporters claim, Ahmadinejad devoted a large part of his speech denouncing the US for its wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. With regard to the Western-backed Zionist colonisation of Palestine, he said: “Today many racists condemn racism in their slogans and speeches but when some powerful countries give themselves the right to make decisions for other countries, using their discretion, and based on their own interests, they can easily trample on all rules and human values. As they have already proven.
“After the Second World War, by exploiting the Holocaust and under the pretext of protecting the Jews they made a nation homeless with military expeditions and invasion. They transferred various groups of people from America, Europe and other countries to this land. They established a completely racist government in the occupied Palestinian territories. And in fact, under the pretext of making up for damages resulting from racism in Europe, they established the most aggressive, racist country in another territory, i.e., Palestine.”
Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad’s speech did not contain any anti-Jewish remarks, Australian PM Kevin Rudd has attempted to use the speech to justify his government’s boycott of the Durban Review Conference. Rudd told an April 24 meeting of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce that “inflammatory remarks of President Ahmadinejad of Iran at the conference are unacceptable and underline the Australian government’s decision not to attend the Durban Conference”. Rudd admitted that his government never had any intention of participating in the conference because Canberra “would not support a document which reaffirms the 2001 Durban Declaration and Program of Action”, because the “2001 declaration singled out Israel” as the only state guilty of racism. However, the Durban DPA does no such thing. It merely expresses concern “about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation”.
Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd
While Israel continues to have the support of governments in other imperialist countries such as the US and Australia, more and more people around the world have supported the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. In the lead up to the Durban Review Conference, thousands of people from around the world attended the Israel Review Conference, also held in Geneva, organised by pro-Palestinian groups. The IRC included a range of workshops which developed proposals for a global campaign against the Jewish National Fund, as well as initiatives for prosecution of Israeli officials for war crimes.
Israel Review Conference logo
The BDS campaign was launched by over 100 Palestinian organisations in July 2005. In the wake of Israel’s Gaza war, support for the campaign has snowballed. The March 29 Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Manufacturers Association acknowledged that its members were losing markets due to the growing BDS campaign. The head of the IMA’s foreign trade committee said: “In addition to the problems and difficulties arising from the global economic crisis, 21% of local exporters report that they are facing problems in selling Israeli goods because of an anti-Israel boycott, mainly from the UK and Scandinavian countries.”
Direct Action, No 11, May 2009
www.directaction.org.au
The Australian Labor government joined the all-white boycott of the UN’s Durban Review Conference held in Geneva on April 20-24. Labelled by Israel and its supporters a “hate fest”, the conference was boycotted by Australia, along with Canada, Germany, Italy, Israel, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland and the US because the conference’s draft “outcome” document reaffirmed the Declaration and Program of Action (DPA) adopted by the UN’s 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. At the end of the Geneva conference the draft document was approved by delegates representing 182 countries out the UN’s 192 member-states.
The Durban conference’s 341-paragraph DPA included a paragraph stating: “We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.” In 2002, by a vote of 134 for to two against (Israel, United States), with two abstentions (Australia, Canada), the UN General Assembly endorsed the Durban conference’s DPA.
World Conference Against Racism logo
The April 4, 2008 Tel Aviv Haaretz daily reported that Israel and the US had “decided a few weeks ago to boycott the Durban II conference scheduled for early 2009… According to a senior government official, the joint decision was made after discussions among senior US State Department and local Foreign Ministry officials, and after being raised in talks between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice… Israel and world Jewish organizations have begun a campaign against the upcoming conference, although it still has no final date or location.”
The campaign against the Durban Review Conference was stepped up by Israel and its supporters in the wake of the Zionist state’s 22-day war on Gaza over December and January, during which the Israeli military killed 1417 Palestinians, only 236 of whom were resistance fighters. In the wake of widespread condemnation of Israel’s war crimes expressed in large demonstrations on the streets of cities all over the world, the Zionist state has been struggling to present itself as the victim of Palestinian “terrorism”. Fearing that the Durban Review Conference might criticise Israel’s war crimes, the Israeli and US imperialist rulers stepped up their campaign to present the conference as an “anti-Semitic hate fest”. They encouraged other imperialist states, including Australia, to threaten to boycott the conference if its “outcome” document had any, even the mildest, criticism of Israel.
This was not the first time Washington had boycotted UN anti-racism conferences. The US government boycotted the UN’s anti-racism conferences in 1978 and 1983 objecting not only to the inclusion of any references to the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel but also to a focus by the conference participants on South Africa’s brutal apartheid policies. In 2001, after dragging its feet as to a decision of whether or not it would participate in the Durban conference, US government officials walked out of the conference on the third day, objecting to both the inclusion of calls for an apology and reparations to victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and any mention of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
At the 2001 Durban conference, pro-Israeli Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Bnai Brith, Hadassah and the Wiesenthal Center, attempted to have a paragraph included in the final declaration that equated any criticism of Israel as a “contemporary form of anti-Semitism”. This included labelling Israel’s policies against the Palestinian people as “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”. As Badil, the Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights based in Bethlehem noted in a paper for the Durban conference, had this paragraph been adopted, it “would have meant that any human rights critique on the State of Israel could be labelled as ‘anti-Semitism’”.
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been an openly racist state, founded by European colonial settlers and using both legally sanctioned discrimination and military force to ethnically cleanse and oppress the indigenous Palestinian people. While Palestinian citizens of Israel are supposedly afforded full citizenship rights, Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, notes that the Israeli state systematically discriminates against its Palestinian citizens, who account for more than 20% of Israel’s total population. According to Adalah, Israel has never sought to integrate its Palestinian citizens and instead resorts to “treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state [has] practiced systematic and institutionalised discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture and political participation.”
Repeated surveys in Israel have recorded the racism that is endemic in Israeli society. For example, a March 2007 survey by the Israeli Centre Against Racism found that more than half of the Jewish population in Israel believes that marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to “national treason”. Seventy five per cent of Israeli Jews polled did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty per cent said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home, 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites” and 30.7% felt hatred when they heard Arabic being spoken on the street.
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
Anti-Palestinian/Arab graffiti in Occupied Hebron
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where 5 million Palestinians live under Israel’s brutal military occupation, Zionist racism is even more overt. Subject to more than 700 military laws, Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem not only have their legal identity controlled by Israel, they are also subject to laws that control their movement and that prevent them from using roads or entering areas reserved for Jewish colonial-settlers. Israeli military law allows for the Zionist state to confiscate Palestinian property, land and water resources in order to redirect them for Jewish-only use, preventing Palestinians from accessing land that their ancestors had owned and cultivated for centuries. Under the Israeli military regime, Palestinians living in the West Bank have no legal protection against the Israeli state’s human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and detention without charge or trial, or the demolition of their homes.
Since 1948, Israel’s ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression against the Palestinian and other Arab peoples of the region have had the consistent backing of successive US governments. All of these governments have sought to ensure that US corporations control the extraction and export of the vast energy resources (oil and natural gas) that exist in the Middle East. Israel has become US imperialism’s chief ally in the region, the US-Israel alliance being based on shared political interests — opposition to any form of Arab radicalism that would threaten imperialist economic domination of the region.
Washington’s imperialist role in the Middle East was the focus of the speech given by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban Review Conference. Far from being an “anti-Semitic rant”, as Israel and its supporters claim, Ahmadinejad devoted a large part of his speech denouncing the US for its wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. With regard to the Western-backed Zionist colonisation of Palestine, he said: “Today many racists condemn racism in their slogans and speeches but when some powerful countries give themselves the right to make decisions for other countries, using their discretion, and based on their own interests, they can easily trample on all rules and human values. As they have already proven.
“After the Second World War, by exploiting the Holocaust and under the pretext of protecting the Jews they made a nation homeless with military expeditions and invasion. They transferred various groups of people from America, Europe and other countries to this land. They established a completely racist government in the occupied Palestinian territories. And in fact, under the pretext of making up for damages resulting from racism in Europe, they established the most aggressive, racist country in another territory, i.e., Palestine.”
Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad’s speech did not contain any anti-Jewish remarks, Australian PM Kevin Rudd has attempted to use the speech to justify his government’s boycott of the Durban Review Conference. Rudd told an April 24 meeting of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce that “inflammatory remarks of President Ahmadinejad of Iran at the conference are unacceptable and underline the Australian government’s decision not to attend the Durban Conference”. Rudd admitted that his government never had any intention of participating in the conference because Canberra “would not support a document which reaffirms the 2001 Durban Declaration and Program of Action”, because the “2001 declaration singled out Israel” as the only state guilty of racism. However, the Durban DPA does no such thing. It merely expresses concern “about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation”.
Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd
While Israel continues to have the support of governments in other imperialist countries such as the US and Australia, more and more people around the world have supported the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. In the lead up to the Durban Review Conference, thousands of people from around the world attended the Israel Review Conference, also held in Geneva, organised by pro-Palestinian groups. The IRC included a range of workshops which developed proposals for a global campaign against the Jewish National Fund, as well as initiatives for prosecution of Israeli officials for war crimes.
Israel Review Conference logo
The BDS campaign was launched by over 100 Palestinian organisations in July 2005. In the wake of Israel’s Gaza war, support for the campaign has snowballed. The March 29 Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Manufacturers Association acknowledged that its members were losing markets due to the growing BDS campaign. The head of the IMA’s foreign trade committee said: “In addition to the problems and difficulties arising from the global economic crisis, 21% of local exporters report that they are facing problems in selling Israeli goods because of an anti-Israel boycott, mainly from the UK and Scandinavian countries.”
Friday, November 7, 2008
Acre pogrom highlights Zionist anti-Arab racism
By Kim Bullimore
This article was first published in the Australian political newspaper, Direct Action (No. 6) www.directaction.org.au
It has also been published on Palestine Chronicle www.palestinechronicle.com
Violent attacks by Jewish residents in the Israeli city of Acre last month have left 14 Palestinian families, a total of 72 people, homeless. All 72 are Israeli citizens who had their homes destroyed. For the more than 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Jewish “riots” in Acre are only the most extreme example of the systematic discrimination they face within the Zionist state.
According to a report issued by the Mossawa Centre, an advocacy centre for Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of the 14 families were too frightened to return to what’s left of their homes. The October 20 report noted that the violence against the Palestinian families, which began on October 8, resulted in three homes being burnt to the ground and that in the case of several families the attacks were “another in a series of anti-Arab aggression[s] directed against them”, with at least one family having had their home “destroyed four times since 2000”.
Violence erupted after Acre Jews attacked a Palestinian man, Tawfiq Jamal, for driving his car through a Jewish neighbourhood to pick up his daughter from a relative’s house on the eve of the Jewish religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Jamal, along with his son, were attacked by hundreds of Jews when they arrived at the house of relatives, the Sha’aban family. According to an October 14 report issued by Badil, the Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugees, Jewish residents surrounded and attacked the family home, besieging 15 people inside, “while police stood outside”. As the attack continued, Palestinian Arab residents rushed to the aid of the besieged family, clashing with Jews attacking the house.
Israeli police look at a car that was flipped over during riots between Jewish and Arab residents of Acre; Israeli policemen arrest a rioter for driving during Yom Kippur (photos from Al Ahram)
Over the next four days, Jewish residents carried out repeated violent attacks against the 52,000 Palestinian Arab residents of Acre, who make up a third of the city’s population. Mobs of up to 1500 Jews wandered the streets stoning Palestinians and torching Palestinian residences, cars and businesses. The Israeli media reported that many in the Jewish mobs chanted “Death to the Arabs” as the attacks were carried out.
On October 13, the Israeli Ynet news service reported that the Northern District police commander Major-General Shimon Koren as saying, “the dominant elements behind the riots in Akko seem to be Jewish instigators”. Despite this, many Palestinians who attempted to defend themselves and their families from the pogrom were arrested. According to Badil’s October 14 report, while the police arrested equal numbers of Jews and Israeli Palestinians, the Israeli courts had systematically “released most of the Jewish detainees, while the time of detention for the Arab detainees is extended”.
On October 13, the Israeli police also arrested and charged Tawfiq Jamal for “harming religious sensibilities” by breaking the Jewish tradition of not driving on the Yom Kippur holiday. The Haifa District Court later sentenced Jamal to a week’s house arrest and suspended his driving license for 30 days. This was despite the fact that there are no Israeli laws which stipulate that it is illegal for either Jews or non-Jews to drive on Yom Kippur.
In response to Jamal’s arrest, Palestinian Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi from the United Arab list told Israeli radio on October 14 that the arrest was “unlawful”. Tibi went onto state that “the arrest proves that police had yielded to Jewish hooligans and I wonder if from now on they will start arresting Jews who eat and drink during Ramadan”, the Muslim holy month.
Israeli MP Mohammed Barakeh from the predominantly Arab-supported Hadash party also condemned Jamal’s arrest saying it was “aimed at appeasing right-wing extremists”. Barakeh told the October 15 Tel Aviv Haaretz daily that Jamal should be released immediately and that “the police abused a lynch victim while protecting gangs of extremists and settlers”.
1 of 3 Palestinian houses torched by Jewish rioters during Acre riots, Oct 2008
Photograph by Oren Ziv, ActiveStills (published with permission from ActiveStills)
The October pogrom in Acre isn’t the first to be carried out by Jews against Palestinian Israelis in Acre or other “mixed” cities in Israel. The anti-Arab riots by Jewish residents in Acre, however, have increased over the last decade with the establishment of a hesder-yeshiva, which combines military and religious training in the city, and with thousands of Israeli settlers being relocated to the city in the wake of Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The violent attacks against Palestinians inside Israel are reflective of the similar attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). On September 13, more than 100 Israeli settlers from the illegal colony of Yitzhar attacked the Palestinian village of Asira al-Qibliya in the Nablus district of the occupied West Bank. The attack, described as a “pogrom” by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was just one of thousands of attacks carried out by illegal settlers against Palestinians since 1967.
In 2001, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem noted in their report, Free Reign: vigilant settlers and Israel’s non-enforcement of the law that “settler violence against Palestinians is extensive and has been prevalent in the Occupied Territories for many years”. B’Tselem noted that between December 1987 and October 2001, 124 Palestinians had been murdered by Israeli settlers. The report went onto note that the Israeli military and police regularly failed to protect Palestinians from such violent attacks. B’Tselem’s website notes that since 2001, the situation in the occupied West Bank has not changed but instead gotten worse.
Burning of Palestinian agricultural land by illegal settlers in June 2008
Photograph by Anne Paq, ActiveStills (published with permission from ActiveStills)
Both the Acre pogrom and the ever-increasing settler attacks in the OPT have highlighted the systematic racism endured by Palestinian citizens of the “Jewish” state, despite its “democratic” facade, as well as the Zionists’ racism against Palestinians living in the OPT. While Palestinian citizens of Israel are supposedly afforded full citizen rights by the Israeli state, Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, notes that the Israeli state systematically discriminates against its Palestinian citizens, who account for more than 20% of Israel’s total population. According to Adalah, Israel has never sought to integrate its Palestinian citizens, instead “treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state [has] practiced systematic and institutionalised discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture and poltical participation.” Adalah notes that Palestinian Israelis are not recognised as a national minority. Instead, Adalah points out that “successive Israeli governments maintained tight control over the community, attempting to suppress Palestinian/Arab identity and to divide the community within itself”.
A March 2007 survey by the Israeli Centre Against Racism found that more than half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to “national treason”, that 75% of Israeli Jews did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty percent said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home, 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”, and 30.7% felt hatred when they heard Arabic being spoken on the street.
Anti-Palestinian graffiti in Hebron
Photo by Anna Baltzer
http://www.annainthemiddleeast.com/
The violent attacks by Jews against Palestinians in Acre and in the OPT are a result of the institutionalised discrimination and racist bigotry that are an integral part of Israel’s official Zionist ideology. Israel originated as a European colonial-settler state that continues to grant privileges to Jews, while systematically discriminating against its non-Jewish Arab citizens.
This racism in Israel, as Joseph Massad, an associate professor in Modern Arab politics at New York City’s Columbia University noted in an March 2007 Al Ahram essay, Israel’s right to be racist, is manifest “in its flag, its national anthem and a bunch of laws that are necessary to safeguard Jewish privilege”. As long as Israel continues to function as a “Jewish” state and continues its illegal and brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank there will be no resolution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. As Massad notes, “no resolution will ever be possible before Israel revokes its racist laws and does away with its racist symbols, thus opening the way for a non-racist future for Palestinians and Jews in a decolonised bi-national state”.
This article was first published in the Australian political newspaper, Direct Action (No. 6) www.directaction.org.au
It has also been published on Palestine Chronicle www.palestinechronicle.com
Violent attacks by Jewish residents in the Israeli city of Acre last month have left 14 Palestinian families, a total of 72 people, homeless. All 72 are Israeli citizens who had their homes destroyed. For the more than 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Jewish “riots” in Acre are only the most extreme example of the systematic discrimination they face within the Zionist state.
According to a report issued by the Mossawa Centre, an advocacy centre for Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of the 14 families were too frightened to return to what’s left of their homes. The October 20 report noted that the violence against the Palestinian families, which began on October 8, resulted in three homes being burnt to the ground and that in the case of several families the attacks were “another in a series of anti-Arab aggression[s] directed against them”, with at least one family having had their home “destroyed four times since 2000”.
Violence erupted after Acre Jews attacked a Palestinian man, Tawfiq Jamal, for driving his car through a Jewish neighbourhood to pick up his daughter from a relative’s house on the eve of the Jewish religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Jamal, along with his son, were attacked by hundreds of Jews when they arrived at the house of relatives, the Sha’aban family. According to an October 14 report issued by Badil, the Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugees, Jewish residents surrounded and attacked the family home, besieging 15 people inside, “while police stood outside”. As the attack continued, Palestinian Arab residents rushed to the aid of the besieged family, clashing with Jews attacking the house.
Israeli police look at a car that was flipped over during riots between Jewish and Arab residents of Acre; Israeli policemen arrest a rioter for driving during Yom Kippur (photos from Al Ahram)
Over the next four days, Jewish residents carried out repeated violent attacks against the 52,000 Palestinian Arab residents of Acre, who make up a third of the city’s population. Mobs of up to 1500 Jews wandered the streets stoning Palestinians and torching Palestinian residences, cars and businesses. The Israeli media reported that many in the Jewish mobs chanted “Death to the Arabs” as the attacks were carried out.
On October 13, the Israeli Ynet news service reported that the Northern District police commander Major-General Shimon Koren as saying, “the dominant elements behind the riots in Akko seem to be Jewish instigators”. Despite this, many Palestinians who attempted to defend themselves and their families from the pogrom were arrested. According to Badil’s October 14 report, while the police arrested equal numbers of Jews and Israeli Palestinians, the Israeli courts had systematically “released most of the Jewish detainees, while the time of detention for the Arab detainees is extended”.
On October 13, the Israeli police also arrested and charged Tawfiq Jamal for “harming religious sensibilities” by breaking the Jewish tradition of not driving on the Yom Kippur holiday. The Haifa District Court later sentenced Jamal to a week’s house arrest and suspended his driving license for 30 days. This was despite the fact that there are no Israeli laws which stipulate that it is illegal for either Jews or non-Jews to drive on Yom Kippur.
In response to Jamal’s arrest, Palestinian Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi from the United Arab list told Israeli radio on October 14 that the arrest was “unlawful”. Tibi went onto state that “the arrest proves that police had yielded to Jewish hooligans and I wonder if from now on they will start arresting Jews who eat and drink during Ramadan”, the Muslim holy month.
Israeli MP Mohammed Barakeh from the predominantly Arab-supported Hadash party also condemned Jamal’s arrest saying it was “aimed at appeasing right-wing extremists”. Barakeh told the October 15 Tel Aviv Haaretz daily that Jamal should be released immediately and that “the police abused a lynch victim while protecting gangs of extremists and settlers”.
1 of 3 Palestinian houses torched by Jewish rioters during Acre riots, Oct 2008
Photograph by Oren Ziv, ActiveStills (published with permission from ActiveStills)
The October pogrom in Acre isn’t the first to be carried out by Jews against Palestinian Israelis in Acre or other “mixed” cities in Israel. The anti-Arab riots by Jewish residents in Acre, however, have increased over the last decade with the establishment of a hesder-yeshiva, which combines military and religious training in the city, and with thousands of Israeli settlers being relocated to the city in the wake of Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The violent attacks against Palestinians inside Israel are reflective of the similar attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). On September 13, more than 100 Israeli settlers from the illegal colony of Yitzhar attacked the Palestinian village of Asira al-Qibliya in the Nablus district of the occupied West Bank. The attack, described as a “pogrom” by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was just one of thousands of attacks carried out by illegal settlers against Palestinians since 1967.
In 2001, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem noted in their report, Free Reign: vigilant settlers and Israel’s non-enforcement of the law that “settler violence against Palestinians is extensive and has been prevalent in the Occupied Territories for many years”. B’Tselem noted that between December 1987 and October 2001, 124 Palestinians had been murdered by Israeli settlers. The report went onto note that the Israeli military and police regularly failed to protect Palestinians from such violent attacks. B’Tselem’s website notes that since 2001, the situation in the occupied West Bank has not changed but instead gotten worse.
Burning of Palestinian agricultural land by illegal settlers in June 2008
Photograph by Anne Paq, ActiveStills (published with permission from ActiveStills)
Both the Acre pogrom and the ever-increasing settler attacks in the OPT have highlighted the systematic racism endured by Palestinian citizens of the “Jewish” state, despite its “democratic” facade, as well as the Zionists’ racism against Palestinians living in the OPT. While Palestinian citizens of Israel are supposedly afforded full citizen rights by the Israeli state, Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, notes that the Israeli state systematically discriminates against its Palestinian citizens, who account for more than 20% of Israel’s total population. According to Adalah, Israel has never sought to integrate its Palestinian citizens, instead “treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state [has] practiced systematic and institutionalised discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture and poltical participation.” Adalah notes that Palestinian Israelis are not recognised as a national minority. Instead, Adalah points out that “successive Israeli governments maintained tight control over the community, attempting to suppress Palestinian/Arab identity and to divide the community within itself”.
A March 2007 survey by the Israeli Centre Against Racism found that more than half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to “national treason”, that 75% of Israeli Jews did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty percent said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home, 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”, and 30.7% felt hatred when they heard Arabic being spoken on the street.
Anti-Palestinian graffiti in Hebron
Photo by Anna Baltzer
http://www.annainthemiddleeast.com/
The violent attacks by Jews against Palestinians in Acre and in the OPT are a result of the institutionalised discrimination and racist bigotry that are an integral part of Israel’s official Zionist ideology. Israel originated as a European colonial-settler state that continues to grant privileges to Jews, while systematically discriminating against its non-Jewish Arab citizens.
This racism in Israel, as Joseph Massad, an associate professor in Modern Arab politics at New York City’s Columbia University noted in an March 2007 Al Ahram essay, Israel’s right to be racist, is manifest “in its flag, its national anthem and a bunch of laws that are necessary to safeguard Jewish privilege”. As long as Israel continues to function as a “Jewish” state and continues its illegal and brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank there will be no resolution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. As Massad notes, “no resolution will ever be possible before Israel revokes its racist laws and does away with its racist symbols, thus opening the way for a non-racist future for Palestinians and Jews in a decolonised bi-national state”.
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