Targeting Israeli Apartheid

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Targeting Israeli Apartheid – by Stephen Lendman

Reports like the Cape Town, South Africa-based Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) May 2009 one titled, “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid” highlight what many others understand, including former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, John Dugard, stating in January 2007:

“Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories). At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law.”

Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court calls apartheid a crime, stating:

“For the purpose of this Statute, (a) ‘crime against humanity’ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

The crime of apartheid” includes murder, extermination, enslavement, torture, arbitrary arrest, illegal imprisonment, denial of the right to life and liberty, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and other abusive acts imposed by one group on another.

In 2008, writing for the Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid, Karine MacAllister said in her article titled, “Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel” that exclusivism is key to understanding the essence of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. It:

“involves or necessitates the denial of the other; of their presence, rights and existence on the land and reconstruction of the past, namely that the land was empty before the advent of Zionist settlement, hence the movement’s slogan describing ‘a land without people for a people without land.’ “

As implemented, Zionism’s essence is “a sophisticated legal, social, economic and political regime of racial discrimination that has led to colonialism and apartheid as well as the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people.” Colonialism flourishes by separating indigenous people from their land and heritage.

Yet Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states:

“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportation of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of the motive.” Neither shall “The Occupying Power….deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (the Apartheid Convention) defines it as:

“similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa (for) the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

Apartheid is one of the worst forms of racism.

The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination defines it as:

“any
distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color,
descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect
of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on
an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the
political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public
life.”

The 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I) includes among other grave breaches:

“practices
of apartheid and other inhuman and degrading practices involving
outrages upon personal dignity, based on racial discrimination.”

The
October 2008 “UNITED AGAINST Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation
DIGNITY & JUSTICE for the Palestinian People” Palestinian Civil
Society’s Strategic Position Paper for the April 20 – 24, 2009 Durban
Review Conference called racism and foreign domination the root causes
of Palestinian suffering under decades of “settler-colonialism,
occupation and institutionalized racial discrimination.”

It
affirmed the Durban Declaration’s “principles of equal rights and
self-determination of peoples and stress(ed) that states must protect
such equality as a matter of highest priority.”

It
acknowledged that “no derogation from the prohibition of racial
discrimination, genocide, the crime of apartheid and slavery is
permitted (and recognized them as) crimes against humanity (and) major
sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia
and related intolerance (and) wherever and whenever they occurred, they
must be condemned and their re-occurrence prevented.”

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW)

Launched
in Toronto in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations,
it’s an annual series of university lectures, rallies, multimedia
events, cultural performances, films, and demonstrations held in cities
worldwide to educate people about the nature and destructiveness of
Israeli apartheid, and to strengthen the global Boycott, Divestment,
and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

From March 1 – 14, 2010, they’ll be held in 40 cities:

Abu
Dis in the West Bank, Amsterdam, Bard (NY), Berkeley (CA), Beirut,
Bethlehem, Bogota, Bologna, Boston, Cape Town, Caracas, Chicago,
Connecticut, Dundee (Scotland), Durban, Eastern Cape, Edinburgh,
Edmonton, Gaza, Glasgow, Guelph (Canada), Hamilton, Houston, Ireland,
Jenin, Johannesburg, Kingston, London (Canada), London (UK), Melbourne,
Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, Peterborough (UK), Pisa, Pretoria,
Providence, Puebla (Mexico), Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Sudbury,
Tilburg (The Netherlands), Toronto, Utrecht (The Netherlands),
Vancouver, Waterloo (Canada), and Winnipeg.

Its
supporters call it an expression of Palestinian solidarity, a call to
boycott, divest and impose sanctions, and a demand that Israel be held
accountable for decades of oppressive occupation, imperial wars,
defiling international laws, expropriating Palestinian land, denying
self-determination, the right of return, targeted killings, torture,
illegal arrests and incarcerations, and the suppression of equal rights
and social, political and economic justice.

They’ll
also highlight apartheid’s environmental costs, the importance of
ending a colonial occupation, and a vision for equality, justice and
peace.

Media Reports

On
March 2, AlJazeera headlined, “Israeli Apartheid Week kicks off,”
explaining the annual event’s “condemnation of the Zionist regime’s
suppression of the Palestinians” through protests and a host of related
speeches and other activities.

Haaretz
ran several articles, including Salman Masalha’s March 3 commentary
headlined, “Israel’s apartheid doesn’t stop at the West Bank,” saying:

Since
Israel’s founding, it hasn’t “kept its promise “to preserve peace and
participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and
equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and
permanent institutions.”

Instead,
it “continues to conduct itself like a Zionist occupation regime on
every inch of the land. True,” Israeli Arabs have some free movement
“in their homeland and even send representatives to the Knesset (with
no power) – but this is the sum of the equality that was formulated and
promised,” in contrast to the OPT where there’s none.

On
the same day Haaretz’s Danna Harman headlined, “Universities across the
globe mark Israeli Apartheid Week,” highlighting Israeli participants
and calling the events “some of the most important (ones) in the
Palestine solidarity calendar, according to its organizers.

Harman
also quoted Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies’ David Katz calling the
participation of Jews in the events “atrocious….They are free to do
as they please, but it’s atrocious. I think they don’t understand the
analogy they are making….which is insulting to those who suffered
under apartheid.”

Jewish South African immigrant Benjamin Pogrund agreed saying “Israelis (taking) part in this week should know better.”

The
Canadian Ontario legislature “unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid
Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.” Will
Ottawa, London and Washington
be far behind?

Conservative
legislator Peter Shulman told Shalom Life, a Toronto Jewish web site:
“The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to
hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain
it doesn’t actually cross over the line.”

The
Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA), a
voluntary association of 22 MPs exploiting anti-semitism for political
purposes, calls “anti-Zionism….cover for anti-semitism,” and
perpetrators should be held criminally liable.

In
America, The New York Times was silent, but the Washington Post’s
Richard Cohen, an unabashed Israeli flack, said Israeli Apartheid Week
reflects anti-semitism and “imaginary” not “legitimate” grievances
“constructed out of lies about the Jewish state….denigrat(ing) the
Palestinian cause….Israel has its faults, but it is not motivated by
racism.”

A
Canada National Post commentary headlined, “A festival of bigotry
(featuring) rabid expressions of hatred against Israel and its Jewish
inhabitants….with extremist speakers whipping crowds into the sort of
frenzy one more usually sees in newsreel footage from the streets of
Cairo or Gaza City….IAW types don’t care about human rights. They
care about smearing the Jewish state.”

Pro-Israeli
organizations denounced IAW, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for one
highlighting the “extreme anti-Israel rhetoric….accusations of
Israeli racism and apartheid….and allegation that Israel is
committing war crimes and genocide against the Palestinian people,” the
ADL, of course, calling this hateful.

Organizers respond saying “Join us in making 2010 a year of struggle against apartheid and for justice, equality, and peace.”

Stephen
Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also
visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to
cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive
Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US
Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are
archived for easy listening.

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Gulbarg Society killings: High court urged to transfer case | TwoCircles.net

Submitted by admin3 on 4 March 2010 – 10:43am.

* Indian Muslim

By IANS,

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court here was petitioned Wednesday to transfer the 2002 Gulbarg Society massacre case, which left 69 people dead during the Gujarat riots, the affected families alleging a bias on the part of the special judge.

The petition by witnesses and riot victims comes after their plea filed before the principal sessions judge G.B. Shah for the transfer was dismissed on the premise that the special court was appointed by the Gujarat High Court.

The petitioners contend that the behaviour of special judge B.U Joshi during trial had led to erosion of faith in him and in the circumstances the case should be transferred to some other court.

They allege that after two witnesses — Imtiyaz Khan Pathan and Rupa Dara Modi — deposed, the judge disallowed further witnesses from stepping out of the witness box to identify the accused at the back of the courtroom, and overruled the objections raised by the witnesses through their advocates.

The special court was set up by the Gujarat High Court under directions of the Supreme Court for the trial of nine serious incidents of killings during the 2002 communal riots.

The 69 people who died in the Gulbarg Society massacre also included former Congress MP Ehsaan Jaffri.

The petition in the high court also comes a day after the special public prosecutor R.K. Shah and assistant public prosecutor Naina Bhatt sent in their resignations from the case to the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing it.

Muslims Won’t Play Together

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London

WE may scoff at the idea that the Olympic Games have anything to do with the “endeavor to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace,” as the Olympic charter enshrines as its ideal. But at least nations across the world were able to put aside differences for two weeks of friendly competition in Vancouver.

A mundane achievement, perhaps, but it’s one that’s beyond the grasp of the Islamic world. The Islamic Solidarity Games, the Olympics of the Muslim world, which were to be held in Iran in April, have been called off by the Arab states because Tehran inscribed “Persian Gulf” on the tournament’s official logo and medals.

It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is not the first time that Arabs have challenged the internationally accepted name of the waterway that separates Persia (or Iran, as it has been called since 1935) from the Arabian Peninsula. Pan-Arabist thought — which dominated Arab political life for most of the 20th century — insisted on the creation of a unified vast empire “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arab Gulf,” provoking sharp confrontations with Iran since the late 1960s.

The Islamic regime in Tehran, which came to power in 1979 dismissing nationalism as an imperialist plot aimed at weakening the worldwide Muslim community (or umma), initially displayed less interest in the gulf’s Persian identity than in the spread of its Islamist message. “The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people,” insisted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”

Yet like Stalin, who responded to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 by urging his people to fight for the motherland rather than for the Communist ideals with which they had been indoctrinated, Khomeini reverted to nationalist rhetoric to rally his subjects after the Iraqi invasion of 1980. He also used the war to justify a string of military and diplomatic actions against the smaller Arab states like Qatar and Kuwait aimed at asserting Iran’s supremacy in the gulf.

In this history of a single body of water, one sees a perfect example of the so-called Islamic Paradox that dates from the seventh century. For although the Prophet Muhammad took great pains to underscore the equality of all believers regardless of ethnicity, categorically forbidding any fighting among the believers, his precepts have been constantly and blatantly violated.

It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased. Likewise, there has been no overarching Islamic solidarity transcending the multitude of parochial loyalties — to one’s clan, tribe, village, family or nation. Thus, for example, not only do Arabs consider themselves superior to all other Muslims, but inhabitants of Hijaz, the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam’s birthplace, regard themselves the only true Arabs, and tend to be highly disparaging of all other Arabic-speaking communities.

Nor, for that matter, has the House of Islam ever formed a unified front vis-à-vis the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world). Even during the Crusades, the supposed height of the “clash of civilizations,” Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide, often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co-religionists. While the legendary Saladin himself was busy eradicating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, he was closely aligned with the Byzantine Empire, the foremost representative of Christendom’s claim to universalism.

This pattern of pragmatic cooperation reached its peak during the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire relied on Western economic and military support to survive. (The Charge of the Light Brigade of 1854 was, at its heart, part of a French-British effort to keep the Ottomans from falling under Russian hegemony.) It has also become a central feature of 20th- and 21
st-century Middle Eastern politics.

Muslim and Arab rulers have always, in their intrigues, sought the support and protection of the “infidel” powers they so vilify. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the champion of pan-Arabism who had built his reputation on standing up to “Western imperialism,” imported more than 10,000 Soviet troops into Egypt when his “War of Attrition” against Israel in the late 1960s went sour.

Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini bought weapons from even the “Great Satan,” the United States. Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his war against Iran in the 1980s. And Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Afghan mujahedeen accepted weapons and money from the United States, with the Islamic state of Pakistan as the middleman, in their struggle against the Soviet occupation.

Yet, since it is far easier to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty, Islamic solidarity has been repeatedly invoked as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaimed it. Little wonder the covenant of Hamas insists, “When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims.”

So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?

For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.

Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

As for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the idea that bringing peace between the two parties will bring about a flowering of cooperation in the region and take away one of Al Qaeda’s primary gripes against the West totally misreads history and present-day politics. Muslim states threaten Israel’s existence not so much out of concern for the Palestinians, but rather as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam.

In these circumstances, one can only welcome the latest changes in the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern policy, which combine a tougher stance on Iran’s nuclear subterfuge with a less imperious approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s two-track plan — discussion with Tehran while at the same time lining up meaningful sanctions — is fine as far as it goes. But a military strike must remain a serious option: there is no peaceful way to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stemming as they do from its imperialist brand of national-Islamism.

Likewise, there is no way for the Obama administration to resolve the 100-year war between Arabs and Jews unless all sides are convinced that peace is in each of their best interests. Any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is far less important than a regional agreement in which every Islamic nation can make peace with the idea of Jewish statehood in the House of Islam.

And that, depressingly, is going to be a lot harder to pull off than even the Islamic Solidarity Games.