Friday, December 24, 2010

Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide

The new book by Ben White

Sample text 1:

“Over the course of a generation, Palestine disappeared from the map. By 1970, just over seventy years since the Basle congress launched Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state, Palestinian society had been shattered:

Around half of all Palestinians were living outside of Palestine as dispossessed, denationalised refugees, prevented from returning home.

One in seven Palestinians were living as second-class citizens in a state that defined itself as the homeland of the Jews.

One in three Palestinians were living under military rule, increasingly subject to a regime of apartheid separation designed to facilitate the colonisation of the OPT by Israeli settlers. (Over half of the OPT population were themselves refugees from 1948).

For political Zionism to come to fruition – for a Jewish state to be created in Palestine – it was necessary to carry out as large a scale as possible ethnic cleansing of the country’s unwanted Arab natives. But even in 1948, and especially in 1967, Israel was unable to fully ‘cleanse’ the land of the Palestinians. As a result, Israel’s fallback position was to implement an apartheid regime of exclusion and discrimination. Where the dispossession had been most effective – inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders –apartheid could be less explicit. But in the OPT, home to a vast majority of Palestinians, Israeli apartheid had to be overt and iron-fisted. In Part II, we will examine conditions for Palestinians living in both Israel and the OPT.”

From ‘Part I: Israeli Independence, Palestinian Catastrophe’

http://israeliapartheidguide.com/sample/

No comments: