ISRAEL MAKES APARTHEID LEGAL
The big and powerful nations who promised us freedom and equality must stand united against Israel’s racism
ONE must be really a misanthrope to hate another human being. More so, if you are a people extended some space to start life anew. This is how the Israelis appear to some. Or at least those Israelis who want to deny the Palestinians what the Israelis want for themselves. The Earth is large enough, but human selfishness gives the planet a facade of smallness. What God has made expansive, men make narrow.
I am no psychologist but I think it will baffle these men of science to know that one who has suffered at the hands of German persecutors could inflict a pain so similar on a people who have nothing to do with the persecution. Perhaps trauma works in mysterious ways. I heard it said many times before that victims often become persecutors. Those who are familiar with the human psyche may understand it better.
Benjamin Netanyahu wants Israel only for the Jews, not other Israelis. The “others” are of course the Arab Palestinians. Nelson Mandela may have put an end to apartheid but Netanyahu has revived it by passing a law in the Knesset to make Israel an exclusively Jewish state. The law is called the Jewish nation-state law. The irony was not lost on people around the world.
Those who do not have short memories will remember how the Jewsih state came into being in the first place. By forcefully ejecting the Palestinian Arabs who had been there for generations. Ejected, too, was the Arabic language. As for Jerusalem, Netanyahu is stealing it, with American complicity. There is an English word for this: deniers. People like Netanyahu and those who advise him are myth makers who deny reality. They rush to create ‘truth’ on the ground by building settlements on Palestinian land. Lies walk the land dressed up as “truths”.
The Modi’in Illit settlement that sprang up so quickly in the West Bank is a means to that Netanyahu end. More than 60,000 Jews live there. It is so mega that it has its own mayor. Schools, shopping malls, and everything that a big settlement requires, Modi’in Illit has them. The point of it and all other Israeli settlements that have sprung up is for Netanyahu to say to the world: “Look, here on this ground live thousands of Jews, so it cannot be Palestine because it is already Israel.” This is the “truth” on the ground that Netanyahu is constructing on the way to the onestate, one-race solution.
What is even more troubling is Netanyahu’s choice of words when tabling the Jewish nationstate bill at the Knesset: “A defining moment in the annals of Zionism.” It circumscribes Israel by excluding the Arab Palestinians. Some will argue as the Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Jerusalem, has argued: “Netanyahu is putting into the constitution all the segregation and discriminatory policy that Israel has been practising for 70 long years since its creation.” The only difference is that apartheid is now formalised.
If we accept the fact that the Jews are a superior race then we are all running down a very slippery slope. Because there is nothing to stop the Germans from saying they are a superior race, too, or the Aryans as Adolf Hitler claimed for himself and others of his kind. The Jews know this very well because this exclusivity was what caused the Holocaust. It is an irony that the Jews should do this on July 19, a day after the centenary celebration of Mandela, the man who snuffed out apartheid. We have come a full circle: the victims of German Holocaust are setting in motion a holocaust of the Palestinians. Hitler will enjoy the irony.
The sad tale of this world we are living in is that powerful nations gave us hope of a better life after two bloody wars in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Those very nations are keeping a pregnant silence while Netanyahu is noisily beating the drums of apartheid. UDHR is supposed to be the foundation of our common future. They were announced to the world to be universal values. Its preamble came with a bang of a promise: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...”
Here on planet Earth on July 19, 2018, Israel was saying otherwise. Yet no one signatory of UNHDR has come out to condemn it except the meek. Bigotry of the big and prejudice of the powerful have triumphed once again. As they have done so very many times in the 8,000 years of our human history.
Perhaps we live in dismal times. Apartheid is alive and living a good life in many countries. Mandiba may have killed apartheid in South Africa, but he died before putting it to death elsewhere. Ask the African Americans, they will write you a long read about the horror of apartheid in America. As if that was not enough, now we have put up with another long read on apartheid in what used to be Palestine.
Mandiba may have killed apartheid in South Africa but he died before putting it to death elsewhere.