The Appalling Racism Within Apartheid Israel

Figures on the rampant, overt racist attitudes of Israeli Jews revealed in Haaretz are astounding and vile:

‘The majority of the Jewish public, 59 percent, wants preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half the Jews, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don’t want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don’t want their children in the same class with Arab children.

A third of the Jewish public wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset and a large majority of 69 percent objects to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

A sweeping 74 percent majority is in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. A quarter – 24 percent – believe separate roads are “a good situation” and 50 percent believe they are “a necessary situation.”

Almost half – 47 percent – want part of Israel’s Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority and 36 percent support transferring some of the Arab towns from Israel to the PA, in exchange’

From past figures, it seems that Netanyahu’s fanatical rightwing pandering has contributed to the growth in vicious racism.

In 2010, 36 percent of Israeli Jews were in favor of revoking the voting rights of non-Jews.

In 2007

Over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason, according to a recent survey by the Geocartography Institute.

The survey, which was conducted for the Center Against Racism, also found that over 75 percent of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty percent of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home.

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Full text

Apartheid without shame or guilt : We’re racists, the Israelis are saying, we practice apartheid and we even want to live in an apartheid state. Yes, this is Israel.

Levy corrects his errors

The article itself, which I wrote, did not contain any mistakes. It provided a precise and detailed description of the survey results. In my analysis of the survey, which appeared as a separate article, there was a single sentence that did not accurately represent the poll results and contradicted what I had written in the news piece a short time beforehand. My sin was to write: “The majority doesn’t want Arabs to vote for the Knesset, Arab neighbors at home or Arab students at school.”

The truth, as I wrote in the news piece, is different: “Just” 33 percent of the respondents said they don’t want Arabs to vote in parliamentary elections, “just” 42 percent wouldn’t want an Arab neighbor, and about the same proportion said it would bother them if there were an Arab student in their child’s class. Not a majority – just a (large ) portion of Israelis espouse these frightening views. Cold comfort.

The most important thing was, and remains, that a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish society advocates positions that can only be described as nationalistic and racist. Nearly half of the respondents don’t want an Arab neighbor or an Arab student in their child’s class; a third don’t want Arabs to vote; nearly half want to discriminate against Arabs living in the country. Isn’t that enough to scare anyone who fears for the future of this country?

Parents of children at a Jewish kindergarten in Nazareth Illit oppose plan to bring in Arab children, threaten strike
Racist JNF plans for driving Bedouins out of the Negev
Zionists continue to attempt to stifle BDS on campus – if it wasn’t effective, would they bother?
Another reason to support academic and cultural boycott of the bulldozer land-thieving zionist entity

How Israel’s murdering IOF thugs shoot Gazan fishermen with impunity

Israel’s Diabolical Starvation Diet for the People of Gaza

Israeli human rights organisation, Gisha, was recently able to access Israel’s 2008 ‘Red Lines’ document annotating its plans to maintain the captive population of Gaza on a starvation diet. Yet Israel did not keep to this plan. Despite this diabolical ‘starvation’ diet calculated malevolently as collective punishment, Israel only let in half the trucks required for it. What is half of starvation?

‘But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition – requiring 170 trucks a day – military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.

The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks – much less than half of the minimum requirement – entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.

To achieve this large reduction, officials deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in the ”culture and experience” of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale never explained.’

Palestine/Israel Links

When liars lie to liars. Lieberman to Cashton.
The death of the two state solution:

‘We could argue over who killed it, but what’s the point? It’s increasingly obvious that a continued insistence on zombie peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians is deluded, because the two-state principle framing them is dead. ‘

The Cameri Theatre group serves as an “official propaganda tool for the State of Israel — a State that occupies Palestinian lands and practises apartheid policies on the Palestinian people.’’’

Four of five speakers pull out of UNESCO conference honoring Israel’s Peres at University of Connecticut

Alice Walker, Roger Waters and Remi Kanazi urge Carnegie Hall in NYC to cancel this week’s performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; and much more in BDS news.

Released Israeli Activists from SV Estelle say tasers and brutal force used – Greek MP assaulted

The nefarious actions of the Israeli government against BGU make a mockery of any claims that academic boycott against Israel’s complicit academic institutions are unwarranted.

Palestinians Reject All Racism and Bigotry

An important and timely affirmation from Palestinian people, published on Electronic Intifada:

The struggle for Palestinian rights is incompatible with any form of racism or bigotry: a statement by Palestinians

We the undersigned, as Palestinians living in historic Palestine and the diaspora, in the spirit of past statements, and in light of recent controversies, write to reaffirm a key principle of our movement for freedom, justice, and equality: The struggle for our inalienable rights is one opposed to all forms of racism and bigotry, including, but not limited to, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Zionism, and other forms of bigotry directed at anyone, and in particular people of color and indigenous peoples everywhere.

We oppose the cynical and baseless use of the term anti-Semitism as a tool for stifling criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism, as this assumes simply because someone is Jewish, they support Zionism or the colonial and apartheid policies of the state of Israel – a false generalization.

Our struggle is anchored in universal human rights and international law in opposition to military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, something people of conscience of all ethnicities, races, and religions can support.

Finally, we call on people around the world to join us in a morally consistent stance that opposes racism and bigotry in all forms. An ethical struggle for justice and equal rights in any context entails zero tolerance for racial discrimination and racism anywhere.

Signed (in order of signature):

  1. Abir Kopty
  2. Danya Mustafa
  3. Nadia Hijab
  4. Shirien Damra
  5. Omar Barghouti
  6. Noura Erakat
  7. Remi Kanazi
  8. Andrew Kadi
  9. Dina Omar
  10. Sandra Tamari
  11. Maath Musleh
  12. Suleiman Hodali
  13. Dana Saifan
  14. Jess Ghannam
  15. Sami Kishawi
  16. Dalia Almarina
  17. Haidar Eid
  18. Samee Sulaiman
  19. Lubna Hammad
  20. Issa Mikel
  21. Dina Zbidat
  22. Esmat Elhalaby
  23. Linah Alsaafin
  24. Ramzi Jaber
  25. Randa May Wahbe
  26. Hilda Massoud
  27. Falastine Dwikat
  28. Jamil Sbitan
  29. Beesan Ramadan
  30. Alaa Milbes
  31. Tanya Keilani
  32. Adam Akkad
  33. Budour Hassan
  34. Ahmad Nimer
  35. Fajr Harb
  36. Susan Abulhawa
  37. Amira Dasouqi
  38. Lubna Alzaroo
  39. Samah Sabawi
  40. Ismail Khalidi
  41. Annemarie Jacir
  42. George E. Bisharat
  43. Sara Jawhari
  44. Amin Abbas
  45. Ali Abunimah
  46. Camillia Shoufani
  47. Dena Qaddumi
  48. Ramzi Kanazi
  49. Alaa Yousef
  50. Najwa Doughman
  51. Amal Atieh Jubran
  52. Mahdi Sabbagh
  53. Rania Jubran
  54. Amar Husain
  55. Omar H. Rahman
  56. Yazeed Ibrahim
  57. Zachariah Barghouti
  58. Nadine Darwish
  59. Rinad Abdulla
  60. Sana Ibrahim
  61. Rana Libdeh
  62. Huwaida Arraf
  63. Basil Farraj
  64. Riham Barghouti
  65. Jalal Abukhater
  66. Grace Said
  67. Wafai Dias
  68. Huda Asfour
  69. Musa Al-Hindi
  70. Halla Shoaibi
  71. Nada Elia
  72. Shafeka Hashash
  73. Linda Sarsour
  74. Nour Joudah
  75. Fadi Quran
  76. Rafeef Ziadah
  77. Muhammad Jabali
  78. Haneen Maikey
  79. Diana Alzeer
  80. Mouin Rabbani
  81. Zaid Shuaibi
  82. Sari Harb
  83. Suzy Salamy
  84. Diana Buttu
  85. Maryam Zohny
  86. Vivien Sansour
  87. Noor Fawzy
  88. Jackie Salloum
  89. Hatem Bazian
  90. Awad Hamdan
  91. Ahmed Moor
  92. Zahi Damuni
  93. Irene Nasser
  94. Sanah Yassin
  95. Sumia Ibrahim
  96. Hazem Jamjoum

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Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon

A Quantum of Racism

Two young Palestinian Israeli citizens who came second in an international Physics Competition in Warsaw are omitted conspicuously in a racist report on the winners in Israel Hayom. It is notable that of all the Israeli winners, only ONE won a prize in the 24th European Union Contest for Young Scientists, and it was the Palestinian Israeli, Alfarook Abu Alhassan, who won the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility GmbH Prize.

*Even when you excel and you are an Arab, you remain invisible.

* Israel came first in an international physics competition, and it is trying to reach the same benchmark in racism.

First published: 1/10/2012 11:30:27am

On 20 September 2012 Israel Hayom published an article under the headline Quantum of success. It highlighted the success of the Israeli delegation from Ilan Ramon Centre at Ben-Gurion University in a competition held at the Institute of Physics in Warsaw.

The article contained the names of the winners, but not all of them…

It mentioned the first prize winner (Yuval Katznelson) and one of third prize winners (May Alon). The article quotes Professor Victor Malamud, head of the Ilan Ramon Centre at BGU, which coordinates efforts for the competition as saying that “We succeeded in showing the world the potential of the Jewish mind.”

On the surface, a cause for Jewish pride, indeed..

But what about the second place getter in the competition? The two second place winners, Magd Alfrawona and Alfarook Abu Alhassan were not mentioned at all. Probably because they don’t have a Jewish mind, or because they are Arabs …

What is the message that such articles give to the general public? What is the message that head of the program is providing to the students?

The conclusion is inescapable, instead of being proud of all those who represented the country and impel them further forward, there is a very clear delineation between the Arab and Jewish participants. This is not all that far from our reality which is full of physical and virtual fences marking the separation between the two peoples.

This statement is racist for several reasons: it ignores some of the delegation’s winners, solely because cultural/social/national differences. This statement tries to establish the superiority of some participants over others on the sole basis of their national affiliation. In addition to all this, the article tries to obliterate the Arab presence in the delegation, and their success. This is despite the writers being aware of a different picture being presented on the university’s English-language website (there the two Arab winners are mentioned, and they also appear in the team photo published in the newspaper).

It is a pity that a lecturer in such a distinguished university professor chose to speak in such a racist fashion as he died. We hope he’ll get his comeuppance when the university launches an inquiry and takes disciplinary proceedings against him, and those responsible for this letdown.

This article proves once again that academia is not free of racism …

Names of participants Winners: http://in.bgu.ac.il/ilanramon/Pages/FIRST%20STEP%20TO%20NOBEL%20PRIZE%20IN%20PHYSICS.aspx

Israel Hayom article:

English: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=5841

Hebrew: http://www.israelhayom.co.il/site/newsletter_article.php?id=21508&hp=1&newsletter=20.09.2012

Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service Melbourne, Australia

Hebrew original: http://fightracism.org/Article.asp?aid=328

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High on positivism
The French Political Science Association: A sanction that appears to be based on political grounds
Ha’aretz editorial: CHE’s recommendation stems from desire to punish faculty who dared offer their students a critical viewpoint
Netanyahu’s Likud party and its nationalist ally, Yisrael Beiteinu, have been cracking down on dissenters for months. It would seem that cowing the academy is one of their objectives. Of the current academic situation in Israel, Lustick told me, “there’s a real witch-hunt.”