US Congress Votes: Israel Not Racist 😂

Richard Medhurst

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South Africa

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“Gaza reminds me of apartheid in South Africa”

20.05.2021 #Apartheid#Palestine#GazaThe situation in Gaza “brings back terrible memories of apartheid” according to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during a France 24 interview.

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Israel’s Racist Nation-State: Codifying Apartheid into Basic Law

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, May 05, 2018

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: Law and Justice, Poverty & Social Inequality

In-depth Report: PALESTINE

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stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

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A nation affording rights to its favored people over others is profoundly hostile to democratic values – what apartheid is all about.

Arabs aren’t welcome or wanted in Israel except as servants to Jews. Israeli laws and customs discriminate against them – hostility toward Arabs in the Occupied Territories extreme.

“Israel’s regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations,” B’Tselem explained, adding:

“End(ing) (it along with Israeli Arabs afforded rights no different from Jews) is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Institutional racism is longstanding Israeli policy – its 20% Arab population (Muslims and Christians) mistreated and consider a fifth column threat. [Arab Jews are not categorized as Arabs despite the fact that a significant share of Israel’s Jewish population is of Arabic descent]

In 2011, legislation was introduced to enshrine Israel’s definition of a Jewish state into Basic Law. No constitution exists. Basic Laws substitute.

Initially not acted on, it resurfaced in November 2014. Extremist cabinet ministers voted to draft a New Basic Law for consideration, saying it’s to:

“(D)efine the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and to anchor the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the principles of the Declaration of the Independence.”

Proposed legislation declared “the right to express national self-determination within the State of Israel only to the Jewish people.”

The measure failed to become law. A revised version was drafted, calling the “State of Israel…the national home of the Jewish people.”

Its draft language declared the “right to self-determination…unique to the Jewish people,” codifying discrimination against Arab citizens.

On Tuesday, the measure passed its first reading – three readings required for enactment into law.

If adopted as Israeli Basic Law, it would enshrine the nation as “the national home of the Jewish people.”

The measure was sent to a Knesset committee for further consideration. Its controversial provisions include recognizing Israel’s Jewish character over democratic values when both are at odds.

Another section approved establishment of exclusive Jewish communities, codifying apartheid into Basic Law, making it more binding and permanent than already.

The measure declares Hebrew the official “language of the state,” Arabic permitted but subordinated, aiming to limit its public use.

Advancing the bill to second and third readings will likely occur after the next election. Kulanu, Yisrael and ultra-orthodox parties oppose the current version.

Having passed its first reading by a 64 to 50 margin in the 120-seat Knesset, eventual enactment into Basic Law is likely.

According to co-sponsor Likudnik MK Avi Dichter,

“(a)nyone who does not belong to the Jewish nation cannot define the State of Israel as his nation-state,” adding:

“The Palestinians will not be able to define Israel as their nation-state. The nation-state law is the insurance policy we are leaving for the next generation.”

The measure is hugely discriminatory, affording rights to Jews denied to Arabs.

Despite language saying everyone has the right “to preserve his or her culture, heritage, language and identity,” the right to self-determination “is (declared) unique to the Jewish people” – indicating opposition to Palestinian self-determination in any future no-peace/peace process talks.

The final version of law adopted may differ in part from its current form, its discriminatory nature virtually certain to be kept intact.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

The original source of this article is Global Research

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Why Zionism has always been a racist ideology

April 20, 2019 at 3:42 pm | Published in: Article, Israel, Middle East, Opinion, Palestine

Asa Winstanley

 AsaWinstanleyApril 20, 2019 at 3:42 pm

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Labour’s Shadow Justice Minister Richard Burgon expressed regret this week for having stated in a speech some years ago that Zionism is the “enemy of peace”. He should not have apologised. His 2014 comments were a simple matter of historical fact, and he should have stood by them.

Liberal and “left” Zionists argue that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly far-right government is a “corruption” of the so-called Zionist dream. This vision represents an egalitarian haven for the world’s oppressed Jewish peoples, we are told.

This is an ahistorical fantasy.

The movement to create a “Jewish state” in Palestine – a country overwhelmingly non-Jewish – was, from its very inception, an exclusionary, racist project. From its earliest days, Zionism was imbued with the same racist attitudes of other European settler-colonial movements. The liberal Zionist conception of equality within Palestine, in reality, excludes Palestinian Arabs, the indigenous people of the land. Such willful blindness is a common feature of colonial movements.

As the renowned Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha explained decades ago his masterful study “Expulsion of the Palestinians”, the Zionist movement, in fact, understood that there were actually people already living in Palestine. However, they chose not to see them as full human beings worthy of rights equal to Jewish settlers.

Masalha wrote that early Zionist Israel Zangwill’s infamous slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” was not intended as a literal demographic assessment. Zionists “did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway”.

OPINION: Gantz, Zionism and the two-state compromise

These notions of white supremacy, which at that time went unquestioned by European elites, were a common feature of colonial projects of all types. How, then, could Zionism be any different?

The answer is that it was not, no matter how much of a “leftist” cast Labor Zionists put on their colonial movement. Western European Labour movements in colonial metropoles, after all, were often explicitly pro-empire in orientation; arguably none more so than the British Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn’s history of support for some of the most basic of Palestinian human rights actually represents a historical rupture with the Labour Party’s long-standing, almost unbroken, record of vehemently anti-Palestinian policies.

Take Richard Crossman for example, a minister in Harold Wilson’s government of the 1960s and later editor of the New Statesman. He was a towering figure of the Labour left at the time, yet was one of the most fanatical of Zionists in the entire party. In a 1959 lecture in Israel, he stated that “no one, until the 20th century, seriously challenged” the “right” or “duty” of what he termed “the white man” in Africa and the Americas “to civilize these continents by physically occupying them, even at the cost of wiping out the aboriginal population.”

Genocide, in other words.

Crossman also lamented that “Jewish settlers” in Palestine had not “achieved their majority before 1914,” and that the Palestinians “regarded them as ‘white settlers,’ come to occupy the Middle East”. One should note that his doyen of the Labour left did not express condemnation of the “white settlers” who did, in fact, come to occupy Palestine by force while displacing the indigenous people. He only regretted that Palestinians recognised the Zionist movement for what it really was and thus opposed it.

OPINION: Kahanism – the logical conclusion of Zionism

No wonder, then, that the Labour government of 1945 had, as part of its election platform, a plank explicitly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine in order to make way for a “Jewish state”. The document claimed there was a necessity in Palestine “for [the] transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in”.

The document even went further, advocating future expansion of the borders of the prospective “Jewish state” by annexing parts of Transjordan, Egypt or Syria “by agreement”. In reality, Egypt and the future state of Jordan were then British puppet regimes.

Ben Pimlott, biographer of Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, described this vision as “Zionism plus plus” – toned down from an even more extreme plan Dalton himself had preferred which had advocated “throwing open Libya or Eritrea to Jewish settlement, as satellites or colonies to Palestine”.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Dalton was, like many colonialists, an explicit racist. He used violently hateful language about black people and Jews, mocking one Labour MP who was Jewish for supposed “yideology”.

Then, as now, Zionism has more often than not gone hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism. Many white racists who despise Jews often have no problem with the concept of a “Jewish state” in Palestine – after all, it holds the prospects of removing Jews from Europe.

As the alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacres wrote in his “manifesto,” while denying he is an anti-Semite: “A Jew living in Israel is no enemy of mine, so long as they do not seek to subvert or harm my [white] people.”

READ: New Zealand massacre suspect appears in court

For all these reasons and more, Zionism has always been a racist movement – no less so in its “labor Zionist” version.

Today, labour Zionism is dead as a political force within occupied Palestine. The Labor party – whose political antecedents founded the state of Israel and perpetrated the Nakba of 1948, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by force – is now relegated to a rump of six seats in the Knesset.

Labor Zionism’s primary utility to the wider Zionist movement is as an ideological weapon against the global left and the Palestine solidarity movement around the world, as seen in the divisive role such groups as the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Labour Friends of Israel have played in the long-running campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.

As one key JLM leader explained the same month that Corbyn was first elected UK Labour leader in 2015: “We built a robust political discourse, rooted in the politics of the left and deployed it in their own backyard.” This project was undertaken so that “Israel’s case” would not be “lost by default”. The Labour anti-Semitism “crisis” is, in reality, a campaign by racists to smear anti-racists as “racist.”

READ: Pompeo condemns rise of anti-Semitism, blasts Britain’s Labour Party

Updated on 23 April 2019 at 12.59 the column was mistakenly published quoting a Labour MP being mocked for supposed “ideology” which should have been “yideology”.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.