Israel: an apartheid state?

It should be cause for comfort that Zionists still deny that Israel is an apartheid state. They have just enough decency to know that their segregationist state is repugnant but not enough integrity to admit it.

The link above is to The Palestine Monitor's article on Israel's apartheid system and laws. I said in the previous post that it has become fashionable for Zionists to say that one can criticise Israel without being labelled anti-semitic, well it has always been the fashion to say that Israel's racism is the same as any other country's. This isn't true. It is true that all states have racists but it is not true to say that all states are racist states. Israel is a racist state. Zionists like to say that Israel is for Jews as France is for the French. But France defines the French as the people of France. The Jews are clearly not the people of Israel and many Israelis are not Jews.

Zionists make great play of the fact that Arabs can and do become MKs (members of the Israeli parliament/knesset) but they cannot campaign for racial or religiousuequality as this would undermine the "Jewish character" of the state.

Political participation

Palestinians' right to run for elections to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, are also limited by their acceptance of the notion of the Jewish state. These limits are expressed in the Law of Political Parties (1992) and, in particular, the amendment of section7 A(1) of the Basic Law: The Knesset, which prevents candidates from participating in the elections if their platform suggests the "denial of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people". Under this section a party platform that challenges the Jewish character of the state, i.e., that challenges Zionist ideology and praxis by calling for full and complete equality between Jews and Arabs in a state for all its citizens, can be disqualified, as such non-Zionist lists have been in the past. The law prohibits Palestinian citizens from mounting a political challenge to the state's Zionist identity in a legal forum, the Knesset*.

Of course, Zionists know all of this. They have heard it a million times before; but their refusal to acknowledge it means that it must be repeated again and again.

*This can work against the extreme right in Israel. Kach, the organisation founded by the American "rabbi" Meir Kahane, was banned for being embarrassingly, openly. racist. The ban was supposedly on the grounds of Kach's racism but when you consider, for example, the presence of Moledet (the transfer party), in Israeli cabinets, you get to realise that it's Kach's openness about Zionist racism that was a problem for the powers that be in (and outside of) Israel.