Israel is committing cold-hearted, deliberate genocide of the Palestinian people, street by street, olive grove by olive grove, dunum by dunum.
Israeli land thieving continues
While Julia Gillard whoops it up with her apartheid hosts at the King David Hotel {!}, Israeli land thieves break Israeli and international law by selling absentee Palestinian properties to private buyers.
For a Free, Unoccupied Palestine
Boycott Israeli apartheid now – governments eventually submitted to the will of their peoples to end support of the apartheid South African regime. Let’s make them do the right thing again for the occupied people of Palestine.
Julia Gillard and those who accompany her on their current cuddle-up tour of the usurping, apartheid Israeli pseudo-state should be ashamed of themselves.
As Joseph Wakin comments in the Canberra Times:
The answer may lie in the clinking of champagne glasses at the gala dinner to be held at Jerusalem’s prestigious King David Hotel. After our delegation attends the Australia Israel Leadership Forum on June 25-26, there will be a festive celebration that showcases Australia’s finest music, films and food. While nationalistic art is appreciated and applauded, while Australians and Israelis dance and dine, Semitic cousins on the other side of the apartheid wall in the West Bank and Gaza continue their diet under constant checkpoints. Like a movie scene, this is hauntingly familiar.
The forum is not intended to explore differences of opinion, but to exchange commonalities between the two countries, such as educational programs, climate change and water management. A true friend would not shy away from telling the truth. This is in line with Obama’s landmark speech in Cairo: ”As the Holy Koran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth.”
Imagine if Gillard, in the spirit of cultural exchange, tells her counterpart about Australia’s own landmark sorry speech and the annual Sorry Day on May 26. Imagine if she reciprocated her statement that Israel is a country with much to teach us. Imagine her own speech: ”G’Day, Shalom, Salaam, Israel. As an honest friend, who cares for your future, and understands the crossroads and the consequences, I must share with you the profound and positive effect of our public apology to our own indigenous people. This is something I urge you to adopt for your own indigenous people, whose plight and narrative has undeniable commonalties with ours. As our Prime Minister stated, step one is bring home the facts the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it.”
After all, this is what democracies do: listen to the majority opinion, not acquiesce to the loudest sounds.
On the Insiders, Gillard states:
In the Australian community there’s obviously a debate, a very real debate about matters in the Middle East and so I suppose a politician’s visit, whether it’s me or whether it’s Peter Costello or anybody else, a politician’s visit is going to be remarked upon.
Of course the policy position of the Rudd Labor Government, the policy position of the Labor Party, has been well known for a long period of time. We are strong friends and supporters of Israel. We are also strong supporters of a two state solution with secure borders to recognise the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people. That will be my message in Israel. It’s been my message at home and of course there’s been developments in the Middle East peace process of significance, particularly with President Osama’s speech in Cairo and I expect that, amongst other things, to be the subject of discussion at the Australia Israel Dialogue.
Some ALP representatives are not impressed. Federal MP for Fowler, Ms Julia Irwin says:
When leaders and academics are distancing themselves from Israel following its attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, Australian politicians are taking part in this public relations exercise.
Please take some time to ring your Federal Member, ask how they feel about Israeli apartheid, the horrendous three year siege of the people of Gaza, 42 year occupation and 61 year dispossession of the Palestinian people. Let them know about the international and local movements for boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel. Enquire about how much electoral campaign funding they receive from supporters of Israeli apartheid.
The Nut Prince vs SuperObama
In discussions of Netanyahu’s reprehensible, cunningly concocted response to Obama, with its preposterous, humiliating demands for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state despite 24% (and rising rapidly) of its citizens being Palestinian, the grudging formation of an unviable, demilitarised, powerless Palestinian serf state with no control over its borders or airspace, for Jerusalem to belong to Israel, and for ‘natural growth’ of the noxious illegal settlements, a friend mentioned the King of Jordan’s interview with the Times a month or so ago. When the Dark Prince spoke of his willingness to conduct direct negotiations with Arab leaders anywhere, even Jerusalem, he may well have been aiming his words at the King.
In his Times interview, the perceptive King said if Netanyahu stalled in negotiations, it would undermine Obama (and of course delay peace, the much-forestalled formation of Israel’s borders and the return any of the land misappropriated by Israel). Americans seem to be cottoning onto Obama’s stated wish for real peace – his popularity is such that they are turning against the spoilt Zionists – Prince Nut may well have over-estimated the patience of Israel’s longstanding benefactors. Obama however sanctioned 10 years of military aid well in advance of his speech.
The King of Jordan also said that if negotiations for a viable Palestinian state drag on, there will be another war in 12-18 months. Israel recently conducted its largest ever military exercises – focussing on a war with multiple targets, including Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. Who are the Israeli hegemons planning on tricking into a conflagration this time on yet another false pretext to perpetuate victimhood and an overweaning need for self-defence? How many of the 57 states that don’t recognise the pariah state will they again antagonise against the US and what will that do for Obama’s efforts for peace? how will an Israeli war against multiple states lessen the threat of terrorism against US citizenry, once more offered up for sacrifice to the hungry apartheid fascist jackals who perpetually seem to attain the highest office in chronically shell-shocked Israel? Will Obama call Nutanyahoo’s bluff, or have the deals already been done, the cake divided and the crumbs packed in tinselled paper for the people of Palestine, with a rehearsed military smackdown in the wings if they do not eat what they are given?
It’s on the cards that the Prince seek a firy diversion from negotiations for a permanent settlement with the Palestinian people. Since 1948, It has always been so.
Contrasting Israeli Apartheid with the South African experience
Ronnie Kasrils delivered an excellent address in Capetown on the extent of Israeli apartheidism.
Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel’s case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines – even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Israeli apartheidism, based on fascist ideals of ethnic purity, is exposed as far worse even than that practised by its benefactor and ally, the white South African state.
When former deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad and I visited Yasser Arafat in his demolished headquarters in Ramallah as part of a South African delegation in 2004, he pointed around him and said “See this is nothing but a Bantustan!” No, we responded, pointing out that no Bantustan, in fact not even our townships, had been bombed by warplanes, pulverised by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we pointed out that Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed for Bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in order to impress the world that they were serious about so-called “separate development.” The Bantustans were not even fenced-in.
Abhorrently, Israel’s colonial racism continues to be condoned by the west.
What is so shameless about this latter-day colonial sham is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the West to aspire to such a goal even into the 21st Century.
… It needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at the top end of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do we place the human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza, the numerous bloodstained milestone since 1948 or the crimes in Lebanon in 1983 and 2006?
How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, roasting and gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide. For 22 days relentless bombardment whole families vaporised before the horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.
In agreement with Kasrils, we also doubt Obama’s milquetoast sermon will produce any change in the ziofascist enterprise. Can fascism be successfully fought with moderation? While we back boycotts, divestments and sanctions, the US government delivers 10 more years of military funding to Israel in advance.
Dare we believe that an America led by Barak Obama will make a difference? Some raise the hope that after 15 years the stalled Road Map might spring back to life and with it the chimera of a Two-State solution. One notes that President Obama only calls for a freeze in settlement construction – and precious little else. Can 12% or a few percent more in horse- trading provide for a viable Palestinian state? One doubts it.
Why is the concept of one multicultural state (the United States of Palestine?) not on the table? Israel in its present ultra-nationalist form, a faux democracy without individual protections provided by a constitution or bill of rights, currently led by racist ultra rightwingers, is a belligerent threat to the region and via its oppression of Palestinians, a threat to the US.
The formation of two ‘states’, where Israel, the ‘north’ holds most of the important resources, particularly water, where its pestilent illegal settlements still riddle the Palestinian landscape, where it holds the strategic advantage and Palestinians remain disempowered and beleaguered in the ‘south’, continuing to provide cheap exploited labout for the elite ‘north’, is unviable and undesirable. Such an outcome may well provide the spark longed for by Israeli ethnic supremacists for transfer of Palestinians who still live in Israel to the new Palestinian institutionalised crypto-bantustan.