I got this from Dennis Kobray via Green Alliance’s discussion listserv.
The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.
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The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking. Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region.
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White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country’s black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans. Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/192/192_cover_Israeli_apartheid_dixon.html
I got this from Dennis Kobray on Green Alliance’s discussion listserv.
Twenty-five years ago I stared into the eyes of Michael Berman, chief operative for his congressman-brother, Howard Berman. I was a neophyte running for the California Assembly in a district that the Bermans claimed belonged to them.
“I represent the Israeli defense forces,” Michael said. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Michael seemed to imagine himself the gatekeeper protecting Los Angeles’ Westside for Israel’s political interests, and those of the famous Berman-Waxman machine. Since Jews represented one-third of the Democratic district’s primary voters, Berman held a balance of power.
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I can offer my real-life experience to the present discussion about the existence and power of an “Israel lobby.” It is not as monolithic as some argue, but it is far more than just another interest group in a pluralist political world. In recognizing its diversity, distinctions must be drawn between voters and elites, between Reform and Orthodox tendencies, between the less observant and the more observant. During my ultimate 18 years in office, I received most of my Jewish support from the ranks of the liberal and less observant voters. But I also received support from conservative Jews who saw themselves as excluded by a Jewish (and Democratic) establishment.
http://www.counterpunch.org/Hayden07202006.html
The ICC Plans Are Overrunning Derwood
Most of us in Derwood have done our homework on the planned intercounty connector because our town is slated to be the ICC entry point. This summer we’ve watched Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan ram through the approvals before the November elections. We’ve seen surveyors’ plastic ribbons fluttering in our woods. We’ve blanched as the state pushes forward on eminent-domain seizure of homes in nearby Cashell Estates.
But no one told us that a midnight confiscation of our private property was in the plan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101413.html
Codeword: Hannibal
Please note that the idea that their problems might be resolved by building up Lebanese civil society (Law enforcement, education, housing, civil engineering, mass transit, social welfare, health care, etc.) is conspicuously absent from this piece.
…I fear that we might not stop there, and that we might succumb to the delusion that military action can transform Lebanon’s political and social realities. That same delusion led Israel to occupy Lebanon for an agonizing decade and a half in which hundreds of our troops — and many more Lebanese and Palestinians — were killed.
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The following winter, helicopters suddenly descended near the muddy clearing in Galilee, where my unit was training. We were sent to Beirut, where before long I saw that our mission had little to do with protecting my neighbors back home. Instead, we served as a wedge between Christians, Muslims and Druze, who were taking advantage of the occupation to settle old scores. It would be the first of several tours of duty for me in Lebanon.
Sharon’s grand plan failed. True, the PLO was forced out three months after the invasion, and the rockets stopped falling on Israeli settlements. But we paid a huge price in Israeli troops killed and wounded — not to mention the casualties suffered by the Lebanese. Instead of remaking Lebanon, we found ourselves bogged down there much as the United States is now bogged down in Iraq. During some of my tours, we spent most of our energy keeping Lebanese from killing one another, rather than protecting Israel’s borders and civilians.
…[B]eing angry…can cloud your judgment and make you do foolish things. I can only hope that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will not fall victim to the same fantasies that sent me and so many other soldiers to Lebanon. In Lebanon’s unending political vacuum, no government can be strong and decisive. That’s why the country has been a pawn that the stronger countries around it have so willingly sacrificed. Absent a multinational campaign against Iran and Syria, Israel cannot permanently prevent southern Lebanon from serving as a forward base for enemy forces. Instead, Israel must use force every few years to push back the enemy, knowing that once we leave, our foes will return and rearm.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101372.html