Israel And Apartheid?

Can you show the class where Israel is on this 1947 map?

At the time this map was published, Jews owned approximately 7% of the land and comprised a third of the population, the vast majority of those new emigres from post-war Europe. U.N. Resolution 181 partitioned Palestine and gave 56% of the land to a new country; Israel. The new Israelis began ethnic cleansing almost immediately, expelling between 750,000 and one million Palestinians from what had hitherto been their homeland, Palestine (see map); approximately 75% of the indigenous population. They did this by a series of bloody massacres and the razing of approximately 400 Palestinian villages, like Deir Yassin, Abu Shusha, Tantura, Lydda and Ramle.

Your assertion that "Jewish people WERE the natives of that land" is either profoundly ignorant of history or profoundly disingenuous. Your insinuation that the Palestinians were nothing more than primitive goat-herders is also as profoundly ignorant of history as it is overtly racist.

Notorious massacres of Palestinians between 1937 & 1948
The Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe")
A history stained with innocent blood: A chronicle of Israel’s massacres in Palestine
The Palestinian Nakba & The Establishment of Israeli Apartheid
Plan Dalet: Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

 

OMG, the hypocrisy is literally insane.

 

Partial transcript from video:

Ethnic cleansing is a very powerful expression. If in 1948 there were around 700,000 Palestinians, and today there are 7 million in the the land of Israel, you can't really use this term. However if you want to use the words ethnic cleansing you can do so to describe what happened to the Jews in Arab countries. In Morocco in 1948 there were 265,000 Jews, today there are around 2,000. In Iraq there were 135,000 Jews in 1948, today there are fewer than 10. Algeria used to be home to 140,000 Jews, today there are fewer than 50, and I can go on. It is Muslim countries who perpetrated ethnic cleansing on the Jews, but this statement doesn't quite cover what has been happening. Muslims have been doing this to all minorities, not only to the Jews. If you zoom out you will see that 100 years ago there were many Christians communities and other small ethnic groups in the Middle East. They are all being wiped out by Muslims.

For some reason the Western World the Christian world doesn't want to talk about about it. As a Jew I care about what is going on with Jews all over the world, and I find it very odd that Christians don't really care about Nazareth or Bethlehem. Which are kind of important to the followers of Jesus, and used to be 80% Christians 50 years ago and now are 80% Muslims. The same goes for Christians in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. In Nigeria, Muslim organizations have murdered thousands of Christians. 2 million Christians have fled Iraq and become refugees in the last two decades, but no one seems to care about them, neither the media nor the universities. Everyone is obsessed with the Palestinian refugees did you know that the UN has two agencies for refugees? One for hundreds of millions of refugees all over the world, and another one called UNRWA which is only for the most privileged refugees on Earth, the Palestinians. Don't just take my word for it check it out for for yourself.

 

A case can be made for or against oppression, but the word "apartheid" does not fit the situation. The case for using that word to describe the relations between Israel and it's Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza fails. Amnesty International has used that term to describe the situation because it has emotional impact.

The word "apartheid" is an Afrikaans word that first appeared in the 1940s. It is derived from Dutch. It is something under national law and within national borders. Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, and it doesn't exist anywhere else today. Apartheid exclusively involves race. Neither Hamas nor Israel considers the current situation to be a racial conflict, and whatever your local working definition of race is where you live, it probably doesn't apply to relations between Gazans and Israelis.

"Armed conflict" and "war" are much more applicable than "apartheid" is. Israel has terrible relations with Lebanon and Syria (both nations) and Gaza (a Palestinian territory without full national statehood). They are mutual enemies, never far from escalating armed hostilities against each other. In contrast, Israel now has generally good relations with neighboring nations Jordan (30 percent of which is ethnic Palestinian) and Egypt. Relations between the West Bank Palestinian territory, Israel's final neighbor, fall somewhere in between.

The UN considers Gaza to be an Israeli-occupied territory not because the Israeli military is based there, but rather because Israel has attempted to blockade the territory under de facto Hamas rule since 2007. It was more clearly an occupation by the Israeli military from 1967 to 2005. Israeli forces are in Gaza now under a declaration of war against Hamas, and not as part of a long-term occupation. The Israeli occupation that started in 1967 will be deemed ongoing by the international community until Gaza has its own nation status, until Gazans form a nation with other Palestinian territories, or until another nation occupies it. None of those things appear likely within the next decade. Israel has never expressed any interest in annexing Gaza. Israel isn't the only "foreign" nation to invade and occupy Gaza. From 1948 to 1967, the Egyptian military controlled Gaza, without any expressed interest in annexing it. From 1918 to 1948, the British military controlled Gaza, similarly without any interest in annexing it. For the 402 years before that, it was controlled by Ottoman Turks who invaded and occupied it starting in 1502, other than for a nine-year period in the 19th century, when the military forces of an Egyptian governor invaded and occupied it.

A good case can be made for oppression. Mutual hostility is evident. "Apartheid" does not fit.

 

Israel's apartheid against Palestinians

 

"“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time ― in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ For Palestinians

 

Remembering my famlies horror when The Irish Republician Army killed Lord Mountbatten. Twas a long time ago.

 

The West bank and Gaza at least on the surface could be compared to what the Reservations were. There are still issues ion the reservations but not nearly as bad and the US government doesn't currently have an active war against them.