On the eve of the upcoming Russel Tribunal in Cape Town, dedicated to the apartheid imposed on Palestinians, one of the initiators Nurit Peled-Elhanan (a woman I admire for not ever mincing her words) reports on how racist laws imprison a nation:
Palestinian blood is dispensable with impunity in Israel and in the occupied territories. Palestinian every day existence is impossible. Cruelty, humiliation, starvation, torture and death define their relationships with their masters, their occupiers, and their governors.
The question that has been bothering me for a long time is how do Israeli citizens, including the children who at the age of 18 join the torture machine – the IDF – cope with such a discrepancy between the values they are raised on and the practices of oppression against their neighbours?
The answer to this question lies in education. Because apartheid is not only a bunch of racist laws, it is a state of mind, fashioned by education.
Israeli children are educated from a very tender age to see “Arab” citizens and “Arabs” in general as a problem that must be solved, eliminated in one way or another.
They can go through life without ever meeting a Palestinian child or talk to one. They know nothing of the life of these people who live 100m, from them, sometimes in the same street as in Abu-Tur in Jerusalem.
Israeli education succeeds in building mental walls that are far thicker than the concrete wall that is being constructed to incarcerate the Palestinian nation and hide their existence from our eyes.
That is why Israelis never protest against the apartheid wall. Most Israelis, including leftist Zionists, see the wall as an appropriate solution to the “problem”. They don’t consider Palestinians as human being like themselves, but as an inferior species, that deserve much less.
This can also explain the concern and the ecstasy over the captured soldier Gilad Shalit, who was renamed “a kidnapped child”, and the complete indifference towards the hundreds of Palestinian children, who are literally kidnapped from their beds by fully armed soldiers and thrown into jail for throwing stones, being where they shouldn’t be, or speaking impolitely to soldiers, or merely existing.
Apartheid in Israel and Palestine, imposed and practised by the Israeli security forces, is enabled by the most profound racism, practised every day, in every domain of life, in every encounter or action, in education and in the media that are wholly dedicated to the production and reproduction of fears and heterophobia.
That is excellent….. but it doesn’t explain why most friends of mine here in Oklahoma would fit exactly in with the Israelis, if transported over there.
… And THAT’s whyI always refer to it as the rogue Apartheid state of israel.
And THAT’s why I will never recognize it as a legitimate state.
Cuz it’s racist indoctrination starts from the cradle and ends (will end) in the grave.
Nobody ever said that racism was dead in the US!
When Israeli apologists declare “we share their values,” it’s unfortunately our worst values that we share: racism, exceptionalism, religion, violence.
Majority of people like to think in stereotypes. It is just easier. You divide people, put a label on them, and voila, you think you have an answer on everything.:”Those are stupid, those are poor, these are dangerous, these are ………”
Many, many people are doing it. Basically ,,to some extent ,all of us.
Many totalitarian governments take adventage of it ,and use this “natural human inclination towards stereotyping”, to brainwash its young generations, using a proper socio-psychological techniques, which are by now mastered to the 9th.
Hitler-Jugend is one of the examples, in communist’s Russia there were Comsomols ( The Communist Union of Youth) etc.
There are plenty of movies on you tube showing how many different methods and techniques are applied to rule societies. Scary.
In a way this is nihil novi sub sole, (nothing new under the sun).
All totalitarian regimes always had to find “THE ENEMY”.
In Nazi Germany the main enemies were Jews, than everybody else ,who was not German, or did not support Nazi’s politics.
In Communistic countries “THE ENEMY” was the one ,who did not support communistic politics. He was called “the enemy of the people”, a “traitor of the state” or some other fancy names.
Nowadays, we have a new label a “terrorist”.
It goes to show what kind of “democracy” is really in Israel ,if they use classic methods of totalitarian regimes to raise their young generations.