This week marks Israeli Apartheid Week, where students and people of conscience join together in a global protest against racism and discrimination. Across the UK, student communities are holding film screenings, webinars, and rallies, bringing attention to the racist system of Israeli rule Palestinians continue to live under.
Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has enacted laws, policies, and practices which have established an apartheid regime which affects every single Palestinian. Simply put, Palestinians like me are discriminated against just because we are Palestinian.
Across the occupied Palestinian territory Israel enforces a system which assigns superior rights to Jewish people. To give just a few examples: Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank are subject to an unfair military judicial system with 98% conviction rates, while Israeli settlers living on stolen Palestinian land are tried under Israeli civilian law.
In Israel itself, citizenship and nationality are distinct. Rights are assigned on the basis of nationality. Those defined as Jewish nationals are assigned the full menu of human rights, while Arab-Palestinian citizens are discriminated against in every aspect of their life, from housing and land ownership to access to public services.
This means that Palestinian citizens cannot even chose where to live. Admissions committees are active in hundreds of Israeli towns and filter out Arab-Palestinian applicants, often barring us completely.
In the Negev/Naqab, in the South of Israel, 40 Palestinian towns are ‘unrecognized’, meaning their Bedouin residents, citizens of the Israeli state, are viewed as ‘squatters’ on their own land. They receive no state infrastructure, like water, electricity, and other social services.
Palestinians living in exile, forced to flee Israel’s ethnic cleansing during the Nakba and their descendants, who number almost 8 million people, can’t return to their land; while Jews from around the world have the freedom to migrate to Israel as citizens.
Recently, one of Israel’s most respected human rights NGOs joined a multitude of civil society organizations, including a plethora of Palestinian organizations and scholars, in naming this reality as a system of apartheid. They rightly said that systematic racial discrimination acts as an organizing principle upholding the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians.
While a growing number of organizations have caught up with us Palestinians in recognizing apartheid, Israel has continued to intensify its racist control and domination of Palestinian lives; from accelerating the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territory, to continuing to cripple Gaza under a 15-year land, air, and sea blockade.
But we know racist discrimination isn’t limited to us Palestinians. Around the world we see racism, xenophobia, and discrimination grow, often enabled by the Israeli state’s global allies.
The knee on the necks of racialized people, from Ferguson to Khirbet Humsa, from Delhi to Jerusalem, continues to suffocate oppressed communities.
The growth of the far-right across the world is terrifying. Israel is built on the same racist and ethnonationalist ideology they share. These ideological affinities have become especially visible since the rise of far-right governments in Israel.
But racist violence is not natural or everlasting. The systems we suffer under can be defeated. Last year, millions took to the streets around the world to protest systematic racism and inequality. By coming together to demand justice, we have shaken our oppressors to the core.
Israeli Apartheid Week is just one mechanism to turn that shake into an earthquake that rebuilds our society from the ground up; and creates the place we deserve to live, in which everyone is afforded their basic rights and needs.
So that’s why I’m taking part. Because all of us deserve better. Because I know Israeli apartheid can, and will, be dismantled.
Israel can only maintain its system of oppression over the Palestinian people thanks to international complicity. For example, UK universities invest nearly over £450m in companies complicit in Israel’s oppressive apartheid regime. Universities around the UK invest in enterprises active in Israel’s illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land, or firms supplying Israel with weapons and military technology.
This is why we must take aim at the institutions that uphold racist systems of rule – like our universities – so we can have a material impact on those who profit from oppression and move a step closer to ending Israel’s impunity.
In the UK, despite the pandemic, students are taking action on dozens of campuses, with 20+ public events taking place throughout the week. Societies are hosting inspiring speakers from Palestine and beyond to educate their peers and mobilize for action.
Together we are unstoppable. Join your local IAW Event: https://bit.ly/UKIAWEvents
A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid | B’Tselem
https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid
B’Tselem, Jan. 12/2021
“A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”
“More than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule. The common perception in public, political, legal and media discourse is that two separate regimes operate side by side in this area, separated by the Green Line. One regime, inside the borders of the sovereign State of Israel, is a permanent democracy with a population of about nine million, all Israeli citizens. The other regime, in the territories Israel took over in 1967, whose final status is supposed to be determined in future negotiations, is a temporary military occupation imposed on some five million Palestinian subjects.
“Over time, the distinction between the two regimes has grown divorced from reality. This state of affairs has existed for more than 50 years – twice as long as the State of Israel existed without it. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers now reside in permanent settlements east of the Green Line, living as though they were west of it. East Jerusalem has been officially annexed to Israel’s sovereign territory, and the West Bank has been annexed in practice. Most importantly, the distinction obfuscates the fact that the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. All this leads to the conclusion that these are not two parallel regimes that simply happen to uphold the same principle. There is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle.”
Re the label “apartheid”, here’s some work by a lesser known British human rights group, “War On Want” ( https://waronwant.org/our-work/palestine ) – recently they put out a 50 page pamphlet “Judge, Jury and Occupier – Israel’s military court system in the occupied West Bank”:
https://waronwant.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Judge_Jury_Occupier_report_War_on_Want.pdf
Chapter 3 is titled “Israel’s Apartheid System” :
“Palestinians constitute around half of the total population living under Israeli control (inside Israel and in the oPt), yet under Israeli law, and in practice, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are treated differently in almost every aspect of life. The approximately 6.7 million Palestinians20 living under direct Israeli control suffer from systematic and institutionalised discrimination affecting every aspect of their lives: housing, education, health, employment, family life, residence, and freedom of movement. There is overwhelming evidence that this system of discrimination instituted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people meets the UN definition of apartheid.21”
Evil eventually undoes itself.
So will the evil of Zionism.