Palestinians fight apartheid



Con Merchant

Since its formation in 1948, Israel has worked hard to portray itself as a beleaguered oasis of democracy in the Middle East, a tiny outpost of decency constantly and incessantly threatened by hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs who are blinded by their irrational hatred of Judaism that they refuse to leave the peace-loving Israel alone.

Anti-Semitism?

Criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is routinely branded as "anti-semitism". Zionist leaders have used the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the second world war to justify their own genocidal campaign against the indigenous Palestinian population.

Israel is a RACIST APARTHEID state

The Jewish state of Israel is a racist apartheid state. In the same way the apartheid South Africa was an attempt to build an anti-black, exclusively white-controlled state on African land, Israel is an attempt to build an anti-Arab, exclusively Jewish-controlled state on Arab land.

Mass Participation

The significance of this uprising can be seen in the mass participation in protests in the West Bank and Gaza, the concurrent and unprecedented uprising among Palestinians living in Israel and the large, and growing, expressions of solidarity from around the world.

Colonialism

When Theodor Hartzl, the ideological founder of the Zionist movements in the 1890s, was asked what he proposed to do with the indigenous Palestinian population when his "state of the Jews" become a reality, he replied, "We will quietly spirit them across the boarder".

"For Europe", Hartzl believed, "we would constitute a bulwark against Asia down there [in Palestine]; we would be the advance post of civilisation against barbarism".

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The Fundamental Aim of Zionist Policy

The fundamental aim of Zionist policy in Palestine from 1917 to the United Nations-sanctioned partition in 1948 was the creation of this "bulwark", a colonial settler state with a population made up of the exclusively Jewish immigrants coming mainly from Europe.

The Palestinian Arabs were not simply to exploited economically. They were to be replaced by European Jewish settlers. The Israeli state was to be founded on the basis of the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine of its indigenous Arabic-speaking inhabitants.

Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's colonisation department, confirmed this in his 1940 diary. "It must be clear", he wrote, "that there is no room for both people's together in this country