Imagine, if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security, educational and related benefits denied all others.

Second class citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally apologized for, commonly occurs.

Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own. The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return. Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.

Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study or work abroad are denied re-entry.

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.

The difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for. The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of every administration since Harry Truman's Israel is “a < href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0518-03.htm";>democracy”, whatever that word has come to mean.

Though news stories in the US talk about autonomous “Palestinian areas” allegedly controlled by Palestinian authorities, often referring to Gaza and the West Bank by name, actual maps displaying the geographic boundaries of the so-called Palestinian controlled areas are rarely seen by American viewers, let alone maps comparing the size of Palestinian areas year to year, or showing the steady encroachment upon Arab land and water resources year to year by Israeli settlements, military outposts, Israeli-only roads, free fire zones and Israel's wall. The massive and militarized apartheid wall, as the rest of the world calls it, is termed a “separation barrier” or a “separation fence” in the US media, an understandable precaution against hordes of terroristic former owners of the land who lurk just outside.

Still, when you Google the terms Israel + apartheid, you get 5.5 million hits. A lot of somebodies somewhere are making the connection without the help of CNN, ABC or Fox News.

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. As Noam Chomsky observed back in 2004:

”Not discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel's nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as "dangerous in the extreme" by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I's, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981....”

The old South Africa bombed, strafed and invaded all its neighbors with some regularity, crippling their commerce and extracting horrific death tolls from refugee camps and other civilian targets. The last time Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon, it left 30,000 corpses.

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.

White South Africans constructed for themselves a bogus scriptural narrative in which the God of Abraham promised them somebody else's land, and brought it into modern history with the embellishment that they were holding the line for the free world against godless communism and the black menace. How similar is Israel's line that European Jews are promised the land of Muslim and Christian Arabs, and that they now hold the line for the free world against radical Islam and those ungrateful brown people?

We at BC have to believe that if the American people knew the truth about what their tax dollars pay for in Israel and what is left of Palestine, there would be a deep and widespread revulsion, similar to that occasioned by US support for apartheid in South Africa. But there are important differences between that time and this one. Though unspeakably odious, racist South African was only marginally important to US interests. By contrast, the maintenance of Israel's apartheid regime, essentially a white hi-tech and military outpost in the middle of all those brown people sitting atop a large share of the world's proven oil reserves is absolutely central to US foreign policy for the foreseeable future. The US is Israel's banker, its arms depot, and its principal diplomatic sponsor. The US is far more complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state than it ever was in South Africa.

Racism and apartheid being what they are, and our historical experience in America being what it is, African Americans have a crucial role to play. African Americans have seldom supported US imperial adventures overseas as readily as whites. Our American experience inclines us to a skeptical appraisal of our government's means and motives at home and abroad. Even though we live as much within the media bubble as white America, where images of the broken and mangled families, the incinerated homes and bombed hospitals are hard to come by, our skepticism leads us to sympathize with those who live at the sharp end of US foreign policy far more often than do our white neighbors.

Our first duty is to tell the truth to each other. We must combat among ourselves the bogus historical narratives which permit indifference to US policy in the Middle East in general, and support of Israeli apartheid in particular. The churchgoers among us urgently, publicly and repeatedly must confront and debunk the nonsense which holds that “wars and rumors of wars” are something predestined to happen in the biblical holy land for what they are – bad scripture and fake history. We need to interrupt, correct and school everyone who talks to us about a “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land, as though some raggedy fool with a suicide belt, or a few hundred fighters with small arms are or ever have been equivalent to the devastation wrought by the established gulags, checkpoints, airborne firepower, economic strangulation, house demolitions and nuclear armed might of the Israeli state. The two sides do not have access to anything like equal means of inflicting violence, and so cannot be equally culpable or equally responsible for stopping that violence.

We need to catch up with the rest of the civilized world, and talk about what we can do to emphatically withdraw our support from the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral and illegal occupation regime. The Presbyterian church, for example, has in the past considered selective divestiture from Israel and from US companies who profit from the occupation, as have the Anglicans. Both might do so again. What can our churches, our unions, our local elected officials, our young people do? What will we do?

--Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon@blackcommentator.com.

Congratulations! Great article from Black Commentator. (Though I do think we need a revolutionar solution!) If you strip the whole situation of Israel/Palestine of the question of religion, then what else do you have but apartheid? Then, apartheid + theocracy, stands out as a poisonous combination!

BTW, can't World Net Daily come up NEW lies? Weapons of mass destruction ready to be unleashed on unsuspecting imperialist countries?

"If you strip the whole situation of Israel/Palestine of the question of religion, then what else do you have but apartheid? Then, apartheid + theocracy, stands out as a poisonous combination! "

Yup. It basically boils down to Palestinian apartheid as proven in the Palestinian Constitution ratified in 2003 and Muslim theocracy. It's not only poisonous, it has proven outright lethal for both Israelis *and* Palestinians.


"BTW, can't World Net Daily come up NEW lies?"

Kindly demonstrate to us how the WND claims are false. Be specific.

The media is also to nlame, here's a good look at that issue:
www.ifamericansknew.org

NEW YORK — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah, The New York Times revealed on Saturday, July22 .

Citing US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Times said the decision to ship the weapons quickly came after relatively little debate within the administration.

The arms shipment has not been announced publicly. The officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions included employees of two government agencies, one of whom described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel, the Times said.

The munitions are actually part of a multimillion-dollar arms-sale package approved last year which Israel is able to tap when it needs to, the officials told the paper.

But some US military officers said the request for expedited delivery was unusual and indicated that Israel has many targets it plans to hit in Lebanon.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, the newspaper said, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means.

An Israeli army spokesman said Saturday that Israel will pursue its war on Hizbullah with more military incursions into south Lebanon, but will not unleash a full-scale invasion "for the moment."

"It will probably widen, but we are still looking at limited operations," he said. "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point."

Israel has been building up its forces at the border and has called up3 , 000reserves.

Thousands of Lebanese civilians have fled north fearing Israel will invade and expand an11 -day-old bombardment of Lebanon which has killed 345 people, mostly civilians.

Lebanese families packed into cars and pickup trucks and clogged roads to the north after Israeli planes dropped leaflets on Friday warning residents of south Lebanon to flee for safety beyond the Litani river, about 20 km ( 13miles) from the border.

Foreigners have also flooded out of the country. Ships and aircraft worked through the night scooping more tired and scared people from Lebanon and bringing them to Cyprus and Turkey.

"False Promise"

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will go to the Middle East on Sunday, July23 , while resisting international pressure for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hizbullah.

Some US analysts doubt Rice's prospects for stopping 10 days of fighting because of her reluctance to talk to key players — Hizbullah and its backers, Iran and Syria.

Resisting calls from the United Nations, Europe and the Arab world, she said an immediate cease-fire would produce a "false promise" that would allow Hizbullah to re-emerge in the future to attack Israel, the top US ally in the region.

"An immediate cease-fire without political conditions does not make sense," she said.

"If you simply look for a cease-fire ... we will be back here in six months again," she added. "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last."

As part of a political solution, Rice said there would be a need for a "robust" international force inside Lebanon but added that the United States was still discussing with its partners what its mandate would be.

US troops were not anticipated in any expanded international peace force for Lebanon, she said.

The Bush administration faced some pressure at home to do more to try to end the violence in the Middle East as US Senate Democratic leaders called on the president to immediately appoint a special envoy to the Middle East.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter to Bush that they were "surprised" that Rice plans only a brief stop in the region.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said Friday he had formally asked the Israeli and Lebanese governments a day earlier to guarantee safe passage routes by land, air and sea into and out of Lebanon.

More than500 , 000people, over a third of them children, had been touched in Lebanon by the conflict and more than 100 , 000Lebanese were now in Syria, most of whom needed assistance, Egeland told the UN Security Council.

http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2006-07/22/01.shtml

AKA: S.indeebay, 'autoblocked@indybay, scapegoated jew, shime on ben kosiba, brad sellars, ect. ect. ect.---we just know him as a trolling obsessed fanatic with no life who is trolling thousands of miles from home)

This fanatic imbecile trolls this fucking site day and night, and lives in Israel?????
What the hell is wrong with you, dude? This borders on extremely crazy. What is the obsession?
They have a lively discussion going on in your neck of the woods:
https://israel.indymedia.org/

Ever heard the phrase: Think Globally, act locally?
Probably not, they don't have that phrase in the right wing nut media that you are used to.

That's right, he's the quintessential barking zionist PR maniac! Their version of that motto is more like "think globally, fuck with people globally." They have virtually every other form of mass media locked down real nice, which is why it's all totally worthless on this subject (Just swallowed lots of poison? Don't bother with Ipecac. Just read the cover article of this week's Time magazine. It'll clean you out twice as good in half the time). Indymedia is one of the last media bastions where you'll see Israel get bashed just like it deserves, so therefore this nut and his friends have been trying to scream it down this way FOR YEARS.

I hope none of this bothers you though. You aren't an ANTI-SEMITE are you??!!?? You do realize that Only Israel Matters™, right?