Good one.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (http://www.imeu.net) is submitting this on behalf of the author.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, which slaps the “apartheid” label on Israel, comes out this week. Before the book hit the stands though, members of his own party rushed to distance themselves from his allegations. While the label makes supporters of Israel uncomfortable, there is ample evidence that Israel practices institutionalized discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens. Israel, in fact, goes further than South Africa. While whites in South Africa sought to control non-whites, Israel has since its establishment pursued various means of getting rid of its non-Jewish population altogether.

The addition of Avigdor Lieberman’s party to Israel’s ruling coalition — and the appointment of Lieberman himself as Minister in charge of “Strategic Threats to Israel” — has also occasioned some discomfort among Israel’s most earnest supporters. But Lieberman’s ascent to deputy Prime Minister should give pause to those who so vigorously chided Carter for using the term “apartheid” to describe Israeli policies.

We are told that Lieberman is unhelpful; that he is the wrong partner for the current Prime Minister; that he is unlikely to facilitate peace with the Palestinians; that he is unrestrained and irresponsible — and even (according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz) that he is a strategic threat himself.

This consensus is not a reaction to Lieberman’s insalubrious background — though former nightclub bouncers rarely rise to national office in any country — but rather to the fact that he is willing to dispense with diplomatic niceties and to express Israel’s ambitions in their crudest and most unapologetic form.

Lieberman wants an Israel free of the land’s indigenous population.

His party’s declared aim is to eject Israel’s Palestinian minority — now approaching a quarter of the population — and to annex the parts of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem with heavy Jewish settler populations.

The irony here, of course, is that Lieberman was born not in Israel but in a remote province of the former Soviet Union. He moved to Israel as an adult.

Because he is Jewish, he was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's law of return.

But it was evidently not enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved (not to mention those expelled during the creation of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.

So he wants the non-Jews out. And he says so bluntly.

It is Lieberman’s blunt racism — rather than the policies he stands for — that makes Israel’s advocates, particularly the liberal ones, feel so uncomfortable.

For the only significant differences between Lieberman and other mainstream Israeli politicians are matters of style rather than substance.

All Israeli politicians are committed to preserving Israel’s Jewishness. They have to be. It’s the law.

As the state of the Jewish people, Israel is, after all, the only country in the world that expressly claims not to be the state of its actual citizens (who include a million non-Jews), let alone that of the people whom it actually governs (half of whom are Palestinian Arabs).

Most of Israel’s land, for example, is the property not of the Israeli people, but of Jewish people everywhere. As non-Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel are barred from access to state land, even though the land used to be Palestinian.

Israel’s newly revised nationality law, similarly, prohibits Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians from the occupied territories and living with their spouses in Israel. The same law does not apply to Jewish Israelis who marry Jewish settlers living in the occupied territories. Interestingly, similar legislation had been proposed in South Africa at the peak of Apartheid, only to be rejected by that country’s supreme court. Israel’s nationality law, however, was endorsed by Israel’s High Court just this year.

There is nothing new in all this, however. The simple fact of the matter is that non-Jews have always been, at best, an impediment to Israel's Jewishness.

This is why, when Palestinian citizens of Israel demand that their state become the state of all its citizens, they are denounced for imperiling the Jewish nature of the state. It’s also why Israel repeatedly demanded the renunciation of the Palestine National Charter as a prelude to negotiations with the PLO. The longstanding Palestinian call for a democratic and secular state — a state for both Arabs and Jews — has always been regarded as a direct threat to Israel’s Jewishness.

To citizens of the advanced Western democracies, the concept of a democratic and secular state — a state of all its citizens — seems elementary. To Israel, however, it is anathema.

The only thing that distinguishes Avigdor Lieberman from run of the mill politics in Israel is that he is willing to take Israel’s vision of itself to its logical conclusion. Rather than tolerating non-Jews as second or third class citizens, he wants them out altogether.

The issue, then, is not that Lieberman is more racist than other Israeli politicians. It is, rather, that he shamelessly utters what most of his peers dare not say aloud.

***

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.
http://imeu.net/news/article003560.shtml

The only thing that distinguishes Avigdor Lieberman from run of the mill politics in Israel is that he is willing to take Israel’s vision of itself to its logical conclusion. Rather than tolerating non-Jews as second or third class citizens, he wants them out altogether.

Zionism is Racism

The exact same thing has been said of Meir Kahane

In the words of his unauthorized biographer, Robert Friedman:
"Ultimately, the Israeli right is angry with Kahane because he says what they think: that the Jewish state should annex the occupied territories and expel all of Israel’s unruly Arabs. And declaring that openly is not good public relations. Kahane is not a golem forged from the anxiety of a tormented diaspora — as the propagandists on the right would have us believe. To a great extent, he is the creation of Israel’s “respectable” right, and despite its differences with him Kahane is the logical culmination of Shamir and Cohen’s uncompromising nationalist views."
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/187261.php

It's not that Lieberman is more extreme than other Israeli politicians. He actually commands respect in a relativistic way, because unlike them he's an OPEN HONEST race-hater fuckbag, not a slinking shadow-rat. He's white-bread Israeli zionism with the mask off, right out there for everyone to see like a Klansman dressed in a pointy sheet. That is a crime the rest of them are bound to punish with pariah-hood. Honesty is the character defect liars despise most.

Kahane and Arafat had a lot in common, TW. Neither thought Jews or Arabs could live together.

He's an OPEN HONEST race-hater fuckbag, not a slinking shadow-rat.

Like Nasrallah:

From the New Yorker “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”

From the Lebanese paper Daily Star: “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

So, how about you, TW- are you ready to come out of the closet living as a shadow rat and declare your anti-Semitism to the world, or are you still pretending its all sweetness and light of your side of the continental divide?

Why do Palestinians want to destroy Israel and drive Israeli Jews into the sea? (typical zionist myth)
למאמר בעברית


This is the question asked most frequently by Israelis and Zionists. We will answer the question indirectly by asking the question below:

Are you aware that Israeli Zionists, during the 1948 war, pushed over 150,000 Palestinian refugees into the sea?

For a long time, Zionists have been propagating fear based propaganda to their followers, probably this picture can tell you a bit of the real story, click here for more details. It's misleading and unfair to focus on what Palestinians might allegedly do in the future, while the past and present of Palestinians are filled with Israeli war crimes. These types of accusations are meant to deflect and confuse the core issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The core issues of the conflict are the collective DISPOSSESSION and ETHNIC CLEANSING (compulsory population transfer) of the Palestinian people for the past five decades. It should be emphasized that the conflict would have been at the same level of intensity, even if both warring parties had been Muslims, Christians, or even Jewish.

Since the inception of Zionism, its leaders have been keen on creating a "Jewish State" based on a "Jewish majority" by mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, primarily European Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. When a "Jewish majority" was impossible to achieve, based on Jewish immigration and natural growth, Zionist leaders (such as Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann) concluded that "population transfer" was the only solution to what they referred to as the "Arab Problem." Year after year, the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous people became known as the "transfer solution". David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, eloquently articulated the "transfer solution" as the following:

* In a joint meeting between the Jewish Agency Executive and Zionist Action Committee on June 12th, 1938:

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims p. 144).
* In a speech addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947:
"In the area allocated to the Jewish State there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment, will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority .... There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176 & Benny Morris p. 28)
* And on February 8th, 1948 Ben-Gurion also stated to the Mapai Council:.

"From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood]. . . there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] Arab. I do not assume that this will change. . . . What had happened in Jerusalem. . . . is likely to happen in many parts of the country. . . in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180-181)
* In a speech addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6th, 1948:.

"We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area ..... I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)
* Click here for more "Transfer" (Ethnic Cleansing) quotes from Zionist leaders.

For Israelis and Zionists to excuse themselves from any war crimes, such as compulsory population transfer (Ethnic Cleansing) and dispossessing the Palestinian people, they've resorted to a myth that Palestinians left their homes, farms, businesses, banks, boats, cars, etc. based on their free will, click here to read our rebuttal of this concocted myth.


Jaffa May 1948, Palestinians were being pushed into the see by the attacking Israeli Army

There is no denying the fact that some Palestinians think as many Zionists do (a Palestinian version of Zionism), and very possibly they do so because they were the victims of such treatment themselves. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, you have to agree that it is human nature to respond to terror with terror, and to racism with racism, these are facts that all decent people must accept and deplore simultaneously. No matter what the circumstances are (such as the urge to seek vengeance, revenge, reprisals, etc.), targeting civilians to achieve political or military objectives, in either war or non-war situations, is terrorism. It should be noted that the Palestinian people have been on the receiving end of Israeli terrorism (the chief aspect of which are the collective DISPOSSESSION and ETHNIC CLEANSING of 8.5 million Palestinians) for the past five decades.

Finally, the Palestinian mainstream does not and will not condone massive ethnic cleansing such as that which Israelis and Zionists have perpetrated against to the Palestinian people. Palestinians, as Muslim and Arabs, have a long history and track record which proves exactly the opposite. Omar Ibn al-Khatab's and Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem are solid proof of how Arabs and Muslims treated their defeated subjects fairly during the Byzantines and the Crusades respectively. Ironically, many of today's Christian Palestinians trace their roots to the Crusades, such as the famous Rock family of Jaffa. In other words, if freeing Palestine would imply perpetrating war crimes similar to the ones perpetrated against the Palestinian people, Palestinians will wait for another Omar or Saladin to right the wrongs of the past. The Muslim Arabs have their history to prove their tolerance towards their subjects, however, the Israelis and Zionists have their track record to speak for them. Palestine Remembered has been explicitly built to expose and uncover Israeli war crimes and to AMPLIFY the voices of the Palestinian refugees.