Israeli Apartheid Week
(Image by Gaza.png: Carlos Latuff derivative work: Israeli Apartheid Week Collective from wikimedia) Details DMCA
Part I -- Apartheid
In 2017 the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) issued a report on the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The report covered the situations of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and the subject population in the Occupied Territories. The report concluded "Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole."
Though U.S. and Israeli pressure managed to suppress the report, evidence for this charge of apartheid is clear-cut. More recently, the facts have been brought together in a succinct presentation by the noted journalist Jonathan Cook. In a 2018 issue of The Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding, he wrote an expose' entitled "Apartheid Israel." Some of the particulars Cook looks at are: citizenship inequality, nationality inequality, marriage inequality, legal inequality, and residential inequality. The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel's Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.
Of course, some Israeli Jews do understand that the country has a serious problem with racism. For instance, this comes through in the June 2020 Haaretz report that indicates that as "world sensitivity to racism and oppression" increases "historical injustice in Israel is...only getting worse."
Part II -- The "Nation-State" Law
One of the ways things are getting worse in Israel is through the enshrining of Zionist-inspired apartheid in law. On 18 July 2018, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted a "Nation-State" Law. It defines the State of Israel as the nation-state "of the Jewish people only." In other words, only Jews can hold "nationality rights" in Israel.
MK (member of the Knesset) Yariv Levin dubbed the law "Zionism's flagship bill " that will put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people." MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the special committee that shaped the bill, stated: "This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people." The absurdity of this proposition is exposed by the fact that the Palestinian minority has been denied significant aspects of its human rights for over 70 years. As it turns out, the two categories of rights, national and human, have been interdependent ever since the development of the sovereign state.
Part III -- Hanna Arendt's Insight
Acting on the claim that one can separate out human rights, much less civil rights, from "national rights" has proven disastrous in the modern political era. Significantly, it was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, Hanna Arendt, who pointed this out following the horror of the Holocaust and on the occasion of the U.N. pronouncement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arendt pointed out that, in the era of the nation-state, rights are defined and enforced within state entities claiming sovereignty over both territory and population. If a state decides that for racial, ethnic, religious, or any other reason, that only one portion of its population is worthy of first-class citizenship, it can proceed to deny to all those who do not qualify any and all rights. This is, of course, what the Nazis did to the Jews, and more recently is reflected in how Myanmar treats its ethnic minorities, how China treats its Uyghur population, and Saudi Arabia discriminates against its Shia religious minority, and so.
The United Nations has proven unable to effectively challenge this perversion of sovereignty. Keep in mind that the United Nations is itself made up of nation-states which reserve the power to discriminate as a consequence of sovereignty. This has made it difficult for the U.N., as an organization, to enforce a "universal" and "inalienable" conception of rights. In truth, the only way to achieve universal rights is to replace the nation-state's claim that its sovereignty allows it alone to grant rights -- replace it with enforceable international law that assures equitable application of rights.
Part IV -- Israel's High Court of Justice Defends Apartheid
Israel is now acting out the scenario Arendt identified. There were many complaints against the nation-state bill, coming not only from the Palestinian Arabs, but also from the Druze community and even elements of the Mizrachi Jewish population. Thus, on 22 December 2020, fully two-and-a-half years after the passage of the bill, the High Court of Justice held a public review of the law.
Two sections of the law drew particular objection from those appearing before the court. First was the objection to the bill's official designation of "Jewish settlement as a value that the state is obligated to promote." Considering the fact that such settlements most often lead to eviction of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the steady segregation of populations based on ethnicity and religion, it can't help but be seen as an important historical factor in Zionist apartheid. The second was the law's purposeful demotion of Arabic -- it will no longer be an official language of Israel. The implication here is that loss of recognition of the language spoken by the Palestinians, Druze, and at least the first generation of Mizrachi Jews is equivalent to their loss of equal social and political status with those who speak Hebrew.
Throughout the ensuing debate the 11 High Court judges could not, or would not, recognize that giving elite legal and social status in law to one group of religiously identified citizens must have detrimental legal consequences for other non-elite citizens and subjects. That it would was a point made by Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalahthe Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights.
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