Israeli Apartheid and Palestinian Civil Disobediance

( I am NOT Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey NOR am I connected to her in any way. I discuss naming it after her in the "notes" post)

Yesterday I found a very interesting and encouraging article on the BBC web-site. It's about a civil disobedience action by Palestinians, which highlights the fact that Apartheid IS an appropriate term for Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Tom

UPDATE 11/17/11
I forgot to mention a few other things about using the term "Apartheid" when referring to Israel. I don't remember the details, but there are laws that make it very difficult for couples to live in Israel if one of them is from certain parts of the Middle-East and North Africa (and the other one is an Israeli citizen). (UPDATE 1/12/12 More on that here)

And it's not just buses that are basically segregated, there are also roads that are segregated, too.

And then there is the fact that the State is officially defined by a Jewish identity. People who support that should be asked if they think there will ever be an Arab-Israeli Muslim or Christian President or Prime Minister in Israel (according to the Israeli government at some point in recent years around 17% of Israel's population is Muslim). More generally, the Arab-Israeli population does experience a fair amount of inequality.

UPDATE 11/27/11
As the article I link to above says, Israel says that keeping Palestinians without permission outside Jerusalem is for security reasons. But instead of banning the small minority of Palestinians who Israel could credibly consider security risks, the burden is placed on all Palestinians to get permission. In a similar situation (both areas include natives and a settler populations of one sort or another) even the British didn’t go that far in relation to N. Ireland (they only banned a small number of nationalists, which was bad enough). The policy that Israel has is very similar to the S. African Apartheid laws about controlling the movements of Blacks and generally keeping them out of white cities unless they had permission to be there.

If security is the motivation, I’d also have to ask, what about extremist settlers? MANY of them FREQUENTLY clash with the Israeli security forces (in both the West Bank and in Israel), and it was a supporter of settlers who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Are any of them, for security reasons, not allowed into Jerusalem? I didn’t think so. (UPDATE 12/15/11 here's a recent article about this sort of thing)

So, security is not the reason. Bigotry is.

UPDATE 2/5/12 To be fair, SOME action is NOW taking place against the settlers, but it's new and seems pretty limited (and doesn't keep them out of Jerusalem, although this is a tiny step in the right direction). The article is here.

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UPDATE 12/11/11 Juan Cole wrote a great essay about the Palestinians, largely aimed at the idea that their identity is invented and therefore they have no claim to Palestine.