Israeli State Apartheid Laws Acknowledged

The latest extension to racist citizenship laws has turned Israel into an apartheid state, according to a June 29 report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The Citizenship Law (Temporary Order), introduced in 2003, establishes that the interior minister does not have the authority to approve residence in Israel for non-Jews. This destroys the rights for young Israeli and West Bank Palestinians, under 25 for women and 35 for men, to be able to marry and live together.

The ban also covers Palestinians of all ages residing in Gaza. The law was extended for the eighth time since 2003. In 2006, five judges in the High Court of Justice argued that the laws were unconstitutional. This bold move was opposed in a deciding vote by Justice Edmond Levy, who argued on the basis that the law was only two months from expiration.

Two years on, however, the laws still exist.

The decision from the Israeli government has been flanked by claims that it was purely for security purposes. The Haaretz report explains that the administration’s rationale for the laws relied on a belief that through implementing further citizenship laws, they could prevent “terrorists” being “planted” in the Israeli territory via marriage.

Haaretz journalist, Amos Schocken, argued in the June 29 report, entitled “Citizenship law makes Israel an apartheid state”, that, with the laws extension, the apartheid nature of the Israeli state needed to be acknowledged.

“The claim that there are characteristics of an apartheid state in Israel is widely heard in the Western world”, Schocken wrote. “The word apartheid is catchy and understood in many parts of the world, which makes it useful to send a message that we resent and which we claim has no connection with reality in Israel.

“However, we do not need to replicate exactly the characteristics of South African apartheid within discriminatory practices in civil rights in Israel in order to call Israel an apartheid state. The amendment to the Citizenship Law is exactly such a practice, and it is best that we not try to evade the truth: Its existence in our law books turns Israel into an apartheid state.”

The citizenship law’s extension comes on the back of a 2007 report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council that described Israel as an apartheid state. Its release caused great controversy as its author, John Dugard, was both a South African lawyer and the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The report stated that “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel’s laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination”. The report highlighted the way that the house and building demolitions, checkpoints, closed zones, Israeli “settler-only” roads and limited access to basic necessities in the occupied Palestinian territories has destroyed the “right to life” for Palestinians.

The extension to the latest round of apartheid laws has been followed by the US Congress approving a US$170 million extension in military aid to Israel, with $30 billion to be given over the next decade. It was a decision condemned by a July 2 Palestine Monitor report, which argues that in continuing to fund Israel, the US is violating its own international aid laws, which state “No assistance [ought to be given] to countries that violate human rights”.

Why are we sending more troops to Afghanistan?

Remember Afghanistan. It was that country we supposedly had “under control”, before heading illegally into Iraq. Howard’s latest announcement that we are too double our deployment in the country must leave many wondering what went wrong.

It was shortly after the 9/11 incident that we had committed our troops to fight the Taliban government and the Al Qaeda elements it supposedly supported. We were supposed to have caught Osama Bin Laden.

Al Qaeda and its leader had been aligned to America during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 70’s. But this time, like too many times before, the old ally who hated the U.S. just as much as the Soviet’s, turned on its former ally who had made it so powerful.

The Coalitions idea of democracy has always been a sham. The election of the U.S. friendly President Karzai been the instigator of compromises made with the warlords, many of whom are ex-Taliban and drug lords, making the democracy dream, simply a mirage that doesn’t stretch far beyond the Presidential gates.

Women’s rights, has been squashed as decent invasion reasoning by women within the country. Afghan MP Malaya Joya was in Australia earlier this year saying that the repressiveness of the previous administration has not ended and has in a lot of cases got worse under the occupation.

The U.S. War on Drugs in the country has also shown itself as a sham. Poppy production has increased under U.S. occupation and now sits at over 50% of GDP and over 90% of the world opium trade. While many small poppy producers have been done out of their living and been strung up as culprits, big time war lords have been able to obtain amnesty from the law. The U.S. War on their country has eliminated a lot of the alternative industries, giving small time farmers no other real choice.

But what about the Taliban being so dangerous and can we really leave without them taking over again? The fact is that for every day we remain in Afghanistan, the resistance grows, Taliban and others.

Our forces in the country are destroying people’s lives while they continue to prop up and defend the sham democracy that is in place. The longer they stay the more deaths we are going to see, with the increased likelihood of Australian casualties. Leaving Afghanistan will take away the main recruiting tool for these groups and will, when fair, unassigned reparations for all the damage we have created is paid, it will finally let Afghans choose their own future.