<<<the same stupid people that buy the rest of the lines then parrot this one, too. >>>

Ah calling the Nobel laureates and other officials and dignitaries who have used this analogy 'stupid' just decimates it's import, eh 'brilliant' andrew??

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Use of the apartheid analogy

The idea of "Israeli apartheid" emerged in the final years of the white South African regime (in the early 1990s), when Palestinians opposed to South African apartheid drew the link between Israel and South Africa.[71] Comparisons between Israeli policies and apartheid have been made by groups and individuals, including:

* Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other South African anti-apartheid leaders
* Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States,[72]
* Former United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
* President of the UN General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann [73]
* Israeli journalists [74][75][76]
* Israel's attorney-general Michael Ben-Yair [77]
* The Syrian Government[78]
* Pro-Palestinian student groups in the UK, U.S., and Canada[79]
* The Congress of South African Trade Unions[80]
* The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa [81]
* The Canadian Union of Public Employees
* Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem[82]
* Author Naomi Klein [83]

Some commentators including Brockmann, Klein and UK MP Gerald Kaufman have suggested sanctions against Israel along the South African model to ultimately improve the situation[84]. Contemporary global political discourse regarding Israel incorporates usages of, and controversy over, the phrase "Israeli apartheid" and its variations.[85][86][87][88][89][90]
[edit] In relation to the Israeli disengagement plan

In January 2004, Ahmed Qureia, then the Palestinian Prime Minister, said that the building of the West Bank barrier, and the associated Israeli absorption of parts of the West Bank, constituted "an apartheid solution to put the Palestinians in cantons."[91] Colin Powell, then U.S. Secretary of State, commented on Queria's statements by affirming U.S. commitment to a two-state solution while saying, "I don't believe that we can accept a situation that results in anything that one might characterize as apartheid or Bantuism."[92]

An academic paper by Professor Oren Yiftachel, Chair of the Geography Department at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, predicted that Israel's unilateral disengagement plan will result in "creeping apartheid" in the West Bank, Gaza, and in Israel itself. Yiftachel argues that, "Needless to say, the reality of apartheid existed for decades in Israel/Palestine, but this is the first time a Prime Minister spells out clearly the strengthening of this reality as a long-term political platform" and that the plan would entrench a situation that can be described as "neither two states nor one," separating Israelis from Palestinians without giving Palestinians true sovereignty.[93]

Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli political scientist and the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, predicted that the interim disengagement plan would become permanent, with the West Bank barrier entrenching both the isolation of Palestinian communities and the existence of Israeli settlements. He warned that Israel is moving towards the model of apartheid South Africa through the creation of "Bantustan" like conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.[94]

The Economist, in an article on the debate over withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, asserted that "Keeping the occupied land will force on Israel the impossible choice of being either an apartheid state, or a binational one with Jews as a minority."[95]

Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian proponent of the binational solution has argued that it is in Palestine's interest to "make this an argument about apartheid," even to the extent of advocating Israeli settlement: "The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state".[96]
[edit] By notable authors

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has noted that, historically, Israeli officials had mulled the possibility of adopting the South African apartheid model as one that the state of Israel itself might emulate. In the late 1970s "(t)hey didn't wish to copy what was once called 'petty apartheid', the everyday harassment of black South Africans, but 'grand apartheid', the Nationalists' attempt to conjure away the problem of minority rule by dividing the country into supposedly autonomous cantons or 'homelands'."[97]

Uri Davis wrote in 1987 that apartheid in Israel is a legal reality, even though it has a different legal structure than in the Republic of South Africa. He asserts that where the Republic of South Africa had an official value system of apartheid and made a key legal distinction between "white", "coloured", "Indian" and "black", Israel has an official value system of Zionism and makes a key legal distinction between "Jew" and "non-Jew". He suggests that this distinction is made in a two-tier structure that had concealed Israeli apartheid legislation for "almost four decades" at the time when he wrote.[98]

Uri Avnery applies parts of the analogy to "the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories" which he describes as "in many respects similar to reality under the apartheid regime," but warns that there are also important differences between the two conflicts.[99]
[edit] By Adam and Moodley
Adam and Moodley apply lessons that were learned in South Africa to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Heribert Adam of Simon Fraser University and Kogila Moodley of the University of British Columbia, in their 2005 book-length study Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians, apply lessons learned in South Africa to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They divide academic and journalistic commentators on the analogy into three groups:[100]

* "The majority is incensed by the very analogy and deplores what it deems its propagandistic goals."
* "'Israel is Apartheid' advocates include most Palestinians, many Third World academics, and several Jewish post-Zionists who idealistically predict an ultimate South African solution of a common or binational state."
* A third group which sees both similarities and differences, and which looks to South African history for guidance in bringing resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.[4]

Adam and Moodley also suggest that political actors such as former Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak used the analogy "self-servingly in their exhortations and rationalizations" and that such actors "have repeatedly deplored the occupation and seeming 'South Africanization' but have done everything to entrench it."[4]

Adam and Moodley argue that notwithstanding universal suffrage within Israel proper "if the Palestinian territories under more or less permanent Israeli occupation and settler presence are considered part of the entity under analysis, the comparison between a disenfranchised African population in apartheid South Africa and the three and a half million stateless Palestinians under Israeli domination gains more validity."[4]

In part, analysts like Adam and Moodley argue, this controversy over terminology arises because Israel as a state is unique in the region. Israel is perceived as a Western democracy and is thus likely to be judged by the standards of such a state. Western commentators, too, may feel "a greater affinity to a like minded polity than to an autocratic Third World state."[101] Israel also claims to be a home for the worldwide Jewish diaspora[101] and a strategic outpost of the Western world which "is heavily bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers" who can be viewed as sharing a collective responsibility for its behaviors.[101] Radical Islamists, according to some analysts, "use Israeli policies to mobilize anti-Western sentiment",[101] leading to a situation in which "(u)nconditional U.S. support for Israeli expansionism potentially unites Muslim moderates with jihadists."[101] As a result of these factors, according to this analysis, the West Bank Barrier — nicknamed the "apartheid wall" — has become a critical frontline in the War on Terrorism.[101]

At the same time, Adam and Moodley note that Jewish historical suffering has imbued Zionism with a subjective sense of moral validity that the whites ruling South Africa never had: "Afrikaner moral standing was constantly undermined by exclusion and domination of blacks, even subconsciously in the minds of its beneficiaries. In contrast, the similar Israeli dispossession of Palestinians is perceived as self-defense and therefore not immoral."[102] They also suggest that academic comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa that see both dominant groups as "settler societies" leave unanswered the question of "when and how settlers become indigenous," as well as failing to take into account that Israeli's Jewish immigrants view themselves as returning home.[103] "In their self-concept, Zionists are simply returning to their ancestral homeland from which they were dispersed two millennia ago. Originally most did not intend to exploit native labor and resources, as colonizers do." Adam and Moodley stress that "because people give meaning to their lives and interpret their worlds through these diverse ideological prisms, the perceptions are real and have to be taken seriously."[103]

Adam and Moodley also argue that "apartheid ideologues" who justified their rule by claiming self-defense against "African National Congress(ANC)-led communism" found that excuse outdated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, whereas "continued Arab hostilities sustain the Israeli perception of justifiable self-defense."[104]

Adam and Moodley contend that the relationship of South African apartheid to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been misinterpreted as "justifying suicide bombing and glorifying martyrdom." They argue that the ANC "never endorsed terrorism," and stress that "not one suicide has been committed in the cause of a thirty-year-long armed struggle, although in practice the ANC drifted increasingly toward violence during the latter years of apartheid."[105]
[edit] By the United Nations

John Dugard, a South African professor of international law and an ad hoc Judge on the International Court of Justice, serving as the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories described the situation in the West Bank as "an apartheid regime ... worse than the one that existed in South Africa."[106] In 2007, in advance of a report from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Dugard wrote that "Israel's laws and practices in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] certainly resemble aspects of apartheid." Referring to Israel's actions in the occupied West Bank, he wrote, "Can it seriously be denied that the purpose [...] is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them? Israel denies that this is its intention or purpose. But such an intention or purpose may be inferred from the actions described in this report."[107][108]

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) is South Africa's statutory research agency. In June 2009, it released an exhaustive study indicating that Israel practices both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and suggesting that an advisory opinion on the legal consequences should be sought from the International Court of Justice. The study was conducted by an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel and the West Bank. The study reviewed Israel's practices in the territories according to definitions of colonialism and apartheid provided by international law. The project was suggested by the January 2007 report by South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council.[109]

Danny Rubinstein, a columnist at Ha'aretz also reportedly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa during a United Nations conference at the European Parliament in Brussels on 30 August 2007, stating: "Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, each of which had a different status."[110]

The current President of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, reported the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "likened Israel's policies toward the Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks under apartheid. ... Brockmann stressed that it was important for the United Nations to use the heavily-charged term since it was the institution itself that had passed the International Convention against the crime of apartheid."[111][112][113]
[edit] By notable academic and media figures

Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, Camp David Accords negotiator, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and author of the 2006 book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, maintained in that book that Israel's options included a "system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed ..."[114] Carter has also argued that the Israeli system is in some cases more onerous than that of the apartheid government of South Africa.[115] Carter's use of the term "apartheid" has been calibrated to avoid specific accusations of racism against the government of Israel, and has been carefully limited to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. For instance, in a news release, Carter described discussing his book and his use of the word "apartheid" with the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix, and noted, "I made clear in the book's text and in my response to the rabbis that the system of apartheid in Palestine is not based on racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land and the resulting suppression of protests that involve violence."[116][117]

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Carter, commented that the absence of a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is likely to produce a situation which de facto will resemble apartheid.[118]

University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer stated in June 2008 that, "Five, 10 or 15 years ago, it was unthinkable to mention ‘apartheid’ in relation to Israel. Now [Jimmy] Carter has used it in the title of his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid". Mearsheimer added, "Israel is, in effect, creating an apartheid state."[119]

Bill Fletcher, Jr., former president of the TransAfrica Forum, which led the U.S. movement to overthrow apartheid in South Africa during the 1980s, published an article in the San Jose Mercury News headlined, "Tactics that ended apartheid in S. Africa can end it in Israel," calling for support for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.[120]

Yakov Malik, the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations accused Israel—an ally of the US in the Cold War against the Soviets—of promulgating a "racist policy of apartheid against Palestinians" following the imposition of Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War of 1967.[121] Israel accused the Soviet Union of publishing anti-Zionist tracts.[122]

Raja G. Khouri, a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and former president of the Canadian Arab Federation, supports the apartheid analogy, and holds that the Israeli policies in question are not motivated by racism.[123]

British journalist Melanie Phillips has criticized Desmond Tutu for comparing Israel to Apartheid South Africa. Having made the comparison in an article for The Guardian in 2002, Tutu stated that people are scared to say the "Jewish lobby" in the U.S. is powerful. "So what?" he asked. "The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."[124] Phillips wrote of Tutu's article: "I never thought that I would see brazenly printed in a reputable British newspaper not only a repetition of the lie of Jewish power but the comparison of that power with Hitler, Stalin and other tyrants. I never thought I would see such a thing issuing from a Christian archbishop ... How can Christians maintain a virtual silence about the persecution of their fellow worshippers by Muslims across the world, while denouncing the Israelis who are in the front line against precisely this terror?"[125]

In December, 2006, Maurice Ostroff of the Jerusalem Post criticized Tutu for being well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided: "If he took the opportunity during his forthcoming visit to impartially examine all the facts, he would discover - to his pleasant surprise - that accusations of Israeli apartheid are mean-spirited and wrong-headed... He would find that whereas the apartheid of the old South Africa was entrenched in law, Israel's Declaration of Independence absolutely ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or gender.[126]

Norman Finkelstein, author of numerous books relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict and anti-Semitism such as Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995), The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (1998), The Holocaust Industry (2003), and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005), defends Carter's analysis in Palestine Peace Not Apartheid as both historically accurate and non-controversial outside the United States: "After four decades of Israeli occupation, the infrastructure and superstructure of apartheid have been put in place. Outside the never-never land of mainstream American Jewry and U.S. media[,] this reality is barely disputed."[127]

Adrian Guelke, Professor of Comparative Politics at Queen's University Belfast and Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict wrote that "Comparison of Israel's policies with the South African policy of apartheid has become a very common theme of Palestinian discourse at both an analytical and polemical level and, it should be noted, use of the analogy is by no means confined to Palestinians." Since the breakdown of the peace process in 2000, he observed, "the use of this analogy has mushroomed."[128]

Fifty-three Stanford University faculty from various fields other than Middle East, Palestine or Israel studies, as well as staff from Stanford's conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution signed a letter expressing the view that "Israel is not an Apartheid State" and that "the State of Israel has nothing in common with apartheid"; that within its national territory Israel is a liberal democracy in which Arab citizens of Israel enjoy civil, religious, social, and political equality. They alleged that likening Israel to apartheid South Africa was a "smear," part of a campaign of "malicious propaganda."[129]

Ian Buruma has argued that even though there is social discrimination against Arabs in Israel and that "the ideal of a Jewish state smacks of racism", the analogy is "intellectually lazy, morally questionable and possibly even mendacious", as "[n]on-Jews, mostly Arab Muslims, make up 20% of the Israeli population, and they enjoy full citizen's rights" and "[i]nside the state of Israel, there is no apartheid".[130]

An early example of the use of the word is a full-page advertisement placed in the New York Times in March 1988 by hundreds of intellectuals, academics, and activists declaring Israel to be "an apartheid state, founded on pillage and predicated on exclusivity".[131]
[edit] By South Africans

In 2002 Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote a series of articles in major newspapers,[132] comparing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to apartheid South Africa, and calling for the international community to divest support from Israel until the territories were no longer occupied.[132]

Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School,[133] Ronnie Kasrils,[134] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[135] Dennis Goldberg,[136] and Arun Ghandhi,[137][138]

On 15 May 2008, 34 leading South African activists published an open letter in The Citizen, under the heading "We fought apartheid; we see no reason to celebrate it in Israel now!". The signatories, who included Kasrils and several other government ministers, COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, Ahmed Kathrada, Sam Ramsamy and Blade Nzimande, wrote "Apartheid is a crime against humanity. It was when it was done against South Africans; it is so when it is done against Palestinians!"[139]

On 6 June 2008, Mr. Kgalema Motlanthe, the Deputy President of the African National Congress, who had recently visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, told a delegation of Arab Knesset members visiting South Africa to study its democratic constitution that conditions for Palestinians under occupation were "worse than conditions were for Blacks under the Apartheid regime."[140]

In a letter to the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Ontario, Willie Madisha, the President of COSATU wrote, "As someone who lived in apartheid South Africa and who has visited Palestine I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. In fact, I believe that some of the atrocities committed against the South Africans by the erstwhile apartheid regime in South Africa pale in comparison to those committed against the Palestinians."[141]

Hendrik Verwoerd, then prime minister of South Africa and the architect of South Africa's apartheid policies, said in 1961 that "The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."[39][142][143]

Former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti relates in his 1986 book Conflicts and Contradictions that during the 1970s, an official of the South African apartheid compared Israeli-Palestinian relations to South African policy for the Transkei in a meeting. The Israeli officials present expressed shock at the comparison, and the South African official said "I understand your reaction. But aren't we actually doing the same thing? We are faced with the same existential problem, therefore we arrive at the same solution. The only difference is that yours is pragmatic and ours is ideological."[144]

In 2008 a delegation of ANC veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[145][146] One member said "The daily indignity to which the Palestinian population is subjected far outstrips the apartheid regime." Another member, human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan, cited the separate roads, different registration of cars, the indignity of having to produce a permit, and long queues at checkpoints as worse than what they had experienced during apartheid. But she also thought the apartheid comparison was a potential "red herring".[147] Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC parliament member, was shocked to see footage of teenagers heaping abuse on and throwing stones at Palestinian children, especially done in the name of Judaism. The delegation's final formal statement made no mention of comparisons with apartheid and Dennis Davis, a high court judge, said he thought the use of the term in the Middle East context was "very unhelpful".[145] Davis also noted that "There's no racial superiority here. There's no pervading ideology that confirms the inferiority of Palestinians." and concluded "But I think it's incredibly unhelpful to say you can simply take this to be apartheid and therefore the South African struggle is the same and the South African solution is the same. That's a very lazy form of reasoning."[148] One of the Jewish members of the delegation said that the comparison with apartheid is very relevant and that the Israelis are even more efficient in implementing the separation-of-races regime than the South Africans were, and that if he were to say this publicly, he would be attacked by the members of the Jewish community.[146]

In May 2009, The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa released a legal study with the findings that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories.[149] According to this study, Israel practices the "three pillars" of apartheid in the occupied territories:

The first pillar "derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews".

The second pillar is reflected in "Israel's 'grand' policy to fragment the OPT [and] ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory. This policy is evidenced by Israel's extensive appropriation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink the territorial space available to Palestinians; the hermetic closure and isolation of the Gaza Strip from the rest of the OPT; the deliberate severing of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; and the appropriation and construction policies serving to carve up the West Bank into an intricate and well-serviced network of connected settlements for Jewish-Israelis and an archipelago of besieged and non-contiguous enclaves for Palestinians".

The third pillar is "Israel's invocation of 'security' to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement [to] mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its system of domination and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a group."

[edit] By Israelis

Jamal Zahalka, an Israeli-Arab member of the Knesset argued that an apartheid system has already taken shape in that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are separated into "cantons" and Palestinians are required to carry permits to travel between them.[150] Azmi Bishara, a former Knesset member, argued that the Palestinian situation had been caused by "colonialist apartheid."[151]

Michael Ben-Yair, attorney-general of Israel from 1993 to 1996 referred to Israel establishing, "an apartheid regime in the occupied territories", in an essay published in Haaretz.[152]

Ehud Olmert, then Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, commented in April 2004 that; "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."[153] Olmert made a similar remark in November 2007 as Prime Minister: "If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished."[154][155]

Some Israelis have compared the separation plan to apartheid, such as political scientist Meron Benvenisti,[94] and journalist Amira Hass.[156] Ami Ayalon, a former admiral, claiming it "ha[d] some apartheid characteristics."[157] Shulamit Aloni, former education minister and leader of Meretz, said that the state of Israel is "practicing its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population."[158]

A major 2002 study of Israeli settlement practices by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem concluded: "Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa." A more recent B'Tselem publication on the road system Israel has established in the West Bank concluded that it "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime," and even "entails a greater degree of arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa."[159]

Academic and political activist Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen who describes himself as an "anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew",[160] has written several books on the subject, including Israel: An Apartheid State in 1987.[161]

Israeli politician and former Knesset member Yossi Sarid criticised discriminatory marriage law, exemption of Orthodox Jews from military service, and banning of Arabs from purchasing Jewish National Fund land as racist in a 2007 Ynetnews article entitled Our apartheid state.[7] He later compared a further array of Israeli practices including the West Bank barrier, separate roads, 'cheap hard labour', and Palestinian enclaves to apartheid in a 2008 Ha'aretz column entitled Yes, it is apartheid. Sarid wrote 'what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck - it is apartheid. Nor does it even solve the problem of fear' and added, 'One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon.' [162]

Daphna Golan-Agnon, co-founder of B'Tselem and founding director of Bat Shalom writes in her 2002 book Next Year in Jerusalem, "I'm not sure if the use of the term apartheid helps us to understand the discrimination against Palestinians in Israel or the oppression against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. I'm not sure the discussion about how we are like or unlike South Africa helps move us forward to a solution. But the comparison reminds us that hundreds of laws do not make discrimination just and that the international community, the same international community we want to belong to, did not permit the perpetuation of apartheid. And it doesn't matter how we explain it and how many articles are written by Israeli scholars and lawyers—there are two groups living in this small piece of land, and one enjoys rights and liberty while the other does not."[163]

In his article "Is it Apartheid?" Israeli anti-Zionist activist Professor Moshé Machover states "... talk of Israeli 'apartheid' serves to divert attention from much greater dangers. For, as far as most Palestinians are concerned, the Zionist policy is far worse than apartheid. Apartheid can be reversed. Ethnic cleansing is immeasurably harder to reverse; at least not in the short or medium term."[164]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra...id_analogy

Sami:
> you lying zio-nazi

Didn't inna give you 3 warnings already to stop calling people names? Sorry, but this might very well be your last post in this tribe....

> Who is this "Islamic president"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majalli_Wahabi

> What FULL equal rights?

Freedom of speech. Freedom of press. The right to vote. The right to run for any office. etc.

Ironically the Palestinians in Israel have far more rights than they do in Arab states.

John:
> I hoped a dialogue would ensue, regarding this topic.

I call bullshit.

If you want dialogue, then you need to stop dredging websites for every anti-Israeli article that you can find.

Posting a couple of anti-Israeli articles every day is _not_ the way to provoke dialogue.

Especially since you've already admitted that Israel the shining light of freedom and democracy in the region.

sami, still channeling your inner Tuk tuk?

dimi3:

Hahahaha...

And yet Israel is 10x better than your average Arab regime.

So, does that mean the Arabs are all much more wretched and vicious than the Nazis?