The farcical claims of the Israeli apartheid state to be a democracy have been further exposed as more reports have emerged of the way they treated their own citizens during the murderous assault on Gaza. It has been revealed that Israel arrested over 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel and dozens of these are being held without charge, some for 9 or more days.
The farcical claims of the Israeli apartheid state to be a democracy have been further exposed as more reports have emerged of the way they treated their own citizens during the murderous assault on Gaza. It has been revealed that Israel arrested over 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel and dozens of these are being held without charge, some for 9 or more days.
About 20% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinian with their origins in the minority not expelled or otherwise driven out when the Israeli state was formed in 1948 or those who remained in the areas seized in the later wars. Because they have a higher birth rate the Apartheid Israeli state sees their presence as a "demographic threat" to the maintenance of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.
It’s depressingly familiar language to anyone familiar with the history of northern Ireland and indeed many of the statistics for things like employment in the public sector are similar to the equivalent figures for the north prior to the struggles of the 60s and 70s. For instance only 5% of civil servants are Palestinian as against the 20% of the population..
The most glaring example of unequal treatment along lines of religious background is of course around immigration. The ‘Law of Return’ allows anyone who claims Jewish descent to immigrate to Israel even if they have no connection whatsoever in terms of relatives. On the other hand even those Palestinians who were born and lived in what is now the Israeli state but fled during one of the wars are unable to return.
In fact its not even possible for someone who live’s in the occupied territories and marries an Israeli citizen to immigrate under family reunification. To get some impression of the full range of discrimination see the Racism in Israel wikipedia page – the content of this page is keenly fought over by supporters of the Israeli state who seeking to minimise descriptions of racism against Palestinians so it now comprises a minimum list that had been forced through a lot of verification.
Maisa Arshid, an attorney for dozens of the Palestinian detainees told Al Jazeera that the purpose of these detentions was to ‘terrorise the population" into silence because “If people in the street know that people have been arrested for nine days, it will prevent protest." Ashid said some have been beaten badly enough in detention to require medial attention and in one case “During an interrogation, police allegedly removed a detainee’s kuffiyeh, urinated on it, and then put it back on the man’s neck”
WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )