Some Notes on Ahmadinejad's "Insult to Humanity" Comment

As tends to happen whenever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech, especially one in commemoration of Al-Quds Day that explicitly rejects the ideology of Zionism and condemns the Israeli government for its inherently discriminatory, exclusivist, and ethnocentric policies and actions, all hell broke loose after the Iranian President addressed a large crowd at Tehran University on Friday.

"The existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to all humanity," Ahmadinejad said, adding that "confronting the existence of the fabricated Zionist regime is in fact protecting the rights and dignity of all human beings."

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the remarks as "offensive and inflammatory." The European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is leading nuclear negotiations with Iran, also denounced Ahmadinejad's speech as "outrageous and hateful."

Naturally, Ahmadinejad's words also sparked the usual shock and horror from the usual people, the same people who still insist that (1) Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and (2) believe that such a comment constituted a direct threat of military action against the superpower-backed, nuclear-armed state of Israel.

Without delving into the persistent myths and deliberate falsehoods surrounding that particular talking point (one that has been sufficiently debunked countless times though obviously never seems to cut through the hasbara) or seeking to justify anything said by Ahmadinejad, a few things should be noted:

First: While Associated Press described Ahmadinejad's comment as "one of his sharpest attacks yet against the Jewish state," which seemed to indicate that this is the first time such language has been used, they failed to point out that Ahmadinejad has used this exact same phrase before.

After Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at a "National and Islamic Solidarity for the Future of Palestine" conference in February 2010, Ha'aretz reported he had said that "the existence of 'the Zionist regime' is an insult to humanity, according to Iranian news agency IRNA."

Later that year, he said the very same thing.

Second (and more important): The "insult to humanity" phrase was not coined by the Iranian President to describe a political power structure defined by demographic engineering, colonialism, racism, and violence.

For example, a December 11, 1979 editorial in California's Lodi News-Sentinel stated clearly, "Apartheid is an insult to humanity" and "must be ended."

But the phrase has far deeper roots - roots with which the UN Secretary-General himself should be well acquainted.

A joint declaration by 20 Asian and African countries issued to the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on October 1, 1963 called upon the agency to reject the membership of South Africa due to its racist and discriminatory regime of Apartheid. It noted "with grave concern that the South African Government continues stubbornly to disregard all United Nations and Security Council resolutions and to maintain its apartheid policies in defiance of the United Nations General Assembly, of the Security, and consequently of the IAEA Statute."

The declaration stated:

1. We condemn categorically the apartheid policies of the Government of South Africa, based on racial superiority, as immoral and inhuman;

2. We deprecate most strongly the South African Government's irresponsible flouting of world opinion by its persistent refusal to put an end to its racial policies;

3. The apartheid policies of the Government of South Africa are a flagrant violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter, as well as being an insult to humanity.

The very first International Conference on Human Rights, held by the UN in (get this) Tehran from April 22 to May 13, 1968, "condemned the brutal and inhuman practice of apartheid," "deplore[d] the Government of South Africa's continuous insult to humanity," and "declare[d] that the policy of apartheid or other similar evils are a crime against humanity."

On February 15, 1995, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights adopted a resolution praising the end of "the era of apartheid in South Africa" which also reaffirmed that "apartheid and apartheid-like practices are an insult to humanity..."

The UN General Assembly has repeatedly reaffirmed "that the conclusion of an internal convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid would be an important contribution to the struggle against apartheid, racism, economic exploitation, colonial domination and foreign occupation" and, more specifically, the UN has affirmed time and again "the inalienable rights of all peoples, and in particular...the Palestinian people, to freedom, equality and self-determination, and the legitimacy of their struggles to restore those rights."

A clearer connection between Israeli policies toward non-Jewish communities under Israeli control and the system of Apartheid has also been made by the United Nations. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination released a report in February 2012 which repeatedly notes the institutional discrimination and systemic "segregation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities" in Israel and the "difficulties faced by members of these [non-Jewish] communities in gaining access on a basis of equality with Jewish inhabitants to land, housing, education, employment and public health."

More specifically, the Committee draws direct attention to Israel "concerning the prevention, prohibition and eradication of all policies and practices of racial segregation and apartheid, and urges the State party to take immediate measures to prohibit and eradicate any such policies or practices which severely and disproportionately affect the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory."

No one can accuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of having any affinity whatsoever for Zionism or the government of Israel. Clearly he believes that Israel practices its own form of Apartheid against the Palestinian people. And he is not alone.

Back in 1961, Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa's notoriously racist Prime Minister said, "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."

In late November 1974, after visiting the leadership in Pretoria, then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres emphasized the "vitally important" economic, political and military ties between the Apartheid state in South Africa and the Zionist state in Israel, writing that "this cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and out refusal to submit to it." The following year, in "top secret" correspondence with South Africa's Defense Minister (and later Prime Minister) PW Botha, Peres offered to sell Israeli nuclear warheads to the Apartheid regime.

In April 1976, just two months before the Soweto Uprising, South African Prime Minister (and known former Nazi sympathizer) John Vorster took an official state visit to Israel, where he was hosted by Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin. A number of friendship pacts and bilateral economic, military and nuclear agreements were signed. At a banquet held in Vorster's honor, Rabin hailed "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence" and praised Vorster as a champion of freedom. Both Israel and South Africa, Rabin said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness."

Vorster lamented that both South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of Western civilization. Only a few months later, an official South African Government's document reinforced this shared predicament: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, along with many other South Africa anti-Apartheid activists and religious leaders have consistently called Israel an Apartheid state. Earlier this year, Tutu wrote, "Not only is this group of people [Palestinians] being oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa, their very identity and history are being denied and obfuscated," and lamented that many supporters of Israel refuse to "grapple with the reality that Israel becoming an apartheid state or like South Africa in its denial of equal rights is not a future danger... but a present-day reality."

South Africans are far from alone in seeing the similarities.

In 1999, the newly-inaugurated Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, argued against the Zionist imperative to control all of historic Palestine, warning, "Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state..."

Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general from 1993 to 1996, has written that following the Six Day War in June 1967,

We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one ‑ progressive, liberal ‑ in Israel; and the other ‑ cruel, injurious ‑ in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.

That oppressive regime exists to this day.

In 2002, Yigal Bronner, then a professor at Tel Aviv University, wrote in Ha'aretz of the true purpose of the Israeli separation wall: "Ours will be a brutal land of pens stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that will make South African apartheid pale. The outcome is too terrible to even imagine."

The same year, the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem released a report entitled, "Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank," which 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."

Previously, B'Tselem executive director Eitan Felner had written in Le Monde Diplomatique that, by "granting the same rights given to Israeli citizens living In Israel to the residents of... settlements, Israel has established a system of segregation and discrimination, in which two populations living in the same area are subject to different systems of law." While Jewish settlers living in colonies built upon illegally occupied, annexed and stolen land "enjoy all the rights of Jews in Israel, including complete freedom of movement, speech and organisation, participation in local and national (Israeli) elections, social security and health benefits, etc.," Palestinians are subject to military law and enjoy no such freedoms, benefits or enfranchisement. "In Africaans they call it apartheid," writes Felner.

Avraham Burg, Israel's Knesset Speaker from 1999 to 2003 and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, has long determined that "Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy," insisting the only way to maintain total Jewish control over all of historic Palestine would be to "abandon democracy" and "institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages." He has also called Israel "the last colonial occupier in the Western world."

In a 2004 article for The New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg, a mainstream journalist who served in as a colonel corporal in the Israeli Occupation Forces, wrote that unless a contiguous, "self-sustaining Palestinian state" emerges, "the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority." He continued: "A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank" considering the fact that "two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws." Jewish colonists "live under Israeli civil law" while indigenous Palestinians "fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws, administered by the Israeli Army," he explained.

In 2007, Yossi Beilin, Knesset minister and chairman of the Meretz Party, warned, "Somewhere down the line — and symbolically speaking, that line may be crossed the day that a minority of Jews will rule a majority of Palestinians west of the Jordan River — the destructive nature of occupation will turn Israel into a pariah state, not unlike South Africa under apartheid."

Yossi Sarid, who served as a member of the Knesset between 1974 and 2006, has written of Israel's "segregation policy" that "what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid." He added, "It is entirely clear why the word apartheid terrifies us so. What should frighten us, however, is not the description of reality, but reality itself...The Palestinians are unfortunate because they have not produced a Nelson Mandela; the Israelis are unfortunate because they have not produced an F.W. de Klerk."

A Ha'artez editorial from October 2007 states, "The de facto separation [in the West Bank] is today more similar to political apartheid than an occupation regime because of its constancy. One side - determined by national, not geographic association - includes people who have the right to choose and the freedom to move, and a growing economy. On the other side are people closed behind the walls surrounding their community, who have no right to vote, lack freedom of movement, and have no chance to plan their future."

Yossi Paritzky, former Knesset and Cabinet minister, writing about the systematic institutionalization and legalization of racial and religious discrimination in Israel, stated that Israel does not act like a democracy in which "all citizens regardless of race, religious, gender or origin are entitled to equality." Rather, by implementing more and more discriminatory laws that treat Palestinians as second-class citizens, "Israel decided to be like apartheid‑era South Africa, and some will say even worse countries that no longer exist."

Shulamit Aloni, another former Knesset and Cabinet member, has written that "the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population."

In 2008, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel released its annual human rights report which found that the dynamic between settlers, soldiers and native Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was "reminiscent, in many and increasing ways, of the apartheid regime in South Africa."

Ehud Olmert, when he was Prime Minister, told a Knesset committee meeting, "For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep‑seated and intolerable" and repeatedly warned that if "we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

Writing in Ha'aretz in October 2009, journalist and author Ari Shavit predicted to his fellow Israelis, "If we do not quickly find the right way to deal with the occupation, the occupation will bury us... If we do not seriously deal with the settlements, we will become South Africa."

In 2009, Oren Yiftachel, public policy professor at Ben-Gurion University, wrote that the meteoric rise of the Israeli right and the growing popularity of its discriminatory and transferist ideology signaled "the return of openly declared Jewish colonialist goals and the intensification of apartheid-like measures as popular political agendas." He continues, "[T]he Israeli/Palestinian space increasingly resembles the South African apartheid state - one group, identified by its ethnic/racial origins, controls multi-group territories," under which "a series of thickening practices, regulations, laws, and acts of violence [are] used for separating Jews from Arabs and for preserving Jewish superiority."

Billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, former president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in 2009, "At a certain point, there will be more Arabs than Jews living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, thereby leading to one de facto apartheid state if no resolution to the conflict is reached via a two-state solution."

Former Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak has admitted that "[a]s long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar extensively addressed the similarities of the Israeli regime to Apartheid South Africa in early 2010, writing, "In Israel, on the other hand, institutional discrimination is meant to preserve the supremacy of a group of Jewish settlers over Palestinian Arabs. As far as discriminatory practices are concerned, it's hard to find differences between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule in the territories; for example, separate areas and separate laws for Jews and Palestinians."

Charney Bromberg, an American human rights activist, former Congress of Racial Equality member and executive director of Meretz USA for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace, said in 2010 that, past the Green Line and in the occupied territories, "you will see so many of the accoutrements that the South Africans placed to control their -- what they believed to be their hostile population. Roads for whites only. Roads controlled at every pass. Roads controlled by fences and guards."

Poet and author Yitzhak Laor has written that Israel is already a "binational state" that maintains "a rigid apartheid legal system, as the High Court of Justice fades away," continuing, "The system preserving this apartheid is more ruthless than that seen in South Africa, where the black were a labor force and could therefore also make a living. It is equipped with the lie of being 'temporary.'"

Zvi Bar'el, history professor and columnist for Ha'aretz, has written that the discriminatory legislation proposed and passed by the "racists in the Knesset" prove that "Israel's apartheid movement is coming out of the woodwork and is taking on a formal, legal shape." In an article entitled "South Africa is already here," Bar'el explained, "It is moving from voluntary apartheid, which hides its ugliness through justifications of 'cultural differences' and 'historic neglect' which only requires a little funding and a couple of more sewage pipes to make everything right - to a purposeful, open, obligatory apartheid, which no longer requires any justification."

In April 2011, Professor Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote that the purpose of the recent "tsunami of racist laws passed by the Knesset" was "the gradual establishment of an apartheid state in Israel, and the future separation on a racial basis of Jews and non-Jews." Tracing the "Israeli apartheid state-in-the-making," back to 1967, Blatman explained:

"What started as rule over another people has gradually ripened - especially since the latter part of the 1970s - into a colonialism that is nurturing a regime of oppression and discrimination with regard to the Palestinian population. It is robbing that population of its land and of its basic civil rights, and is encouraging a minority group (the settlers) to develop a crude, violent attitude toward the Arabs in the territories. This was exactly the reality that, after many years, led to the establishment of the apartheid state in South Africa."

Former Shin Bet chief and Labor MK Ami Ayalon said in May 2011 that, if Palestinians abandon negotiations toward a segregationist two-state solution and "ask for citizenship and equality in Israel, and if we don't give it to them, it would be apartheid." Such a scenario, Ayalon lamented, would mark "the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

Shlomo Gazit, former member of Palmach, an elite unit of the Haganah, wrote in Ha'aretz that "in the present situation, unfortunately, there is no equal treatment for Jews and Arabs when it comes to law enforcement. The legal system that enforces the law in a discriminatory way on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid regime."

Last summer, Knesset minister Ahmed Tibi told the Jerusalem Post that "keeping the status quo will deepen apartheid in Israel as it did in South Africa," while Gabriela Shalev, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, told The Los Angeles Times last year that, in terms of public opinion of Israel, "I have the feeling that we are seen more like South Africa once was."

Council on Foreign Relations member Stephen Roberts, after returning from a trip to Israel and the West Bank, wrote in The Nation that "Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire."

Writing in late 2011, Ha'aretz publisher Amos Schocken described Israel's actions in the occupied West Bank as the implementation of "a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid" that "ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights."

In April 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu's own nephew, Jonathan Ben Artzi wrote that Israel's "policies of segregation and discrimination that ravaged (and still ravage) my country and the occupied Palestinian territories" undoubtedly fit the definition of Apartheid.

On May 1, 2012, Henry Siegman, Holocaust survivor and former head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote, "In the 1980s many in the American Jewish establishment (myself included) participated in demonstrations against South Africa's apartheid regime. The struggle against apartheid was considered by the Jewish community (not only by liberals) to be a Jewish cause. But that was in the 1980s, and the apartheid was in South Africa. Today it is in Israel -- and not as a future possibility, as many have been warning, but a current reality." Siegman added:

Netanyahu and his government have sought to disguise their de facto apartheid regime by pretending the status quo in the occupied West Bank is temporary, and that it would lead to a two-state agreement if only Palestinians would return to negotiations in a peace process that has been a farce, having served no purpose other than to disguise the enlargement of the settlement project that created the apartheid to begin with.

Linguist, cultural anthropologist, and Hebrew University professor David Shulman wrote in May 2012 in The New York Review of Books that there already exists "a single state between the Jordan River and the sea" controlled by Israel and which fits the definition of an "ethnocracy." He continues,

Those who recoil at the term "apartheid" are invited to offer a better one; but note that one of the main architects of this system, Ariel Sharon, himself reportedly adopted South African terminology, referring to the noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves he envisaged for the West Bank as "Bantustans."

These Palestinian Bantustans now exist, and no one should pretend that they're anything remotely like a "solution" to Israel's Palestinian problem. Someday, as happened in South Africa, this system will inevitably break down.

In his 2005 memoir, Hirsh Goodman, an Israeli author and intellectual who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, recalls a 1967 radio address by David Ben-Gurion. "Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible. If it did not Israel would soon become an Apartheid State," writes Hirsh, adding that the statement "resonated" with him because "I understood what he was saying."

Whether those who get hysterical over Ahmadinejad's rhetoric agree with the above assessments - many of which were made by prominent Israeli and Jewish politicians, officials, and academics - is irrelevant. It's clear that Ahmadinejad himself would agree.

In fact, that the Islamic Republic has long officially recognized a distinct correlation between Apartheid South Africa and Israel is evident in its actions following the successful Iranian Revolution in 1979. The new Iranian government immediately cut diplomatic and economic ties with Israel, which had received upwards of 60% of its oil from the Shah's Iran before the revolution.

Only one other country suffered a similar fate.

Though the Shah had, according to the South Africa Foreign Ministry, "good relations in the fields of trade, science and technology, defence, medicine, energy and mining" with the Apartheid regime, the nascent revolutionary government "severed relations with South Africa in February 1979 and imposed a total trade boycott." Up until that point, Iran supplied South Africa with 90% of its oil. The new Iranian government also openly supported indigenous South African liberation organizations.

Only after Apartheid ended did Iran lift the embargo and reestablish diplomatic relations with South Africa on May 10, 1994.

Ahmadinejad himself pointed out these facts during his 2007 speech at Columbia University. He explained that, following the revolution, "We [Iran] announced our readiness that besides two countries, we are ready to have friendly relations and talks with all countries of the world. One of those two was the apartheid regime of South Africa, which has been eliminated. And the second was the Zionist regime. For everybody else around the world, we announced that we want to have friendly, brotherly ties."

Consequently, Ahmadinejad's reference to Israel (which he sees as an Apartheid state) as an "insult to humanity" (which repeats the same verbiage used repeatedly by the United Nations itself) appears to be far less inflammatory than the outrage that followed would suggest.

*****

UPDATE:

During a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on April 2, 2006 and speaking in an official capacity as Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh stated:

I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned.

That is the message, and I'm sure that we are -- this message is shared with all the international community and peace-loving people of the whole world.

As this is presented by Soltanieh as the "policy" of Iran, there is no reason to doubt that Ahmadinejad would concur with such a statement.

*****

UPDATE II:

August 24, 2012 - Jeffrey Goldberg has doubled-down on his use of apartheid terminology, writing that "the description of a two-tiered justice system on the West Bank is still relevant today, and the threat to Israel's democracy, and good name, posed by settlement ideology is more real than ever."

*****

UPDATE III:

October 16, 2012 - Akiva Elder, the prominent Israeli journalist and current chief political columnist and editorial writer for Ha'aretz, writes today:

Amid a dry economic report published yesterday in TheMarker lies an official announcement/acknowledgment of unparalleled importance: The government of Israel confirms that between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there is no longer a Jewish majority. In other words, in the territory under Israel's jurisdiction a situation of apartheid exists. A Jewish minority rules over an Arab majority.

The subtitle on the article summarizes Eldar's point this way: "The government's acknowledgement that Jews are a minority in this land means one thing only: Apartheid is here."

Eldar's inescapable conclusion is just the latest in a string of commendable (albeit imperfect and, at times, seemingly begrudging) truths articulated by the journalist. This past September, Eldar wrote in Ha'aretz,

For 64 years the Jewish community realized the Zionist vision using discriminatory immigration and residential laws, unequal division of resources and hegemony over religious and national symbols. For 45 years a Jewish minority has deprived the Palestinian collective in the occupied territories of political rights and violated the dignity, property rights and freedom of movement of millions of human beings.

And last December, Eldar condemned the racism of the Israeli government and its eager colonists, admitting, "Jewish ethnocentrism - and the desire to erase the collective identity of the Palestinians and take control of their land - have been a thread linking religious and secular over the past 44 years."

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In late October 2012, at the African National Congress (ANC) International Solidarity Conference, ANC Chairperson, Baleka Mbete, stated that, based upon her firsthand experience in both South Africa and Palestine, she could say confidently that Israeli policy is "far worse than Apartheid South Africa."

*****

UPDATE IV:

February 21, 2013 - In the wake of recently resurfaced comments allegedly made by Chuck Hagel during a 2010 speech at Rutgers University regarding the risk Israel run of "becoming an apartheid state if it didn't allow the Palestinians to form a state," The Times of Israel has reported even more damning statements made by a former Israeli official.

Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General and ex-Ambassador to South Africa, said on February 20, "In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state."

Liel, speaking at Jerusalem conference dedicated to discussing this very topic, was forthright and unflinching in his assessment of Israel's current policies and predicament regarding the continuing occupation of Palestine:

"As someone who knows the original apartheid well, and also knows the State of Israel quite well – I was born here, grew up here, served and fought for it for 30 years — someone like me knows that Zionism isn't apartheid and the State of Israel that I grew up in wasn't an apartheid state," Liel emphasized.

"I'm here today because I came to the conclusion that the occupation of the West Bank as it exists today is a sort of Israeli apartheid," said Liel. "The occupation became a hump on the back of Zionism; it has now become the hump of the State of Israel."

There is a real danger of Israel's occupation of the West Bank becoming an integral part of the state, he said. "When that happens, when the West Bank and [Israel in the pre-1967 lines] become one, and the Palestinian residents of the West Bank will not have citizenship — we're apartheid," he said

Liel also had a message for U.S. President Barack Obama, who is slated to visit to Israel in March:

"If you, President Obama, intend to come here for a courtesy visit — don't come. Don't come! We don't need you here for a courtesy visit," Liel said. "You cannot come to an area that exhibits signs of apartheid and ignore them. That would simply be an unethical visit. You yourself know full well that Israel is standing at the apartheid cliff. If you don't deal with this topic during your visit, the responsibility will at the end of the process also lie with you."

The event at which Liel was speaking was entitled, "Is there Israeli Apartheid?" He was joined by Peace Now board member Amiram Goldblum, journalist Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz reporter Gideon Levy, Hebrew University professors emeritus Frances Raday and Gideon Shimoni, Ben-Gurion University professor Oren Yiftachel, Bar-Ilan University political science lecturer and B’Tselem board member Menachem Klein, and human rights lawyer Michael Sfard.

After noting the "systematic discrimination" of Palestinians by Israel, Levy stated his agreement with Apartheid terminology. "What else could we call what's happening here?," he asked. He also pointed out that, while military occupation is not unique to Israel/Palestine, "I don't know any other occupation where the occupier thinks he's the victim, where he thinks he's the only victim," adding, "as long as Israel doesn't pay a price for the occupation, nothing is going to change."

Klein concentrated his comments on East Jerusalem, where he said Israel practices a form of "ethno-apartheid."

Only professor Shimoni challenged the application of the term Apartheid with regard to Israeli policies which he said was "rather unfair and lacks intellectual honesty." He argued that "from land theft to various draconic [sic] restrictions, as much they are worthy of condemnation — they are not apartheid," which he called a "rhetorical weapon...to demonize and excoriate the State of Israel."

The Times of Israel too claimed that the Apartheid analogy is "highly contentious" and "usually employed only by radical anti-Israel activists." However, anyone familiar with the statements of myriad Israeli politicians and commentators (as compiled here) know this is a falsehood.

*****

UPDATE V:

February 28, 2013 - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, speaking February 27, 2013 at the official opening of the fifth United Nations Alliance of Civilizations Global Forum in Vienna, explicitly referenced Zionism as an inherently discriminatory ideology akin to Fascism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

"We should be striving to better understand the culture and beliefs of others, but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them." Erdogan said. "And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity."

*****

UPDATE VI:

March 14, 2013 - Today at the Herzliya security conference, Israeli journalist and Ha'aretz correspondent Barak Ravid opened a panel discussion he was moderating about the so-called Two-State Solution by referring to "the de facto apartheid reality in the West Bank" that is "neither Jewish nor democratic."

*****

UPDATE VII:

April 12, 2013 - Israeli columnist Akiva Eldar reported today on the increased awareness and acknowledgment that Israel is indeed a state that practices the crime of Apartheid. Writing in Al Monitor, Eldar points out that this is really nothing new.

He reminds us, "Almost 10 years ago, Dr. Yossi Beilin, who served as minister of justice, deputy foreign minister, the leader of the left-wing Zionist Meretz Party and one of the architects of the Oslo Accord, warned that 'if a border is not drawn between us and the Palestinians within several years, the state of Israel could deteriorate to using apartheid methods in order to rule the Palestinians who will form a majority west of the Jordan River.'"

Eldar also notes that "a poll conducted by the Dialog Institute and published in the Haaretz newspaper in October 2012" found that "69% of respondents (a representative sampling of 500 Jewish Israelis) said that if Israel decides to annex the West Bank, they would oppose granting voting rights to the Palestinian inhabitants."

He goes on to explain that a new group, called "The Organization against Apartheid in Israel," has been established - "the first Zionist organization to dare to include the dirty word “apartheid” in its name." Eldar continues:

Among the founding team are Dr. Moraleh (Mordechai) Bar-On, a former Knesset member (Meretz) who was the chief education officer of the IDF; Dr. Alon Liel, who was director general of the foreign ministry and Israeli ambassador to South Africa; Ilan Baruch, also a former ambassador to South Africa; former Knesset member Mossi Raz (Meretz); Professor Menachem Klein (Bar-Ilan University) and Professors Amiram Goldblum, Peter Hillman and David Harel (of Hebrew University) and the lawyer and human rights activist Michael Sfard. All of the above mentioned people are active in various organizations dedicated to ensuring the existence of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state.

The new organization’s founding document says that within the state of Israel there is no rule of separation along racial or national divides, but Israel’s control of the Palestinians living across the Green Line causes legal, physical and infrastructural separation and discrimination, and separation of civil and human rights on the basis of nationality. It notes that the Israeli regime in the West Bank maintains separate legal systems for Palestinians and settlers living in the same area and that in certain places, especially Hebron, the apartheid is clear and evident.

*****

UPDATE VIII:

June 19, 2013 - In a letter to pro-Palestinian rights activists, the former South African Ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, explained his recent "decision to reject a symbolic gift from the Israeli government — planting trees in his honor in a national park named after South Africa."

Why? Because of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, which Coovadia referred to as a "replication of apartheid."

*****

UPDATE IX:

July 2, 2013 - Israeli Justice Minister, war criminal and population transfer enthusiast Tzipi Livni is the latest Israeli official to use the dreaded A-word when describing the ongoing occupation of Palestine.

Speaking at an accountants' conference in Eilat, Livni warned that much of Europe already sees Israel as "a colonialist country" and, as a result, the BDS movement is advancing. Addressing recent youth-organized protests against Israel's decision to export natural gas, Livni told the crowd:

I appreciate the fact that they care and are thinking about the future, and obligating us to think about the future. But the time has come for the same youth to ask, to what kind of state do they want to leave the gas reserves? To a Jewish democratic Israel? Or to a binational Arab state? Or to an apartheid state? It is impossible to deal with economic issues and to ignore the important diplomatic issues related to two states for two peoples.

Of course, Livni's statement is rhetorically speculative. Yet, as +972 Magazine's Larry Derfner deftly notes, the potential future Livni proposes is already the reality of the present. He writes,

If maintaining the occupation will become apartheid in the future, why, after 46 years of it, isn't the occupation apartheid now? What's going to be different later? Will the occupation become apartheid only after the Jews lose their majority (which now stands at about 51 percent) between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, where Israel is the only sovereign state? Will apartheid begin only when the Arabs reach 50 percent plus one of the area's population, and so long as they're at least one Arab shy of 50 percent, will apartheid be at bay?

Meanwhile, speaking with the Huffington Post at the Aspen Ideas conference, Jeffrey Goldberg said that the current situation in the West Bank is "provisionally apartheid," in which Palestinians (but he doesn't call them that) "live under military occupation."

Goldberg, who wrote in The New Yorker in 2004 that a "de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank" due to a two-tired justice system and military occupation, still holds out hope that the situation is not everlasting.

"This is the choice obviously facing Israel...If you decide that this is the permanent arrangement and these Arabs are always going to be under your control, that they're not going to have the vote, then you gotta call it what it is. I mean, Jim Crow, you call it Apartheid, whatever..."

Yeah, whatever.

*****

UPDATE X:

July 21, 2013 - Speaking July 20, 2013, at the Aspen Institute's annual Security Forum, retired U.S. Central Commander and four-plus decade Marine Corps veteran General James Mattis said that, unless a two-state solution is reached, Israel will effectively become an apartheid state.

"The current situation is unsustainable," he said, and added:

We have got to find a way to make the two state solution that Democrat and Republican administrations have supported, we've got to get there, and the chances for it are starting to ebb because of the settlements and where they're at, are going to make it impossible to maintain the two state option. For example, if I'm Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there's ten thousand Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to include ‘em, either it ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don't get to vote -- apartheid. That didn't work too well the last time I saw that practiced in a country.

(h/t Max Blumenthal/Mondoweiss)

*****

UPDATE XI:

July 26, 2013 - Writing on the momentum, mainstreaming and growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes international law and the civil and human rights of Palestinians, former Ha'aretz senior columnist and editorial writer Akiva Eldar notes the similarity of the expanding awareness, advocacy and legitimacy of the movement with those that brought an end to South African Apartheid.

The recent decision by the EU to ban all trade with Israeli companies and projects that operate in the internationally-recognized Palestinian territories occupied by the Israeli military has garnered the support of a number of notable Israeli academics and intellectuals, including "six Israel Prize laureates (Dani Karavan, David Tartakover, Shimon Sandbank, Zeev Sternhell, Yehoshua Kolodny and David Harel), as well as playwright Yehoshua Sobol, former Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Liel, former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair and former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa Ilan Baruch."

In addition, "The list of countries joining the sanctions against Israel is getting longer by the day," as are the number of international artists who are respecting the academic and cultural boycott.

Eldar concludes, "This is what the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa looked like. And who knows, the American determination coupled with European firmness may yet herald the end of the Israeli occupation and our conflict."

*****

UPDATE XII:

September 23, 2013 - The always-astute Noam Sheizaf of 972+ Magazine reveals a new take on the Apartheid analogy today:

Apartheid is great, let's go on with it

Rafael Castro, winner of the “Worst Defense of Zionism” award for 2012, managed to top his own standards, by comparing the occupation to Apartheid in a positive way:

The Zionist Left insists that unless Israel acquiesces to a Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Israel is set on the path of South Africa. Namely, on the path of apartheid [...] This argument has its cogency, except that this cogency is based on a mistaken assessment of South African history.

It would be simplistic to believe that South Africa's Caucasian minority repealed apartheid simply to please the international community or to appease its conscience. Indeed, most whites knew long before 1994 that minority rule was immoral. What earned their support for a policy that was so unethical was their sincere conviction that apartheid was the lesser evil [...] it is not implausible to believe that – had South Africans been granted universal voting rights in the 1960s or 1970s – South Africa today would resemble contemporary Tanzania and Zimbabwe rather than the vibrant multiracial democracy we know nowadays...

What follows is a call for Israel to continue its own version of Apartheid until the natives are ready for their own state. The decision as to when this moment shall arrive remains, as always, in Israeli hands.

Personally, I suggest appointing Castro as our UN ambassador; the occupation would end in a week.

*****

UPDATE XIII:

September 24, 2013 - Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was explicit in his condemnation of Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians as a form of - if not worse than - Apartheid.

He said:

What has been - and continues to be - practiced against the innocent people of Palestine is nothing less than structural violence. Palestine is under occupation; the basic rights of the Palestinians are tragically violated, and they are deprived of the right of return and access to their homes, birthplace and homeland. Apartheid as a concept can hardly describe the crimes and the institutionalized aggression against the innocent Palestinian people.

*****

UPDATE XIV:

November 19, 2013 - In an interview at Harvard University, Israeli politician Dan Meridor, a stalwart and respected member of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, likened his own party's policies to those of Apartheid South Africa.

Frustrated that members of Likud seem only to care about continuing to build colonies in the West Bank and not at all about equal rights and the rule of law, Meridor said, "They have just one thing – the territories. But the human rights part of it, the democratic part of it, the equality part of it is not part of their way of thinking. I heard [a Likud member] saying he is for human rights, but not civil rights [for the Palestinians]," adding, "What’s the difference? No voting. It's like South Africa."

Regarding the past comments of parliamentarian Miri Regev - a fellow Likudnik - who last year referred to African migrants and refugees in Israel as "a cancer in our body," Meridor called it "awful language," unbecoming of a Likud politician, and said it "was disconcerting to hear Jews speak in such a way," according to report by the Times of Israel.

In the past, Meridor criticized the passing of an amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law that mandated a loyalty oath to a "Jewish, democratic state" as inherently discriminatory to non-Jews.

"Lately there has been suggestion, after suggestion, after suggestion meant to send messages to the Arab public - 'this is not yours, this is not your country,' and there are even those who say 'we will soon transfer you to a Palestinian state,'" Meridor said in October 2010. "The Arab citizens are constantly reminded that they do not belong, and yet we demand loyalty from them."

Meridor was first elected to the Israeli Knesset in 1984 and has held numerous ministerial posts including Justice Minister, Finance Minister, and Deputy Prime Minster. For the past four years, he was Netanyahu's Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, until he was unseated earlier this year. He is now a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

He also made headlines in April 2012, when he admitted during an interview with Al Jazeera that Iran has never in fact threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," though he still erroneously claimed that "Iran is going after nuclear weapons," referred to "the standoff between America and Iran, and the Muslim world" as "a sort of Kulturkampf, a clash of civilizations," and hilariously declared that Israel's refusal to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was "sound and good" policy, which "does not bother anyone seriously."

Apparently, for Meridor, that's the correct way for a member of Likud to act.

*****

UPDATE XV:

December 7, 2013 - Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a consistent critic of his successor Benjamin Netanyahu's bellicose obsession with Iran and refusal to halt colonization of occupied Palestine, is quoted in the New Yorker as telling Bernard Avishai, "When the Administration finally puts on the table internationally accepted principles for a settlement — principles I offered and America and Europe implicitly endorse — Netanyahu will face an impossible dilemma. If he resists, he turns Israel into the new South Africa."

Olmert added, "The Iranian threat is serious. But the way to deal with Iran is by settling with the Palestinians — stop immediately the settlement policy and offer a serious peace plan... Only a peace deal with the Palestinians can end the regional conflict."

*****

UPDATE XVI:

December 8, 2013 - Following the death of Nelson Mandela, Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa, and likened the resistance of the African National Congress to that of Palestinians.

"The Zionist regime represents the modern face of Fascist racism, and we see again how the West and the U.S. see themselves indebted to this regime and have pioneered in all-out support for Israel," Larijani said. "And this ridiculous comedy has repeated behind the same ridiculous face of supporting the human rights at the international level and massacring the Palestinian nation in their homes."

He added, "The West won't respect the Palestinians' rights except through resistance."

*****

UPDATE XVII:

March 7, 2014 - Professor Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, lamented today in Ha'aretz that "Israel no longer has a place in the family of enlightened nations. It has become the South Africa of the 21st century," adding, "Amid the awareness that Israel is sliding toward an apartheid regime, the silence of Jews worldwide is deafening."

*****

UPDATE XVIII:

March 10, 2014 - South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has issued a statement in support of "Israeli Apartheid Week," the annual international initiative to educate and raise awareness of Israel's ongoing discriminatory and violent policies against Palestinians and galvanize the growing BDS campaign.

"I associate myself with the objectives of the 10th international Israeli Apartheid Week," he said, and explained, " I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government."

"The same issues of inequality and injustice today," which Tutu experienced decades ago under South Africa's Apartheid regime, "motivate the divestment movement trying to end Israel’s decades long occupation of Palestinian territory and the unfair and prejudicial treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them," he declared.

*****

UPDATE XIX:

April 18, 2014 - In Ha'aretz, prominent Israeli historian and academic Zeev Sternhell writes today:

Therefore the occupation will continue, land will be confiscated from its owners to expand the settlements, the Jordan Valley will be cleansed of Arabs, Arab Jerusalem will be strangled by Jewish neighborhoods, and any act of robbery and foolishness that serves Jewish expansion in the city will be welcomed by the High Court of Justice.

The road to South Africa has been paved and will not be blocked until the Western world presents Israel with an unequivocal choice: Stop the annexation and dismantle most of the colonies and the settler state, or be an outcast.

*****

UPDATE XX:

April 27, 2014 - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in remarks to the Trilateral Commission on Friday April 25, warned that, unless a two-state solution is imposed upon Israel and Palestine, Israel could risk becoming an Apartheid state, according to an exclusive report by Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast.

During the closed-door meeting with the influential group of political officials and economic experts from the United States, Western Europe, Russia, and Japan, Kerry said:

A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state. 

Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.

For reference, Rogin further noted:

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, the “crime of apartheid” is defined as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The term is most often used in reference to the system of racial segregation and oppression that governed South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

*****

UPDATE XXI:

August 8, 2014 - Speaking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, professor Noam Chomsky had some comments about the Apartheid analogy (which he also wrote about recently in The Nation). He argues that the term is too generous for the situation in the West Bank and Gaza and yet doesn't quite apply to Green Line Israel:

In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by "apartheid" you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There’s a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. It was 85 percent of the workforce of the population, and that was basically their workforce. They needed them. They had to sustain them. The bantustans were horrifying, but South Africa did try to sustain them. They didn’t put them on a diet. They tried to keep them strong enough to do the work that they needed for the country. They tried to get international support for the bantustans. 

The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison. And they’re acting that way. That’s a very striking difference, which means that the apartheid analogy, South African apartheid, to the Occupied Territories is just a gift to Israeli violence. It’s much worse than that. If you look inside Israel, there’s plenty of repression and discrimination. I’ve written about it extensively for decades. But it’s not apartheid. It’s bad, but it’s not apartheid. So the term, I just don’t think is applicable.

*****

UPDATE XXII:

December 4, 2014 - Writing in Ha'aretz, renowned Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell writes of the earliest days of the Zionist state, when Israel's founding fathers shaped the state to come. "Ben-Gurion and the ruling elite were not interested in repairing the world," he explains. "They were nationalists who had come to Israel to build a state for the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion himself attributed no decisive importance to equal rights or social equality, and ignored the fact that establishing the state had caused a revolution in the status of the people who were living there."

Sternhell also notes that "the founders made laws for themselves, not for human beings as such." He adds:

Who ever imagined that the Jewish community might one day turn into a colonialist entity and lay the foundations of an apartheid regime as a permanent condition, and would want to engrave that shame in its law books on top of that?

This past August, Sternhell gave an extensive interview to Ha'aretz in which he made many similar points.

"Israel is now the last colonial country in the West," he said, "How long will that continue? If not for the memory of the Holocaust and the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism, Europe would have long since boycotted the settlements." He added that, in his view, a one-state solution is effectively impossible in Israel/Palestine "because with one state there will be an apartheid regime." He elaborates:

After all, no one here is playing with the idea that there will be civic equality between Nablus and Tel Aviv. There will be a civil war here, in the best case, and in the worst case there will be an apartheid state in which we will rule the Arabs without the dimension of transience that is still attached to the territories – even though it’s obvious to anyone with eyes in his head that the transience has long since vanished and that there is an apartheid situation in the West Bank.

*****

UPDATE XXIII:

December 5, 2014 - Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the ultra-Zionist, Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal isn't thrilled about a long-proposed Knesset bill, supported openly by right-wing politicians including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"The bill, called 'Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People,'" Eshman writes in a new Jewish Journal article, "would formally identify Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, affirm Jewish law as the inspiration for its legislation, and delist Arabic as an official language. Unlike the country's Declaration of Independence, the bill makes no mention of Israel as a democratic country or of the rights of its non-Jewish citizens."

Eshman frets that the passing and implementation of such a bill would present a "red line" for American Jews, the majority of whom couldn't possibly support such blatant abrogation of equal rights and democratic principles. (Apparently, for Eshman, the aggressively discriminatory and dangerous nature of Israel's treatment of people who aren't Jewish has not yet presented such a conundrum. But hey, it's only been 66 years.)

Believing that "the proposed law would seriously undermine" the "social and political rights to all its inhabitants," as promised (but never actually granted) by Israel's 1948 Proclamation of Independence,  thereby "privileging one group, demeaning others and, eventually, frighteningly, laying the legal groundwork to single out and mistreat Israel’s minority," Eshman comes to a striking conclusion:

Can I be blunt? This proposed law lays the legal framework for apartheid.

Eshman finds himself in unlikely agreement with the brilliant Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy, who wrote last week that the proposed law "is legal preparation for the right wing's one-state solution, the annexation of the territories and the establishment of the Jewish apartheid state."

"The bill is the constitutional foundation," Levy continued, "and its acceptance is the laying of the cornerstone of the binational segregation state that the right wing is setting up quietly and methodically, unseen and unhindered."

Levy concludes by passionately stating that this "Jewish nation-state law" will officially reveal the sham of Israeli democracy:

This how the last excuse of the apartheid-deniers, who claim that unlike in South Africa there are no racial (or national) laws here, will fall. The Jewish nation-state law will shape the character of the one state according to its spirit – the spirit of apartheid. The law will ensure what the right wing has always been saying: that this country has room for two peoples, one superior and one inferior. One with all rights, and one with none. From now on, under the protection of the law, according to which everything is done. First in sovereign, occupying Israel, and soon in the annexing and colonialist one, too.

*****

UPDATE XXIV:

July 29, 2015 - Denis Goldberg, a veteran activist of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, described Israel as an "apartheid state" during a forum on the Israel-Palestine conflict in Johannesburg.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Israel is an apartheid state," he told the gathering, according to Middle East Monitor.
Now 82 years old, Goldberg, who is Jewish, was one of the founding members of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. He was sentenced, alongside with Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists, to life in prison in the 1964 Rivonia treason trial.

Ha'aretz reports that Goldberg "was released in 1985 with Israel's intercession, then went to live on a kibbutz, but moved to London months later, denouncing Israel's war in Lebanon, its occupation of the Palestinian territories, and its close ties with South Africa."

At the Johannesburg event, Goldberg explained why refused to be silent about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. "Having lived through apartheid in South Africa, I cannot allow in my name the same kind of oppression to go on," he said. "When I come across the deliberate exclusion of people from the benefits of their wealthy societies, whether on class, race or religious grounds, I have to speak out," he added, "just as I did as a first-generation white South African."

Middle East Monitor continues:

He said that he does not oppose Jews, but the Israeli government’s Zionist polices.

"I have to be an opponent of the exclusionist policies of Zionism, but let me say straight away that I have to be opposed to the exclusionary policies of the feudal Arab states of the Middle East as well," he said.

Goldberg said some people ask why Israel is an apartheid state, when it is not like how South Africa used to be during the apartheid era. They say that in Israel there are some Palestinian members of parliament, and that the Palestinians have equal rights.

"Well I say you don’t need to be like South Africa to be an apartheid state, there is a definition in international law through the UNESCO declaration on apartheid," he said.
He said what constitutes apartheid is government laws, regulations and policies that distinguish between groups of people on the basis of race or religion.

He also faults Israel for destroying the Palestinians' livelihood and economy by uprooting their centuries-old olive trees, water and irrigation systems.

Goldberg said the situation in Israel is not as complicated as the Zionist lobby tries to make it seem.

"It's simple: the dominant group excludes the indigenous people from their equal rights within the borders of Israel itself and in the occupied territories, in breach of international law," he said.

He said these actions showed an attitude that Palestinians were considered lesser people, which is similar to what happened in South Africa during the apartheid era when blacks were barred from voting.

The anti-apartheid activist added that South Africans have a moral duty to protest what is happening to the Palestinians.

*****

American Jihadists and Israel's Lone Soldiers:Come for the Perks, Stay for the War Crimes

(Margarita Korol)

In his 2011 book entitled Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, author J.M Berger (purportedly in his own words) "uncovers the secret history of American jihadists."  Berger, who refers to himself as a "specialist on homegrown extremism," tells us that these traitorous terrorists are "Muslims [who] have traveled abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs."

Please read that definition again. Ok, just one more time.

Now read this from Tuesday's New York Times:

On Tuesday, with talk rampant about the possibility of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran, Mr. [Josh] Warhit became a citizen of Israel to enlist in its army.

"Our parents were freaking out," Mr. Warhit, now 22, recalled of that first trip [to Israel] during the war against Hezbollah. "It only made us more thirsty. I love the Jewish people. Love involves commitment. Right now we need people to commit.

"Of course it's scary," he added, regarding Iran, "but if you feel a commitment, that's the thing to do."

Warhit explains his decision to leave the country of his birth in order to join the massively American-subsidized military of a foreign state this way: "I love my family, I love my friends and I love the Jewish people. The Jewish people don't need another Jew in suburban New York."

Apparently, according to Warhit, what the "Jewish people" do need are more Israeli soldiers using American-bought weapons to maintain a brutal 45-year-old occupation and apartheid legal system, facilitate ethnic cleansing, impose collective punishment upon millions of civilians by way of walls, checkpoints, blockade and siege, bulldoze homes, orchards and olive groves, protect colonists in violation of international law, oppress and dominate an already devastated and dehumanized indigenous population, conduct night raids, abduct, detain, and abuse children, use sonic booms to deliberately terrorize people, wage more aggressive wars and commit more crimes against humanity with total impunity.

If that's not terrorism then nothing is.

The article, headlined "Enlisting From Afar for the Love of Israel" and written by the Times' new Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, states that "Warhit, who grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Rochester after spending several summers in Israel, was one of 127 soldiers-to-be who landed Tuesday morning at Ben-Gurion International Airport."  The enlistees, referred to as "lone soldiers," were given "a hero's welcome that included a live band, balloon hats and a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," who praised them for deciding "to defend the Jewish future."

In Jihad Joe, Berger writes, "Since 1979, American citizens have repeatedly packed their bags, left their wives and children behind, and traveled to distant lands in the name of military jihad, the armed struggle of Islam."

Compare that to what Rudoren's Times report tells us of the young IDF cadets who "left behind parents, girlfriends, cars and stuffed animals to become infantrymen, intelligence officers, paratroopers and pilots in a formerly foreign land."

"Their motivation is often way higher than the average Israeli," Colonel Shuli Ayal, who oversees the lone-soldier program, told Rudoren. "They want to make their service as meaningful as possible."

With such zealous fervor and passionate commitment to his co-religionists and the ethnocentric, exclusivist nationalism of Zionism, it is no wonder that Warhit desperately hopes to join the Givati Brigade, an IDF military unit which Rudoren innocuously writes "has been active around the Gaza Strip" over the past ten years.  What she should have told her readership is that the commander of the Givati Brigade, Colonel Ilan Malka, was directly responsible for authorizing the airstrike that murdered 21 members of the Samouni family in Gaza on January 5, 2009 for which no one has been held accountable.

Soldiers in the Givati Brigade are also known to have custom t-shirts designed and printed for their units at end of training or field duty that bear such images as dead Palestinian babies, mothers weeping at their children's graves, guns aimed at kids and destroyed mosques.  These shirts glorify, celebrate, and mock the rape of Palestinian girls, the murder of Palestinian men, women (especially if they're pregnant) and children.

An anonymous Givati soldier was recently sentenced to a mere 45 days in prison for "illegal use of a firearm," a charge reduced from manslaughter through a plea bargain.  He had willfully murdered 65 year old Ria Abu Hajaj and her 37 year old daughter Majda Hajaj, after they were ordered to evacuate their home in Juhr ad-Dik with their families during the Gaza massacre in early January 2009.  They were waving white flags and moving slowly in an area in which there was no combat whatsoever when the Israeli soldier opened fire on the group of 28 Hajaj family members, which included at least 17 children.  Apparently, the use of his firearm was illegal, not the execution of civilians.

Clearly, for Warhit, it's all about the love.

The article continues, "[A]ccording to a military spokeswoman, Israel has enlisted 8,217 men and women from other countries since 2009, 1,661 of them from the United States, second only to Russia's 1,685," adding, "They receive a host of special benefits: three times the typical soldier's salary, a personal day off each month, a free flight home and vouchers for holiday meals."

How's that for incentive? Come for the perks, stay for the war crimes.

A March 2012 article in the Jewish online journal Tablet chronicles "Aluf Stone, an organization for Diaspora-born soldiers who have served in the Israel Defense Forces" that was formed in 2008 and is affiliated with the American Veterans of Israel (which is something that apparently exists).  The report quotes Aluf Stone co-founder Marc Leibowitz describing service in the Israeli military as "a specific and meaningful shared experience.  Deeper than an alumni group or a fraternity, which people are fanatical about."

Fanatical.

Leibowitz explained that most Jewish groups are wary of associating with Aluf Stone since "[n]o organization wants to be seen as if they are encouraging Americans to fight in a foreign army."  Still, the article's writer Adam Chandler reveals, in 2011 "the group was invited by the Friends of the IDF to speak at a synagogue in New York and share their stories with an audience composed of family members of IDF soldiers from the States."

One member of Aluf Stone told Chandler that American-born former IDF soldiers "don't belong in U.S. veterans' groups and networks, as they didn't [all] serve in the American military."  Consequently, "Aluf Stone occupies an interesting middle ground in the U.S."  More accurately, perhaps, the members of Aluf Stone were actually occupying Palestine.

While it's clear that these Jewish foreigners who join the Israeli military do so out of some sort of fervent compulsion and perceived obligation to their own religious tribe, so much so that they leave their own nation to bear arms on behalf of another, it should be noted that numerous studies have found religious ideology not to be a prime motivating factor in terrorist attacks credited to Muslims.

An unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004 determined that:

Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.

Professor Richard Jackson of The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand concurs that "terrorism is most often caused by military intervention overseas, and not religion, radicalization, insanity, ideology, poverty or such like."

Political Science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape, who has conducted some of the most comprehensive research and written the most respected analysis of terrorist motivation, concluded in a 2010 study that "suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance."   His data reveals that "[m]ore than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation."

That U.S. and Israeli policies of invasion and occupation rather than religious extremism are the guiding forces behind acts of terrorist violence is evidenced in a letter allegedly written by those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and published in The New York Times. It stated, "This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

The letter adds, "The American people are responsible for the actions of their government" and "all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people."

Tragically, those American lone soldiers, that zealous minority of homegrown ideologues who - in J.M. Berger's words - "travel abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs," will now be personally responsible for the actions and crimes of the Israeli government and military as well.

(h/t Glenn Greenwald)

*****

Points of No Return, Zones of Immunity, & Windows of Opportunity: The Constant Israeli Hype Over Iran

"For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."

- President John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address, June 11, 1962

"Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions...The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation."

- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, 1965

A report in The Times of London, with the headline "Israel steps up plan for air attacks on Iran", enumerates the various "options" and "military contingency plans" available to the Israeli military in order to "neutralise" Iran's "nuclear weapons programme."  Journalist Christopher Walker writes that Israeli "[m]ilitary planners are studying" the possibility of "hitting Iranian missile plants...with the 'long arm' of its airforce or targeting foreign scientists at the facilities rather than the buildings themselves."  He adds that "surgical air strikes" would be carried out by "advanced F-15I fighter planes."

The piece also quotes the Israeli Defense Minister as warning, "A country like Iran possessing such long range weaponry - a country that lacks stability, that is characterised by Islamic fundamentalism, by an extremist ideology that is striving to become a superpower in the Middle East - is very dangerous."

Another alarming article, this one in The Washington Times, begins this way:

Reports that Israel is preparing for pre-emptive air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and is now able to fire nuclear missiles from submarines were seen as reflecting deep anxiety in Israel for Tehran's nuclear program.

Israeli newspapers said officials appear to have leaked the reports in an attempt to focus the attention of the international community on the dangers of Iranian nuclear weapons development.

In The New York Times, Hebrew University professor Martin van Creveld writes of the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, explaining, "With the United States now in the midst of a hotly disputed election campaign," if the Israeli Prime Minister "wanted to act, the time to do so would be between now and November."

The first report is from December 9, 1997.  The second from October 13, 2003.  The third was published on August 21, 2004.

It is now August 2012.  Another election cycle is nearing an end and with it as always comes the same tired fearmongering and war hysteria.  Threats and predictions of an unprovoked, illegal Israeli assault on Iran are once again flooding the media with dire warnings of fabricated and meaningless - but sufficiently spooky - phrases such as Iran's supposedly looming "zone of immunity," which until recently was ominously dubbed the "point of no return."  We've been through this charade for three decades with no end in sight.

Early this month, Israeli national security adviser Ephraim Halevy, who was once director of Mossad, was quoted as saying that if he were Iranian he "would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks."  Meanwhile, Iranian diplomats continue to assert that the Islamic Republic has no intention of attacking Israel.  "We will react if there is any provocative act from the other side," Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporter Laura Rozen just a month ago. "We will not initiate any provocative steps."

Iran's defense doctrine has been reaffirmed at the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community.  Earlier this year, Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency continues to assess that "Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict."

On the very same day that the editors of the New York Daily News took their cues from Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren to warn that "Tehran is on the verge of being able to produce a bomb," a spokesman for the White House National Security Council maintained that U.S. intelligence "continue[s] to assess that Iran is not on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon."

Last week, reliable Netanyahu administration mouthpiece Barak Ravid reported in Ha'aretz that "[n]ew intelligence information obtained by Israel and four Western countries indicates that Iran has made greater progress on developing components for its nuclear weapons program than the West had previously realized."  He also published an article claiming that "President Barack Obama recently received a new National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program, which shares Israel's view that Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability," adding that the alleged report contains "new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran's nuclear program."

Not only was Ravid's reporting - tactlessly and transparently planted by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - full of evidence-free claims by the MEK and over-hyped falsehoods about a secret detonation chamber and atomic particles washed away from an Iranian military installation legally off-limits to IAEA inspectors that have long been debunked, its main scoop was immediately denied by the Obama administration.  In response to Ravid's claims, Reuters reported a National Security Council spokesman as saying that "U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear activities had not changed since intelligence officials delivered testimony to Congress on the issue earlier this year."  Both the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Ronald Burgess have consistently assessed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

Essentially confirming suspicions that he was the source of Ravid's information, Ehud Barak told Israel Radio,  "There probably really is such an American intelligence report...making its way around senior offices" in Washington that, "makes the Iranian issue even more urgent and (shows it is) less clear and certain that we will know everything in time about their steady progress toward military nuclear capability."

That's right: probably really.

Ehud Barak even resorted to totally inapplicable and inappropriate historical analogies to anonymously fear-monger about Iran.  Utilizing the ultimate in Zionist emotional blackmail and hasbara, Barak evoked the threat of Nazi Germany: "What happened in the Rhine in 1936 will be child's play compared to what will happen with Iran," he declared.

Seemingly responding to former Mossad head Meir Dagan's January 2011 determination that Israel "should use military force only if it is attacked, or if it has 'a sword at its neck,'" Barak also pulled the phony, backed-into-a-corner, self-defense card: "The sword at our throat is a lot sharper than the sword at our throat before the Six-Day War," he told Ha'aretz.

Neither of these claims makes any sense.  That Iran is not the industrialized, military powerhouse that Nazi Germany was, nor does it have any expansionist or genocidal goals, hardly merits attention.  With regard to the Six-Day War, Barak is hoping his audience knows nothing of history.  The Israeli attack on Egypt that began the war was not a preemptive act of self-defense, but rather an aggressive military action.  Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin even admitted in 1982, "In June 1967 we again had a choice.  The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us.  We must be honest with ourselves.  We decided to attack him."  He added, "Who knows if there would have been an attack against us? There is no proof of it."

Speaking to reporters on August 10, White House spokesman Jay Carney revealed that, with regard to U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear energy program, "we have eyes, we have visibility into the program, and we would know if and when Iran made a -- what's called a 'breakout move' towards acquiring a weapon."

Furthermore, Carney bragged about his administration's deliberate imposition upon the Iranian people of "the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country," which he said are "designed to take advantage of what we believe remains to be a window of opportunity to persuade Iran through these sanctions and through diplomatic efforts to forego its nuclear weapons ambitions."

Window of opportunity. Zone of immunity.  Point of no return.  All options on the table.  Credible military threat.

Such hype, based on dubious claims and false information, is nothing new when it comes to American and Israeli warmongering.  For instance, a CBS News report from August 18, 2002 stated, "Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin."  The article quotes Gissin: "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose.  It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

Similarly, this past weekend, The New York Times reported that Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called upon the P5+1 (the five nuclear-armed permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) to "declare today that the talks [with Iran] have failed" and demand Iran cease all nuclear activity within a matter of "weeks."  When Iran obviously does not comply, as such a demand is ludicrous and a direct abrogation of Iran's inalienable rights, Ayalon said "it will be clear that all options are on the table."

The threats of war come not only from politicians, but also - as it has before - from pundits and the press.

In a memorandum highlighting a particularly alarmist and dishonest speech delivered by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention on August 26, 2002, neoconservative rainmaker Bill Kristol wrote, "The time for action grows near. Congressional leaders should seriously consider a resolution authorizing use of force when they return next week. Passing such a resolution as soon as possible would provide the president with maximum flexibility and an opportunity for tactical surprise, would strengthen his hand vis-a-vis our allies, and might embolden internal opposition in Iraq."

Nearly a decade later, a Weekly Standard opinion piece published July 2, 2012 and co-authored by Kristol declared, "Time is running out and the consequences of inaction for the United States, Israel, and the free world will only increase in the weeks and months ahead. It's time for Congress to seriously explore an Authorization of Military Force to halt Iran’s nuclear program."

The repetition of rhetoric advocating military violence in the form of initiating a "war of aggression" - long considered "the supreme international crime" - has never been limited only to neoconservative hawks.  For example, the warmongering of so-called "liberal" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is virtually indistinguishable from that of Kristol.

In February 2003, following Colin Powell's dazzling display of lies before the United Nations Security Council, Cohen wrote that Iraq "without a doubt" maintained an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Such was Cohen's certainty that he added, "Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

This year, Cohen has been at it again, this time arguing that Israel has good reason to attack Iran, claiming that, while "the ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change," which Cohen insists is "not as improbable as it sounds," in the meantime, an Israeli assault "could accomplish quite a lot."  His reasoning is based on a total misunderstanding of historical events, wholesale contempt for international law, blind acceptance of selective Israeli and American allegations, and willfully ignoring consistently reaffirmed assessments of U.S. intelligence and IAEA inspections.

Inexplicably, this man still has a job.

As it was, so it is again.  An incumbent president is in full campaign mode and a challenger is pledging eternal fealty to Israeli militarism and Zionist expansionism.  Such was 2004, so it is again.  And through it all, the Israeli government, despite making its preferences clear, feigns neutrality.

In a September 7, 2004 interview with The Jerusalem Post, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared, "I don't interfere in elections. I never interfere in elections in other countries, and I hope that they will never interfere here either. I have no need to interfere and it is forbidden to interfere."  He added, "It is no secret that the US is Israel's devoted friend. There is a traditional friendship between the US and Israel. It is mutual."

In a letter to The New York Times published on April 12, 2012, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren wrote, "Israel does not interfere in internal political affairs of the United States...and greatly values the wide bipartisan support it enjoys in America."

And yet Oren continues to insist that the Israeli clock "is ticking faster" and claims "Israel, not the United States, is threatened almost weekly, if not daily, with annihilation by Iranian leaders."  He declares diplomacy dead and suggests "that truly crippling sanctions together with a credible military threat - and that I stress, that's a threat; not that we just say that it's credible, the folks in Tehran have to believe us when we say that - may still deter them. But we also have to be prepared, as President Obama has said, to keep all options on the table, including a military option."

Oren's explicit call for not only collective punishment but a "credible military threat" - echoing the demands of his boss Netanyahu - is in fact a direct violation of the Chapter 1, Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter which declares, "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Nevertheless, the threats and speculations continue unabated with Israel always residing safely within its own zone of impunity.  Though highly-credentialed foreign policy experts, in addition to many military and defense officials, warn against the wisdom of an Israeli attack, rarely - if ever - does anyone explain that such action would unequivocally constitute a war crime.  This same scenario repeats year after year.

In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, Holocaust survivor and Israeli professor Israel Shahak wrote,

Since the spring of 1992, public opinion in Israel is being prepared for the prospect of a war with Iran, to be fought to bring about Iran’s total military and political defeat. In one version, Israel would attack Iran alone, in another it would 'persuade' the West to do the job. The indoctrination campaign to this effect is gaining in intensity. It is accompanied by what could be called semi-official horror scenarios purporting to detail what Iran could do to Israel, the West and the entire world when it acquires nuclear weapons as it is expected to a few years hence. (p.54)

Shahak appears to be referencing a The Washington Post report from June 15, 1992 which quoted Israeli Major General Herzl Budinger as declaring that unless "Iran's intensive effort to develop atomic weapons is not 'disrupted,'" it would "become a nuclear power by the end of the decade."  In order to avoid this outcome, Budinger insisted on "the greatest disruption possible, whether military or political," either in the form of "international political action" or even "aggressive action, if needed."

Later that year, a November 30, 1992 article in The New York Times revealed that officials in the George H.W. Bush administration were frustrated with Israel "for fanning the recent alarm by portraying Iran as the most dangerous threat to both the region's and Israel's security," when such a threat didn't exist.

We've been seeing exactly this situation play out with increasing frequency.  Last summer, Ha'aretz reporter Ari Shavit, this regarding the constant Israeli "threat of a military attack against Iran," wrote:

This threat is crucial for scaring the Iranians and for goading on the Americans and the Europeans. It is also crucial for spurring on the Chinese and the Russians. Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran.

Yet the Iranian government isn't falling for the bluff, despite the fact that, with inhumane sanctions, the murders of Iranian civilians, drone surveillance, covert operations, support for Iranian terrorist groups,  and continuing cyberwar, the United States and Israel are already violating Iranian sovereignty and imposing lethal violence and forced deprivation on the Iranian people and their country.

But even an air strike, let alone a full-scale war, won't happen.  Probably really.

Aboard Air Force One last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that "the President remains committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and that we are leading an international effort to -- yes, something exciting happened in soccer.  Sorry, excuse me, now I'm distracted."

Carney had the right idea.  We should all be so distracted.

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Is Barak Ravid the new Judith Miller?

From The New York Times on September 8, 2002:

From Ha'aretz on August 9, 2012:

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StandWithUs' Dishonest Train Campaign:The Resurrected Roman 'Renaming' of Palestine Ruse

Henry Clifford's advertisement at the Chappaqua Metro-North train station July 10, 2012.

(Photo: Seth Harrison / The Journal News )

Hasbara outfit StandWithUs, as reported late last month, has placed its own billboards at Metro-North train stations in New York and Connecticut in an attempt to counter a much-discussed awareness campaign depicting the loss of Palestinian land over the past sixty-six years, paid for by Henry Cliffords' Committee for Peace in Israel/Palestine.

StandWithUs' counter-campaign, aimed at denying the validity of Palestinian ties to its own homeland by presenting the Old Testament as a divine land deed (in addition to lauding Israel's technological achievements and resurrecting the "no partner for peace" talking point), includes this ad:

No one disputes that Jewish presence in Palestine has been continuous since antiquity, albeit in varying degrees of population percentage whereby Jews often represented a very small minority of the total population of Palestine.  In 1517, when the Ottoman Empire seized control of Palestine, Jewish inhabitants of the region made up only 1.7% of the native population.  By 1882, Jewish Palestinians comprised 8% of the population.

When the State of Israel was unilaterally established in May 1948, after decades of massive Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia and months of the deliberate ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral villages, the Jewish population of Palestine was still only about 30% of the total.

Regardless of population density and demographic distribution, of course, all inhabitants of the land should be granted the same human and civil rights and identical protection under the law.  The establishment of the State of Israel, a declaration by a minority of Zionist ideologues, destroyed any semblance of equality among the population of historic Palestine, with the minority Jewish population obtaining first-class citizen status in the nascent state and Jews worldwide gaining the ability to immigrate to a place they had never been.  Meanwhile, indigenous Palestinian Arabs were aggressively stripped of self-determination and sovereignty and prevented from returning to the homes and places of birth from which they had been violently expelled, in direct contravention of international law.

No historic connection to a land that has been home to countless tribes, cultures and communities over the course of millennia can ever excuse the deliberate, systematic and institutional discrimination against an indigenous people merely because they happen to be adherents to the "wrong" faith.

But this particular billboard is even more dishonest as one reads further.  It claims, "Ancient Israel was renamed 'Palestine' by the conquering Romans in 135 CE."  This is a common refrain, trotted out time and again by those who try to deny the existence of an indigenous Palestinian people.  The point is to present a version of history whereby the term "Palestine" was fabricated out of thin air by an imperial occupying power and applied to an entire region of land that was formerly populated and controlled solely by ancient Hebrews.

This claim demonstrates a distinct lack of historical knowledge and deliberate denial of known and verifiable facts.  As I noted a year ago, when The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a media pressure group and Zionist advocacy organization, bullied The Los Angeles Times into issuing a correction based on false information, specific references to "Palestine" date back nearly six hundred years before the 2nd Century CE.

In the 5th Century BCE, Herodotus, the first historian in Western civilization, referenced "Palestine" numerous times in his chronicle of the ancient Greek world, The Histories, including his documentation that "the coastal parts of Syria...and all that lies between it and Egypt is called Palestine." (VII.89, trans. Henry Carter, Heritage Press, 1958)

Furthermore, the name Palaestina was not of Greek origin, but has even more ancient roots.  According to the late University of Chicago professor Gösta Ahlström in his seminal book The History of Ancient Palestine, "Clearly Herodotus did not invent the name but used an already common term," derived from the Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaean, and Egyptian words for Philistines.  "Herodotus' use of the term shows that its content had expanded in the Persian period and that it referred to the people of the coastal areas from Gaza to Carmel," explains Ahlström.

A century after Herodotus, Aristotle affirms the commonality of the term when, in his Meteorology, he describes the Dead Sea as "a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink." (II.3)  The mid-4th Century Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax, an obscure geographical journal and circumnavigation manual of the ancient world (and most likely of Athenian origin) details the Phoenician communities inhabiting the coast of Palestine and Syria, referencing by name the cities of Joppa (Jaffa), Dor (Dora), and Ascalon (Ashkelon).

In the mid-2nd Century BCE, ancient geographer Polemon wrote of a "part of Syria called Palestine," while Greek travel writer Pausanias wrote in his Description of Greece of "the dates of Palestine." (9.19.8)

The name Palestine was also referenced in Roman literature well before 135 CE, when StandWithUs says the land was suddenly "renamed."

For instance, in the first decade of the 1st Century CE, the Roman poet Ovid mentioned Palestine in both his famed mythological poem Metamorphoses and his erotic elegy The Art of Love. He also wrote of "the waters of Palestine" in his calendrical poem Fasti. Around the same time, Latin poet Tibullus wrote of "the crowded cities of Palestine" in his poem Delia.

Even the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing around the third decade of the 1st Century CE, referred to "Syria in Palestine" as being inhabited in part by "the very populous nation of the Jews." (XII.75)

Perhaps the most well-known Jewish historian of the 1st Century is Josephus (c.37-100 CE), born and raised in Jerusalem, who was a military commander in Galilee during the First Jewish Revolt against the occupying Roman authority, a negotiator during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and later wrote extensively of Levantine Jewish history. His The Jewish War, Antiquities of the Jews, and Against Apion all contain copious references to Palestine and Palestinians.

Towards the end of Antiquities, Josephus writes that he has documented historical events "from the original creation of man, until the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, as to what hath befallen the Jews, as well in Egypt as in Syria and in Palestine" and beyond. (XX.11.2)

While the StandWithUs Metro-North billboards seek to establish the notion that "Ancient Israel" was exclusively Jewish and the direct precursor to the modern State of Israel, historical fact does not bear this out.  According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Palestine during antiquity was a "demographically mixed region" that was "understood to be the homeland of the Jews throughout the period, though in fact housing a minority of them." It continues, "More precisely, the Jews belonged to the small area around Jerusalem known in Greek as Ioudaia, whence the name Ioudaioi."

Also, historian Gösta Ahlström notes that, while Palestine long referred to the region south of Carmel, including "the Jezreel Valley, the Beth-Shan Valley and Pella down to Raphia in the south and the western part of Transjordan south of Pella to the Dead Sea in the east," the term "Canaan" was also used in antiquity to refer to "the lowlands and the coastal area of Palestine," a region in which "the largest ethnic group was non-Semitic."  Moreover, "Canaan was a name for the more densely populated areas of the land, where the cultural and urban centers were located.  The central hill country did not really count, because it was very sparsely settled."  This "central hill country," Ahlström tells us, "was probably called Israel."

The term Palestine was long used by Roman authorities to refer to the region, as evidenced by the establishment of the Limes Palaestinae, or frontier border of Palestine, in 70 CE following the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, son of Roman emperor Vespasian.

The claim that the Roman emperor Hadrian officially changed the name of the region to "Syria Palaestina" or simply "Palestine" in a spiteful effort to punish Jewish inhabitants of Judea after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE and forced the native Jewish community into exile is also dubious, if not wholly erroneous, especially when, by that time, the terms "Syrian Palestine" and "Palestine" had already been in common use for over six hundred years and Romans were not in the habit of exiling entire native populations from lands they occupied and administered.

Ahlström adds, "In the Roman period, the understanding of the name Palestine had widened and included also the interior; thus it was natural that Palestine became the official name for their provinces after 135 CE."

In its attempt to counteract the simple truth of Henry Cliffords' maps campaign at Metro-North stations, StandWithUs has revealed not only its shabby knowledge of the history of the region, but also demonstrates its clear disinterest in advocating for the implementation of equal rights and international law in historic Palestine.

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Some of this post was either excerpted or adapted from an earlier article of mine from September 29, 2011.

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UPDATE:

August 11, 2012 - Commenter "FreddyV" over at Mondoweiss points out another wholly dishonest aspect of the StandWithUs poster that I totally meant to address but forgot to include.

The image depicted on the billboard of a relief of the honorific Arch of Titus in Rome, is often described as proof that the Jews of antiquity were exiled from their homeland following the siege, sack, and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. (Note how StandWithUs even associates the "renaming" of Palestine and supposed "exile" of Jews with an event totally unrelated to and occurring 65 years after the events depicted on the relief.)

But that's not what the relief shows. In fact, the procession seen above is not of Jews being expelled, but rather of Romans themselves plundering the city. The menorah, trumpets and other spoils are being carried away in triumph by the victors. However, hasbara groups like StandWithUs would have you believe that these are defeated natives, tragically taking their belongings into exile.

But they're wrong. That's actually what this shows:

Nakba 1948

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