by Stephen Lendman
Arabs in Israel/Palestine are today’s Nazi Germany Jews. Denied fundamental rights. Persecuted for praying to the wrong God.
Treated like subhumans. Enduring virtually every type indignity, degradation and crime against humanity. Abuses too great to ignore.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) calls some Israeli citizens less equal than others. Saying when fundamental freedoms for some are threatened, “we are all in danger.” i
Arab citizens “are discriminated (against) in almost every aspect of their lives.” Including employment. Education. Healthcare. Housing.
Land. Infrastructure. Political representation. Legislation. Personal safety. Socioeconomic status. Family unification. Virtually every way imaginable.
Most Bedouin Arabs live in so-called “unrecognized villages.” Denied essential services. Including water. Education.
Healthcare. Electricity. Roads. Transport. Sanitation. Postal and telephone services. Refuse removal and more.
Israeli tactics against basic freedoms have a chilling effect overall. Human and civil rights are undermined. So are equity and justice for all.
In Occupied Palestine most of all. Worst in besieged Gaza. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under a ruthless matrix of control system.
A sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination. Suffocation. Slow-motion genocide.
Incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid. Repressive dispossession. Displacement.
State terrorism separating Palestinians from their land and heritage. Denying them fundamental human and civil rights.
Apartheid is the worst form of racism. Israeli militarized occupation the worst form of apartheid.
Involving militarized harshness. Naked aggression at Israel’s discretion. Institutionalized racism.
Teaching children to hate Arabs. Collective punishment.
Immigration rights for Jews only.
Denial of free expression, movement and assembly. State-sponsored terror. Traumatizing community incursions.
Land theft. Home demolitions. Including punitively against families of Palestinians harming Jews.
Settlements. East Jerusalemite citizenship revocations. Targeted assassinations. Mass arrests for political reasons.
Torture. Destruction of agricultural land. Other private property.
Permits dictating where Palestinians may live, work. move or conduct other daily activities.
Ghettoization through checkpoints, other barriers, Israel’s Separation Wall and military orders.
Political, social and economic injustice writ large. Repressive legislation. Compromising fundamental rights everyone deserves.
Israel’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law denies citizenship rights for Palestinians with Israeli spouses.
Tort legislation absolves Israel for denying Palestinians fundamental human and civil rights. Harming them lawlessly. Preventing them from claiming just compensation.
Israel’s Nakba Law violates Arab history, culture and heritage. The right to express, teach, or disseminate it freely.
Commemorate what they lost. Subsequent appalling persecution. Arab intellectual Constantin Zureiq coined the term.
Saying “(t)he defeat of the Arabs in Palestine should not be treated as a simple disaster or fleeting event.”
“It was the worst catastrophe, in the deepest sense of the word, to have befallen the Arabs in their long and disaster-ridden history.”
Draconian Infiltration Law harshness. Subjecting migrants and asylum seekers to prison and/or deportation.
Affecting good samaritans helping them. Jews and non-Jews alike. ACRI increasingly concerned about Israel’s war on freedom.
Including repressive legislation. “Senior officials voic(ing) harsh and unprecedented statements against human rights organizations, political groups, and minorities…”
“(A)ttempt(ing) to curtail their operations. A tide of anti-democratic legislative proposals… introduced…”
“(A) rising wave of assaults on social, political, and national minorities in the public sphere.”
Undermining fundamental democratic rights. Infringing on “freedom of expression, human dignity and equality and on freedom of assembly and protest.”
Dozens of Israeli laws discriminate against Palestinians. In all aspects of their lives. According to ACRI:
“Arab citizens face entrenched discrimination in all fields of life. In recent years, the prevalent attitude of hostility and mistrust towards Arab citizens has become more pronounced, with large sections of the Israeli public viewing the Arab minority as both a fifth column and a demographic threat.”
“There are glaring socioeconomic differences between Jewish and Arab population groups, particularly with regard to land, urban planning, housing, infrastructure, economic development, and education.”
“Over half of the poor families in Israel are Arab families, and Arab municipalities constitute the poorest municipalities within Israel.”
Zionism is the enemy of Jews and non-Jews alike. Racist. Corrosive. Destructive. Extremist. Undemocratic.
Claiming Jewish supremacy, specialness and uniqueness as God’s “chosen people.”
Violating fundamental human and civil rights. Deploring peace. Choosing confrontation over diplomacy. Espousing violence.
Seeking dominance through militarism, intimidation and naked aggression.
Jews alone have rights. De-Arabization is official Israeli policy. Palestinians suffer horrifically.
Israelification aims for Judea and Samaria Judification. Including total control.
Encouraging Palestinians to leave. Confining remaining ones to ghettoized cantons.
Stealing all valued land. Ethnically cleansing unwanted Arab inhabitants.
Exploiting their water and other resources. Installing quisling Palestinian leadership. Through rigged elections.
Enforcing Israeli diktats. Terrorizing Palestinians into submission. Denying them fundamental rights and privileges.
The late Law Professor Michael Mandel called Israeli settlements “war crimes.”
Law Professor Francis Boyle said since 1987 first Intifada resistance, “the world has seen heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people.”
Including “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against any civilian population, before or during war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds…”
Similar to what Nazis did to Jews. Boyle calls these crimes the “historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
Including racist laws violating core international human and humanitarian laws. Israel’s draft Jewish state legislation the latest example.
“(D)efining the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and to anchor the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the principles of the Declaration of the Independence.”
Mocking core democratic rights. Affording them to Jews only. Making separate and unequal official Israeli policy.
Denying equality for one-fifth of the population. Around 1.7 million Arabs. Marginalizing them. Persecuting them ruthlessly.
Similar to what Nazis did to Jews. More on this below. The good news is Netanyahu’s popularity plunged from 77% around midyear to 38% currently.
And internal disagreement got him to postpone Knesset Jewish state voting. Originally scheduled for November 26.
Officially enshrining apartheid if enacted. Existing with or without Jewish state law.
Much like Hitler’s Nuremberg laws. Institutionalized Nazi violence solidified power. Established despotic rule.
Assured by Gestapo and SS enforcement. Against declared enemies of the state. Including communists. Social democrats. Organized labor. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Jews.
After March 1933 elections, Nazis institutionalized violence. Ruhr Riots spread nationally. Jewish businesses, enterprises and stores were picketed.
Handbills said: “Germans, don’t buy at Jewish shops.” SA stormtroopers broke into Jewish homes. Mistreated occupants. Arrested them.
Hitler launched a nationwide boycott against Jewish enterprises, doctors and lawyers. Entrances to their establishments and offices were blocked.
Anti-semitic graffiti was displayed. Windows smashed. Racist propaganda incited public anger against Jews. Calling them enemies of the Third Reich.
By 1935, they were publicly humiliated. Banned from certain towns. Publicly assaulted. Orthodox Jews had their beards cut off. Heads shaved to humiliate them. Mock Judaism.
Racist legislation followed. Including the infamous Nuremberg Laws. More on them below.
Landlords were forced to break leases with Jewish tenants. By 1936, harming Jews physically was commonplace. Including destroying their businesses and livelihoods.
In 1938, violence escalated. Intensified after the March Austrian Anschluss. A wave of anti-Jewish measures followed.
Aimed at Austrian Jews. Nazi policy enforced “Aryanizations.” Confiscations. Arrests, Unrestrained physical violence.
In November, the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom occurred. Hitler and Reich Minister of Propaganda Goebbels incited it.
Exploiting German diplomat Ernst vom Rath attempted assassination. On November 7 in Paris.
Violent riots followed. Involving the entire Nazi party apparatus. In most German cities and towns, enterprises and Jewish homes were looted.
Over 200 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish enterprises were attacked, burned and destroyed. When it ended, 680 Jews were dead. Another 30,000 interned in concentration camps.
The ministerial bureaucracy and Gestapo intensified enforcement of Jewish emigration. Kept Jews and Aryans apart. German law exempted violent anti-Jewish acts.
Many occurred. Including murders. Rapes. Other sexual assaults. Organized pogroms. Public humiliations. Vandalism.
Anti-semitic graffiti, boycotts, confiscations, looting and other forms of theft. Virtually anything permitted to vilify and remove German Jewry.
On WW II’s eve, German society was accustomed to anti-semitic violence. It was the genesis of the 1941-45 holocaust. Facilitated by racist Nuremberg Laws.
Protecting “German Blood and German Honour.” Preventing marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Aryans.
Declaring persons with any Jewish blood no longer citizens. Denying them all rights.
Banning Jews from holding professional jobs. Excluding them from education, politics, commerce and industry.
Segregating Jews from Aryans. Punishing them financially. Bankrupting Jewish enterprises.
Prohibiting Aryan doctors from treating them. Excluding Jewish children from state-run schools. Denying Jews all rights afforded Aryans. Nazi genocide followed.
For decades, Palestinians endured similar abuses. Worse today than earlier. Under the most extremist government in Israeli history.
Fascist by any standard. History has a disturbing way of repeating.
Showing how unchecked racist hate causes genocide.
Affecting millions of Palestinians. Harming them grievously. Increasingly devastating if not stopped.
