The following was reprinted from Dissident Voice. It is the second of the two-part article on the so-called “socialist” Julia Carmel Salazar. A version of this article before its editing by Dissident Voice will be published on the Internet Archive in a 15-page version and a 41-page version, the longest one, both of which should be processed at a later point. I have changed the link to part 1 to apply to the reprinted version on this blog, instead of the one in Dissident Voice. A Berniecrat who is often critical of social democrats, although he is imperialistic, quoted a recent Intercept reporterfinding that the rent strike happened in 2014 but not in Harlem even though Salazar claimed it was still part of Harlem. Still, it said 2013 elsewhere, so there are still problems with her personal narrative here.
In Part 2, I build upon what I talked about in Part 1, when I analyzed the candidacy of Julia Salazar, called Salazar in this article, what a “socialist” running on the “Democrat line” meant. In this article I focus on her life, not by telling it in minute detail but briefly looking at her background and pointing out inconsistencies. As Josh Varlin of the Trotskyist WSWS (World Socialist WebSite) even remarked very recently, “Salazar’s misrepresentation of her past is, however, politically significant” because “Salazar’s political evolution is far from run-of-the-mill” since she was “extremely active in right-wing politics until just before her entry into pseudo-left politics.”
On April 18, Salazar began her campaign for the New York State Senate, specifically for District 18 in North Brooklyn, announcing it at Bushwick’s Maria Hernandez Park, and recently winning the Democratic primary by a large margin, beating Martin Dilan, who was funded to the hilt by the real estate body. With this, she is virtually guaranteed a win in November because there is no Republican or Independent running against her. She defines herself on one of her twitter handles as a member of the New York City Democratic “Socialists” of America (DSA) chapter and UAW (their National Writers Union), with some supporters calling her a “community organizer.” Since then, some have raised questions about her identity and her “personal narrative,” as she has presented it in her campaign even though she has strongly declared she was not campaigning on identity. [1] She is like other millennials who fibbed parts of her past as Eve Fairbanks wrote in a recent BuzzFeed article.
The questions about Salazar begin with her origins. It is clear that she was born in Miami in December 1990, evidenced by the fact that her parents had paid for a second mortgage three years earlier. It is also clear that she grew up in a family which was politically conservative, with a Colombian-born father, Luis, a cargo pilot, and her New Jersey-born mother of Italian descent, Christine, a flight attendant. However, she could not get her story straight about her family: sometimes she called them secular, while other times she called them Catholic or partially Jewish. Nonetheless, it seems evident that at least part of her family was Catholic as she had admitted to a DSA podcast that she was baptized Catholic, growing up in South Florida.
The first part of her origin story is that she was a “proud” Columbia immigrant, as her campaign website and her Our Revolution bio once described her. This part of her story quickly ended, as she fell back to the claim that she was a “proud daughter of an immigrant father” or “a Colombian-American from an immigrant family.” [2] But this is definitely stretching the reality, as her father was a U$ citizen before she was born, putting into question that she immigrated to the U$ with her family “when she was very little,” and that her family moved to the U$ when she was a baby.
She already had admitted to the New York Times the deception behind calling herself an immigrant, saying: “I’m not an immigrant myself. Rather, I have always felt a deep connection to my father’s immigrant experience because of the time I spent without family in Colombia at such a young age. We were back and forth, literally, constantly. My earliest memories are of Colombia.” Salazar’s mother, born in 1957, does recall varied visits to Colombia, even stating that “the Colombian culture was a huge part of our family” while her slightly older brother, Alex, who is currently a mango farmer in Florida, confirmed “a pair of trips to Colombia” during “their childhood for short visits,” but said that “we weren’t an immigrant family. It was never something even considered.” With her father being Colombian-born, this would mean that she would be effectively half-Colombian, but considering that her mother was White, this proves false her assertion in 2017, before she became a candidate, that “my own immediate family are people of color who immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia, and most of my family still lives there.”
This is even the case as she has said that she looks “practically identical” to her father and less like her white mother, but is sometimes “white-passing or perceived of as white by some.” While she may be right that “immigrant stories are rarely straightforward or unidirectional” and that she has “family in both countries, and I feel a part of both,” while she may be “referring to going there more than we went anywhere else” and she “embraced the Colombian culture,” according to her mother, this doesn’t account for her inconsistencies and distortions. As such, her claims that she “never misrepresented my history, and attempts to construct a narrative where I was dishonest about my birthplace to reporters…are malicious and false” are faulty. This is not totally unprecedented: those who are second-generation (children of an immigrant or immigrants), see themselves as attached to the culture of their parent or parents’ birthplace, even if they aren’t born there.
Connected to her claimed immigrant identity was her claim that she was working-class. She had said that her mother “really struggled to support me and my brother financially as a single mother” and that both of her parents “came from a working class background.” It is clear that she was largely raised by her mother, supporting her contention on that count. However, her brother, Alex, has said that their family was “middle class, or upper middle class” when living in Jupiter, a “small beach town” north of West Palm Beach, which Salazar has countered by saying that Alex’s memory on this subject was faulty. In contrast, Salazar’s mother said that while she and her children lived in a nice house, she sometimes financially struggled, especially after divorcing with her husband (when Salazar was six years old in 1996), with Luis, saying:
If I could make it look easy for my kids, I did. I thought that economic hardship was not a burden that kids that were going through a divorce needed to experience.
Beyond this, it is clear that Christine raised both Salazar and Alex, getting only a portion of her husband’s money “through alimony and child support,” growing up in a large house but at times “had to push hard to make ends meet.” Without even using the story in the Daily Mail, a horrid right-wing tabloid, which also seems to raise questions about her claims of a working-class background but just depends on her brother as a source, there are some indications that she is fibbing her story.
She admits that at times her parents collectively earned $100,000 in a year, although she has said this wasn’t always the case, with her brother saying, rightly, that you would have to “have a pretty wide definition of working class,” saying that they lived “a comfortable life.” Even if we accepted that she grew up working class, her mother did not have a college degree for only two years after divorcing her husband, graduating with a degree in psychology from Florida Atlantic University. Furthermore, let’s say we accept the contention of Salazar’s mother that Salazar is from the “you work your ass off class,” and that “she really wants to help others. The people of Brooklyn…if she gets elected, she will be their advocate,” it seems evident that she was more likely middle-class than working-class, especially since her mother was working-class but her father was solidly middle-class.
Additionally, she had a trust of $600,000, which some like Zionist Yair Rosenberg, have taken to indicate that Salazar was a trust-fund kid, because, when her father died in 2009 he left a “house and considerable retirement savings.” While she and her campaign have said that a relative manages the account and she has received nothing from the trust fund, it is hard to believe she has not been given at least something.
Apart from her claimed immigrant and working-class identity was her claim of Jewish ancestry. She has said that “my father was of Sephardic Jewish heritage,” that she had “some Jewish family,” and “a Sephardi surname.” But, even her mother, who is supportive of her daughter’s campaign, has said that neither her family nor her divorced husband’s family were Jewish, claimed to say that the latter family had a “Sephardic background” which Salazar had been curious about, adding that this is “where her interest stems from.” This interest reportedly began in 2009, when she was age 18, after graduating high school, when her father died of prostate cancer, with a funeral in a Catholic church in Ormond Beach, Florida, when she claims she began “exploring her Jewishness,” telling the New York Times that she was spurred to “search for meaning in my father’s death,” saying that “a lot of mysteries I wanted to solve,” focusing on her family history (on her father’s side), with claimed roots in the Sephardic (also Sephardi or Sephardim) “community expelled from medieval Spain” which converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, with most of them settling in the Ottoman Empire and others immigrating to parts of Europe and the Americas. But her claim to Jewish ancestry is questionable.
A Colombian genealogist, Maria Emilia Naranjo Ramos, looked into the family history of Salazar, determining that her ancestors included a central banker, business people, and civic leaders, while being recognized throughout the “generations by their commitment and generosity towards their community,” serving as Catholic elites, which Salazar called “pretty cool.” [3] Furthermore, they have been “Catholic in their tradition and for many generations,” with no evidence, as of yet that they are “possibly Sephardic.”
As the Spectator, which is very critical of Salazar, has said, Salazar’s family “may well have descended from conversos, Sephardic Jews who retained some connection or awareness of their origins after forced conversion.” Salazar threw this all away by stating that “this genealogy does not make me Jewish,” putting into question if she was exploring “her Jewishness” or her “Jewish roots” after her father’s death or not. As such, her claim to Jewish ancestry is still a tall tale, as the only person who could have told her about it was her father, with her mother saying that: “she’s the one who sought out her family history…I believe that was a discussion that Julia had with him about the family history in Iberia. But he would always say that he was born and raised in Colombia but his family was Iberian.”
This connects to another part of her identity: her claim to the Jewish faith. She has told her fellow activists of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) that she was “a Jew of color…a Colombian American and…Jewish.” [4]
With this, her Jewish beliefs would fall within the category of the JFREJ’s description of “mixed-race Jews whose ancestors include many kinds of non-European peoples, and both white people and People of Color who have chosen (or whose parents, grandparents or ancestors have chosen) to become Jews through conversion,” with her declaring to be within the latter group. Some have focused on her tattoos with disdain, declaring she is “not” Jewish, stating that Leviticus 19:28 (with varied translations) says you cannot make gashes in your flesh “for the dead” or any “marks” on yourself. However, as Rabbi Evan Moffic wrote in HuffPost, in Judaism “there is no blanket prohibition on tattoos” and as a Jewish Reform website plainly states, “after the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community became even more opposed to tattoos…[but] in recent years, tattoos have become more common in the Jewish community…the Jewish community might still be divided over tattoos…we don’t exclude people in our communities from that care simply because of markings on the skin.”
As such, having a tattoo does not automatically exclude you from being Jewish. Whether she read a lot, reading the bible and apologetics and Torah, she had admitted that she didn’t have a “bat mitzvah, or a confirmation, or any of that sort of thing.” It would not be until 2012 or 2013 when she claimed to undergo a conversion to Judaism, with some saying she was a conservative Christian before then even though she talked about events at Hillel. Not only is the length of her Reform beit dein conversion in question, with some courses saying it was two months and others saying five months, but she has no record of it and the person named Daniel Crane was not “an ordained rabbi, and therefore could not yet lead conversions while Salazar was a student,” putting her conversion into question.
In the end, as one recent article in New York magazine noted, she chose to “identify and live as a Jew in 21st-century New York City amid a rising population of adults with fractional Jewish ancestry,” finding a Jewish community in college, which is true despite the fact it is an open question, despite what her classmates said in the Forward, whether she converted at all! Benjamin “Ben” Norton, Salazar’s friend, may be right that “whether or not she converted late in life is irrelevant” and that “the people challenging her blood purity and tracking her family history are bigots.” Even so, this does not include well-intentioned criticism, which this article falls into or the genealogist who looked at her family history, at minimum.
Fast forward to August 2009. She began attending Columbia University, after she had reportedly worked in the service industry for years, specifically at a grocery store, as a housecleaner, and as a barista, drinking “very hot coffee” on her short breaks.” She was also a registered Republican with conservative views, graduating Jupiter High School at the top of her class, but did not vote in the presidential election in 2008. Moving to New York City, Salazar would attend an Ivy League school, “an institution with an immense amount of wealth” as she would later describe it, where she would study history, psychology, and have a concentration in Jewish studies. Reportedly while in college she would work as “a nanny and house cleaner,” supporting herself through school, working for “30 hours a week…on the Upper West Side, using the income to pay rent and other expenses not covered by her scholarship” and financial aid, giving her “class consciousness.”
Her “political evolution” would be slow. During her campaign she would claim she was a “community organizer” in New York City for “nearly a decade” or have a “decade of experience as a local community organizer has brought her from the streets of Bushwick to the halls of Albany.” [5]
This raises a red flag of concern since it would mean, at most, she would have to be politically active since 2007 or 2008. If it was not exactly a decade, this would still be a problem as her right-wing phase of her life lasted until 2015 at least, evidenced by the fact that in 2010 she registered with the Independence Party of New York, supposedly mistakenly thinking she was an unaffiliated voter even though it is possible this wasn’t a mistake considering that the party is center-right and “populist, and began going to Hillel the same year, even going to Jewish services with friends. The following year, when she began to reside continuously in New York, she would be arrested on “allegations of fraudulently attempting to access the bank account of Kai Hernandez, a family friend and then-wife of baseball star Keith Hernandez,” a bizarre case which would drag on for four years, ending in 2017 with a settlement in Salazar’s favor, settling for $20,000 since the person she was suing was dying of cancer. More importantly, in 2011, she would begin to dip her toe into politics by starting a “Columbia United for Israel” chapter at Columbia that year which never became an official group because she wasn’t deeply invested in it and Columbia didn’t allow it, never moving beyond a relatively inactive Facebook group.
The following year, in 2012, she would become the President of a group fighting against reproductive rights on Columbia’s campus: Columbia Right to Life (CRL), possibly beginning to be sent emails from them in 2011. Specifically the group would fight to ensure that “a fund for abortion services would not be paid for by Columbia students,” and she would lead the Support for Pregnant Students Initiative, serving as the “public voice” of the group on campus, and be angry at the Columbia Spectator for “manipulating” the words of CRL members, showing their “bias.” She would even, later that year, write in the Spectator an op-ed where she declared that “it is unacceptable for the University to provide support for students to have abortions while simultaneously failing to provide resources to accommodate those who keep their baby…With Columbia’s influence, we have the opportunity to help pregnant women, and thus live up to the progressive values of social justice, autonomy, and women’s health that we proclaim.”
There was understandable backlash, as her fellow students told her about abortion, changing her views after “honest conversation[s],” regretting the views she took then. Even so, despite her claim that the group didn’t have a significant impact, the fact is that she was positively described by Public Discourse the following year, when she ended her involvement, and the group seemed to somewhat achieve its goals.
In 2012, she was part of a Christian Zionist organization: Christians United for Israel (CUFI). She appeared on Glenn Beck’s show, The Blaze, and was in San Antonio for a summit of CUFI. Before she spoke, she smiled in disbelief at reported “anti-Israel” lyrics by a Palestinian rap group (singing in Arabic) and shook her head, shaking her head again in a similar manner when the other guest talked about Palestinian “hate speech” being an issue for Christians. About 4 minutes into the video, the segment in which Beck interviews her begins. She goes on a pro-Zionist screed, stating that “anti-Israeli” professors were in the “Middle Eastern, Asian Languages and Culture…using the classroom as their podium to spread lies about the state of Israel, to de-legitimize the state of Israel, and to spread propaganda to Columbia students” and declaring that CUFI’s goals were to “educate the community about the truth about Israel…Palestinian Authority….Hamas…[and] Ahmadinejad.”
She would later add on a DSA podcast that the “Glenn Beck appearance was concurrent with me first learning about what CUFI was,” and saying the interview was in January 2012 when “CUFI sponsored me to go to San Antonio for their conference,” with her being told an hour beforehand and she spoke on the show. In August of the same year, she met with IDF soldiers “patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border,” in a trip organized by CUFI, which reportedly did not establish a chapter at Columbia. On this trip her views of the murderous Zionist apartheid state, often called “Israel,” were reportedly changed, when she visited the West Bank and met with Palestinians there, even reportedly keeping in touch with a Palestinian in the U$ who had “grown up in West Bank and lived through the second intifada.” It is also worth noting that sometime during her time on campus she was part of a humanitarian imperialist organization: Amnesty International, claiming it did not mesh with “very hawkish views on foreign policy, social issues or on poverty,” which has some truth to it, but ignores the long-standing connection of Amnesty with the murderous empire.
It was the year following, in January, that she reportedly engaged in a rent strike. As she tells the story, after “shivering through a winter without heat,” she organized a rent strike among fellow tenants at her apartment building (reportedly in Harlem), run by a “notoriously abusive landlord” who neglected tenants, calling for the landlord to “make repairs and turn on the heat in the winter” and they won some concessions in a housing court, as a result. As such, the management company raised rents through the roof, leading Salazar to be displaced and say she began to think about systemically changing such problem. There have been some questions of whether the strike happened again which is complicated because the address where she lived may not be publicly available.
We do know that the same year, she would make a brief visit to Florida, and from then to 2017, considerable “documentary evidence, including tax and payroll records…reflect earnings in New York and are directed to her at residential addresses in New York, and including her residential leases, bank and health insurance records, rent and mover’s bills, and travel records.” Her testimony in the Dilan v. Salazar case was corroborated by a roommate who had lived with her “in various apartments in New York since September 2013 and that Salazar was never away for more than one or two weeks.” This is complicated by the fact that she told her friend Katie Helper in Teen Vogue that she organized the strike in early 2014 even though Gothamist clearly indicates it happened in 2013. Which is an open question whether the strike happened at all!
In the spring and fall semesters of 2013, her Zionist views would be reinforced. In the spring semester, she would help found the J Street U chapter at Columbia, clearly supporting the two-state solution and organizing meetings for the group, including opposing the idea of “Apartheid Week” regarding the Zionist state. [6]
In that same semester, she would also be fine with inviting liberal Zionists to campus, seemed to favor those from Peace Now and Haaretz and asked in one message: “is anyone else a little disturbed by the similarity between Palestinians referring to this as “Nakba” and its mockery (intentional or not) of the Jewish use of the word “Shoah” (both literally meaning “catastrophe”)? I find it to be a little too close for comfort.” By the fall semester, she would be the co-president of the chapter and a WZO (World Zionist Organization) campus fellow, who was, politically, a liberal Zionist who seemed to want a coordinated response to address SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) actions.
Near the end of that semester, she would meet David Keyes, now Netanyahu’s spokesperson to foreign media, then a “human rights activist,” a second time at a coffee shop, and, by her recollection, be physically assaulted by him in his apartment. Years later, in 2016, she would have a Facebook post about the incident, deleting it after the Times of Israel picked up on the story. Regardless of Salazar’s other inconsistencies and distortions, it is wrong to think that she is lying on this topic either by engaging in victim-blaming or other efforts as a prominent Wall Street Journal reporter, Shayndi Rice, shared a similar story, and ten more women have come forward with similar stories.
The following year, in February 2014, she would write her second-op-ed in the Columbia Spectator, which described her as “a Columbia College senior majoring in Middle Eastern history and Jewish studies. She is a co-chair of J Street CU and a member of Columbia/Barnard Hillel.” This goes against what she told a DSA podcast: that she led the chapter “until the very beginning of 2014, January of 2014, which was when I disengaged for the group essentially over the question of BDS and support for BDS,” raising the question of when she left the group. In her op-ed, she would lend her support to the corrupted two-state solution, saying that “there is a growing constituency of us who refuse to tolerate the injustice of the status quo…Advocating for pragmatic solutions to these issues is imperative because they are an essential part of any two-state agreement. Through practicality, we can turn our frustration into strategic activism. We can lead our community to promote a just solution to the conflict, before peace escapes us.” This shows that she hadn’t abandoned her Zionism by then, and as the Gotham Gazette put it, she would join “the Israel/Palestine activism scene as a member of J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace.”
Around the same time she also became involved with IfNotNow, a group that “wants American-Jewish institutions to become more aware of Israel’s occupation of territory Palestinians consider their homeland, while protesting the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict,” which she would criticize herself the following year. She also would write her first article for Mondoweiss, about being denied entry into the Zionist state and saying she “was raised with the delusion that Israel was a safe haven for me, perhaps even the only safe place for Jews” which Vox says implies she was raised as a Jewish child although she was not. By April 2014, she would be part of a debate on Columbia University about the “academic boycott of Israel.”
In May 2014, Salazar would leave Columbia University but would not graduate. This has led to some controversy because she said under oath in the Dilan v. Salazar that she graduated and her website seemed to imply this was the case, even seeming to imply graduation when she donated to the university in later years and on her academia.edu account, which shows her interests, with the same being the case for her Scribd or Quora accounts. As such, Citizens Union and the Brooklyn Young Democrats withdrew their endorsement of her as a candidate. As she tells the story, after college she went to Jacobin reading groups, with the first meeting about the Global South, and began reading Karl Marx, even though she has also said that she began reading Marx while in college. So, this is disputed.
The same goes for her identification as a socialist, telling a DSA podcast at one point that she was a socialist in 2013 and at another time that in 2014 she first identified as socialist. The following year, she would write another article for Mondoweiss, noting her presence in If Not Now, a group of U$ Jews organizing in Brooklyn and “seeking to protest Jewish communal organizations’ complicity in the violence” in Gaza by Zionist armies and opposing the “brutal” occupation of Palestine,” but also had strong criticism of the organization and of J Street, later partying with those like Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Rania Khalek, Michael “Mike” Prysner, Nathaniel Wallace, and Jan Ritch-Frel and Michael Prysner, where they all watched the Democratic presidential debate. The latter basically rather shows her left-leaning views at the time, with the same applying to her friendship with Ben Norton, who is not as radical as one might think at the time.
By 2016, the year she would attend the Big Eddy Film Festival in Narrowsburg, New York, she would be in Nashua, New Hampshire “with her union, the United Automobile Workers,” which she is said to have organized for “during a contract dispute at Barnard College, on Election Day.” She said that it was also a get-out-the-vote campaign, adding that “collectively, we all felt certain that Hillary Clinton would win. When the results came in, it was really, really devastating…My heart hasn’t stopped racing since that moment, basically.” She later told the Gazette that “the Trump Administration has motivated more people, myself included, to shift our focus to trying to effect change as much as we possibly can at the city and state level, where we have more control, where we can effect change in a practical sense and also do harm reduction in response to federal policies across the board.”
The same year she began working with the JFREJ “on anti-police brutality initiatives,” after seeing them at Black Lives Matter protests. [7] She would also write her third article for Mondoweiss, talking about a Black Lives Matter platform which called the Zionist state an apartheid entity oppressing Palestinians and the response by Jewish organizations to it, and would become “rank-and-file DSA member” in the summer.
The year after that, 2017, she would serve as the senior editor of a blog called Unruly: A Jews of Color, Sephardi & Mizrahi Caucus Blog and would be a full-time staff organizer in the JFREJ, while being a member of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) and an active DSA member. In January of the same year, she attended the Women’s March in NYC, leading a “contingent of progressive Jewish marchers,” seeing the march as “as an opportunity to build our community’s unified resistance against Trump’s oppressive policy proposals” and saying that despite clumsy messaging, it was “a good-faith effort to do something here that will mark an historic defiance against the hate and discrimination that Trump represents.” She would not cancel, as revealed in the Dilan v. Salazar case, her Florida voting registration until July 2017, and then become a registered voter in New York.
Then, in 2018, this year, she would write an article in Jacobin about the NYPD’s police brutality, then started supporting and volunteering for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign. She would be convinced by some of her friends in the NYC-DSA, like Michael “Mike” Kinnucan (her deputy campaign manager), Nick Rizzo, and Bianca Cunningham, and maybe that assistant editor of Jacobin, Alex Press, who moved into the area in 2017. She would finalize her decision by March and begin running in April, with a kickoff the following month. Of these individuals, Rizzo was a major factor, described in April 2016 by Bedford & Bowery as a politician who “shares some concerns with the Brooklyn hipster constituency…and like many liberal-minded people of our generation, he also cares a great deal about issues of equality…and is frustrated with…the establishment.” He would call himself a “Bernie supporter” who barely saw “any possibility of Trump winning,” adding, worryingly, that: “…it’s actually better for all of us to have a functioning two-party system…Competition is essential for a democracy” and that he would vote for Hillary Clinton if she was the Democratic nominee and saying he was in favor of tipping. Since then, his views on Twitter, such as thinking that “Millennials” and Generation Z will bring “the change”, being dedicated Democrat and nationalist who seems to like assessments by Trotsky, shows that what he said in 2016 still matters.
Whether we believe Salazar or not, support or oppose her, her personal narrative, which was muddled by her inconsistencies and distortions, matters as she is a figure in the public eye, not only putting doubt on her ability to carry through for Brooklynites (as a “new hope”) in Albany but in the DSA itself. It is hard to see if she will be “an advocate for the underdog,” as her mother describes her. In the end, while thinking people should be critical of progressive icons like Salazar, any tendency to ally with reactionaries or promote their narratives to engage in such criticism undercuts any efforts to create a better world.
Notes
[1] If you would like the links to the tweets I am referring to, please email me.
[2] She explained this change to Stephen Miller of Fox News by saying that she does not “personally manage” her campaign website, blaming a staffer and lack of coordination on her “first-time team,” admitting to being “unknowingly unclear on this,” adding that her busy campaign was also to blame. How can you expect a well-organized and coordinated campaign if you are blaming your staff?
[3] This is where New York magazine gets into weird territory: they declare that because Salazar’s ancestors were elites in Colombia who had a role in public life, that this “legacy of financial well-being and achievement carried over from Colombia to Salazar’s early family life in Florida, where she was born” because…Salazar’s brother said so! This is pretty weak, since it is no guarantee that just because your ancestors are wealthy you will also be wealthy.
[4] The quote “lower my expectations” which is used in this article comes from this video. I did my best to transcribe the video:
I hope I am not alienating anyone but I am also not into vartora [?]. I’m not equipped to do that either. But, I am a Jew of color. Many people aren’t familiar with this term but I’m a Colombian-American and I’m also Jewish. And Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the movement that many of us are in has empowered me to say that proudly. Growing up I was told to lower my expectations by society. I immigrated to this country with my family when I was very little. In Colombia, my mom raised me as a single mother, she didn’t have a college degree. We really struggled. I started working in a grocery store when I was 14, I worked in the service industry from high school, and as a domestic worker in college. And it was that experience that while early on, you know [cuts off].”
[5] The full quote from her page is: “as a member of the Bushwick community, she has been a tireless advocate for her neighbors and fellow tenants. Julia’s decade of experience as a local community organizer has brought her from the streets of Bushwick to the halls of Albany. She has protested, picketed, lobbied, and organized to achieve a more just New York. From working with her neighbors to fight for their legal right to safe housing to demanding criminal justice reforms at the city and state levels, Julia has been at the forefront of campaigns for social justice in New York.”
[6] WZO, which was founded in 1897, wants to “serve as the umbrella organization for the Zionist movement” and be a “symbol and a founding institution of Zionist political thought and action.” It also pumps millions into new illegal settlements in the West Bank. In an article she co-wrote with Max Blumenthal, she would describe J Street, talking about “liberal pro-Israel students” in the organization, adding that “J Street U [is] the campus arm of the liberal pro-Israel organization, J Street.” J Street has directly attacked BDS and it also “rejects the return of Palestinians to lands and homes.”
[7] For the discussion of whether JFREJ is a Zionist organization, please email me. She may have also worked with CodePink as there is a page for a “Julia Carmel.”
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in February 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Some changes have been made.
In the bourgeois media, sources are abound that the DPRK is “isolated” from the rest of the world and is a “hermit kingdom.” International Business Times asks that “Why Is North Korea So Isolated?,” The Diplomat declares that the country has “growing isolation” and has “Self-Imposed Isolation” while HuffPost claims that sanctions are “isolating the isolated,” BBC claims to have an “exclusive” on the country’s “cultural isolation,” and Forbes declares the country has an “isolated regime.” This claim, trumpeted across the media in many more outlets than those just listed, is an utter lie just like the propaganda spread by Time magazine about the “origin” of the nuclear program of the DPRK in the ashes of the Soviet Union. A report released last year by bourgeois “watchers” noted that even as the country’s “ideology of Juche has emphasized independence in foreign affairs,” this, in reality, hasn’t meant “diplomatic or economic isolation.” [1] In fact, 163 “countries have established formal diplomatic relations with North Korea” even though many of these countries do not “have an ambassador accredited to the DPRK or a diplomatic mission in Pyongyang,” possibly because of the pressure of imperialists through sanctions or some other reason related to those specific countries. However, the DPRK has “embassies in 47 countries, with several of its ambassadors also accredited to neighboring countries” and has also established “a handful of trade missions or representative offices in countries where it lacks an embassy, as well as diplomatic missions to UN offices in New York, Geneva, and Paris.” That doesn’t sound like an isolated country at all! The 47 countries hosting embassies of the DPRK are shown in the map below, coming from the report:
On January 9th of this year [2018], the WPK’s Central Committee “sent a congratulatory message to the Central Directive Council of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle to mark its 45th founding anniversary. The message referred to notable achievements and progress the Indonesian party has made over the past 45 years since its foundation for the country’s independent development and prosperity and the promotion of the Indonesian people’s well-being under the ideal of Pancasila.”
Then there are 24 countries which have embassies in Pyongyang are varied, and even include some of the countries in Western Europe, again showing this idea of “isolation” which is spread across the bourgeois media is silly:
Currently relations between the DPRK and Jordan have been diplomatically severed by the latter party. I was relying on a 2016 study of diplomatic relations to put this map together, so some countries may be changed.
That comes to a total of about 4.3 billion souls (at least) represented by the embassies (and their ambassadors) of the 24 countries, shown on the above map, within the DPRK!
If we take the bourgeois media at its word (which CommieDad says rightly we should never do), it would seem that more than $100 million of goods was traded with the DPRK by African countries on an annual basis, along with military training in central Africa, shipping of arms, and pervasive ties to Africa. [2] However, many of the countries quoted by the grey propaganda VOA outlet say that they have no trade or lessened relationships with the DPRK, underling the whole article! Apparently these accusations were taken seriously enough to warrant investigations by the United Nations, showing it to be, in this case, a tool of the imperialists to disrupt any claimed ties between the DPRK and the African continent which it forged “since most nations’ struggle for independence in the 1960s.” The same can be said about the list of 49 countries which purportedly violated sanctions of the UN Security Council, again working as a tool of the imperialists, claimed by a bourgeois think tank (the Institute for Science and International Security), with “violations” ranging from “banned financial transactions and other business activities,” importing “goods and minerals,” helping the DPRK ship “materials in and out of its country illicitly” and, finally, “arms trading or military training,” the latter which are mostly in Africa. [3] It is hard to know how much of this is even true, but it shows that imperialists are trying to criminalize the business of trade for the DPRK in order to “isolate” it. But, if even some of these “violations” are true, which is possible since the DPRK has sent arms to Pakistan, Myanmar, and the UAE in the past, it shows that part of the world is not going along with this, which is an act of resistance in and of itself.
Perhaps some of the countries share the view of President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea who congratulated “Kim Jong-un for his election victory at the recent Workers Party Congress, and pledged increased support for North Korea’s attempts to build a thriving socialist nation.” [4] For the latter country, ties with the DPRK go back to the 1970s when a former president, Francisco Nguema, welcomed military advisers of the DPRK, and changed the “the name of his ruling party to the United National Workers Party in 1971” (Juche 60) reportedly to mirror the ruling party of the DPRK, the WPK (Workers’ Party of Korea). It is known, beyond this, that Cambodia has a “curious friendship” with the DPRK as the latter has “few economic interests in Cambodia” but there is still seemingly a persistent “residual affinity” and growing relationship. [5] This the case while some goofballs think that jailing Khmer Rouge leaders sends a message to the DPRK even though the latter is not connected to the Khmer Rouge at all. At the present, Juche Korea also has friendly relations with Bulgaria, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Thailand (dating back to the backing of a communist “insurgency” there during the Cold War), Mongolia (also see here), Myanmar (which resumed diplomatic ties in 2007 after canceling them in 1983 (Juche 72) after imperialists claimed the DPRK was tied to terrorism), The Gambia, and Hungary, to name a few. Any foreign policy errors they may have made undoubtedly has roots in their revisionist approach, as the DPRK is a progressive state rather than a socialist one.
Diplomatic relations by the DPRK with other nations, 1948-1961. Later Serbia resumed the diplomatic relations of Yugoslavia. Relations with Democratic Republic of Vietnam began in 1950. In later years, in 1982, the president of Guinea named an institute inaugurated in the country the “Kim Il Sung Agricultural Science Institute” showing the power of their support for African liberation.
Such internationalism is nothing new for the DPRK and is rooted in its early years when it received aid and support from socialist nations. For example, medical staff from the Hungarian People’s Republic, part of the Warsaw Pact, in 1952 (Juche 41) during the Great Fatherland Liberation War, workers helping reconstruct the country after the destruction of the war, and construction of a surgical hospital in 1955 (Juche 44). The same was the case with aid from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), called “East Germany” in the West, which exported “machines, pharmaceuticals, medical instruments and other medical equipment” in 1952, and created a group of 600 workers, a “Bau-Union,” for “the purpose of construction and repair of roads and bridges in North Korea” in 1955. Additionally, Czechoslovakian and Soviet troops were reportedly stationed in the DPRK in 1951 (Juche 38), Polish motor vehicles from the Zeran plant in Poland were delivered to the country in 1954 (Juche 43), and Polish engineers went to the DPRK in 1955, agreeing to “serve as building instructors” for a period of three years. Then there is aid from the Soviet Union which supplied “machine guns, rifles, mortars, other small arms…obsolete artillery…trucks…[and] Soviet tanks” in 1954, a military pact with the DPRK in 1950, Soviet college professors sent to the country in 1950 (Juche 39), and military cooperation in later years, even in the later 1980s, different from the Russia of today.The efforts against the U$ imperialists under the UN flag during the Great Fatherland Liberation War were bolstered by thousands of pairs of tennis shoes from Communist China, hundreds of thousands of blankets from Hungary, 300,000 sheets from Czechoslovakia, two medical aircraft from Poland, two boxcars of medicine from GDR, and 10,000 horses from Mongolia just in 1951! By 1958 (Juche 47), even General Nathan F. Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, part of the U$ military establishment, had to admit that “the Communist position in North Korea is stronger than ever because they have a better base from whence to operate.”
Diplomatic relations established by Juche Korea, 1963-1967. In 1966 relations with the state of Palestine began, while Mauritania suspended relations from 1977-1980.
By 1966 (Juche 55), the DPRK was trading $445 million in traded goods, raising from previous years (it was only $124 million in 1949) with more exports than imports, and most of the trade with “communist” nations. This was thanks to their independent policy, establishing relations with all sorts of countries across the world. For instance in 1964, the government criticized the actions by imperialists in Vietnam, expressed the hope of “traditional solidarity” with the Soviets, established diplomatic relations with Mauritania, indirectly said the country should not “conform to Chinese dogma” and established diplomatic relations with Congo! In the 1950s, as the Soviets made moves against trusteeship on the Korean Peninsula, supported by imperialists, the DPRK proposed holding “elections in all Korea” while the puppet ROK state wanted elections in each artificial division of the Korean Peninsula, an imperialist-backed viewpoint, as they wanted a “non–Communist, independent and representative government” in Korea. However, by 1972 (Juche 61), the Chinese were openly supporting peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula, with the cause for reunification again pushed by the DPRK the same year. Since then the Chinese have changed their position to supporting reunification but only because it will benefit their capitalist class.
Diplomatic relations established by the DPRK, 1968-1972. Relations with Iraq broken off in Oct 1980. Relations with South Yemen in 1968. Relations with Sri Lanka suspended 1971-1975, later a ship with “more than 100 tractors, pumps, plows, vinyl pipes of more than 50 thousand meters and other agricultural implements” were sent to the country, as noted by a Spanish-speaking comrade named Fekerfanta, aid which was requested by Si Lanka. Relations with Chile broken in Sept 1973, later resumed in 1990 after Pinochet.
By the 1970s, there was concern among imperialists and the puppet Koreans in the south that the DPRK may get an upper hand. One diplomatic cable in 1974 remarked that “there are several states in Asia and perhaps half a dozen in Western Europe that would be stimulated to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea.” The same year, Park, the puppet president of ROK, declared that “the North Koreans are the most militant, radical Communists of all Communist Party nations in the world” and was concerned that “the general trend in Japan is towards the left. The left-wing press and political circles are pressuring the Japanese Government, and the Japanese Government is making hasty approaches to North Korea. I hope the U.S. will use its influence to discourage these approaches.” Basically, the ROK and imperialists were worried because they felt that this would weaken efforts to “contain” the DPRK! As a cable in 1975 (Juche 64) remarked, “what happens in Korea affects the balance of power elsewhere and vice versa. Europe is affected by the expansion of Soviet power in Korea.”
Diplomatic relations established by the DPRK, 1973-1977. Relations with Argentina broken in 1977. Relations with Australia suspended 1975-2000. Relations with Fiji suspended from 1987-2002. Costa Rica relations broken off at year not known. Myanmar relations suspended 1983-2007. On Feb 2 of this year, Jordan terminated its diplomatic relations with the DPRK, which it claimed it was doing “in line with the policies of Jordan’s allies” with its major ally being the murderous empire!
Fast forward to June 1985 (Juche 74). A Special National Intelligence Assessment was issued saying that the DPRK had an “activist foreign policy” aiming to unify Korean peninsula, deny recognition to ROK, gain continuing support of revisionist USSR and revisionist China, and engage in overtures to Seoul and West in hopes of improving the image of the DPRK, solicit “new trade and aid,” even investment. The report estimated that there were 700 military personnel on the African continent, along with military assistance and other aid. Advisers from Juche Korea were in countries were Soviets were supposedly present, and their policy sprung from what had been done in the late 1960s and early 1970s,when liberation fighters, which they called “terrorist groups and extremists” were supported “in Africa, Middle East, and Africa.” The following year, another report was issued by the intelligence community of the murderous empire. It argued that the DPRK continued to push for reunification, looking to the periphery, which they called the “Third World,” for support, opposed the legitimacy of ROK, and turned toward Moscow, benefiting from Soviet aid. It also added that while the Soviets disliked the government (showing it was not a Soviet colony), the DPRK disliked the “regime in Afghanistan,” was said to have supported “Prince Sihanouk’s anti-Vietnamese struggle in Cambodia” while the government distanced itself “from Moscow elsewhere in the Third World” in order to be and stay non-aligned in the world. Some of these stances were emblematic of their revisionist approach at the time.
Diplomatic relations established by Juche Korea 1979-1992. Grenada relations broken Jan 1985, later resumed. Lesotho relations broken Aug 1986, later resumed.
In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviets recognized the ROK, and the Chinese did in 1992 (Juche 81), which was a “major diplomatic blow to North Korea.” After the Cold War ended, international politics shifted, leading “Pyongyang to drop its longstanding opposition to joining the UN jointly with Seoul, with both north and south Korea joining the global body in 1991” along with the “collapse of the Soviet bloc” resulting in cuts in aid to the DPRK, leading to economic problems in the mid-1990s and closing “many of its embassies between 1993 and 2001” since the budget was restricted. [6] As a result the DPRK, in the early 2000s, established diplomatic relations with many European countries, even with with the European Union in 2001 (Juche 90), the culmination of their revisionist foreign policy but also due to the end of the Soviet Union. As the World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2017, of U$ State Department showed, arms exports of DPRK were minimal from 2005-2015, but even they reportedly compromised much of the exports in 2005 and 2010 especially, there has been a decline in arms exports from 2005-2015 while abuses of human life continued within the murderous empire.
Diplomatic relations established by the DPRK, 1993-2011. Relations with Botswana broken in Feb 2014 [7]. 2001 relations with the EU began. In October of 2017, the UAE downgraded relations with Juche Korea (and stopped issuing visas to nationals from the DPRK), with “similar moves by Qatar and Kuwait” showing these Gulf autocracies really serve the murderous empire.In the end, this article proves without a doubt that the DPRK is not isolated in its approach to the world, even though it has adopted revisionist approaches and there is the continuing trend of creeping capitalism in the country itself.
Notes
[1] Daniel Wertz, JJ Oh, and Kim Insung, “DPRK Diplomatic Relations,” issue brief, National Committee on North Korea (NCNK), August 2016. A version of this is also on a webpage currently on their website, but also archived here. NCNK is a NGO, which is part of Mercy Corps (a 501 (c) charity) of those with “significant expertise in and diverse perspectives on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” which aims at “fostering mutual understanding and trust between the governments and peoples of the U.S. and DPRK, facilitating engagement and cooperation, reducing tension, and promoting peace on the Korean Peninsula through education, information-sharing, and relationship-building.” While it is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ploughshares Fund, Henry Luce Foundation, and Pacific Century Institute, Inc, it claims that “donations from individuals are also an integral part of NCNK’s financial base.”As such, it is a bourgeois group (this is evident from looking at its members) but something can be taken from it of course. Its a bit like 38 North. For the horrid Time magazine article, see “How North Korea Built a Nuclear Arsenal on the Ashes of the Soviet Union” in February of this year, which even admits at one point that “whether any of Ukraine’s impoverished scientists have gone to work in North Korea is difficult to prove.” So what was the whole article about then? It was just a work of unmitigated propaganda.
[2] Salem Solomon, “Africa’s Ties to North Korea Extend Beyond Isolated Military Deals,” VOA, Sept 17, 2017; Kevin J. Kelley, “Uganda: UN Probes Tanzania and Uganda Deals With North Korea,” TheEastAfrican, Sept 13, 2017.
[3] Zeeshan Aleem, “Here’s why North Korea’s economy is able to survive sanction after sanction,” Vox, Dec 7, 2017.
[4] Samuel Ramani, “North Korea’s African Allies,” The Diplomat, Jun 4, 2016. Take for example Bolivia, officially called the Plurinational State of Bolivia and headed by Evo Morales, which has harshly criticized the murderous apartheid and Zionist state. While some sources seem to indicate there is an accredited DPRK embassy in Caracas, nothing can be found about the relations between Bolivia and Juche Korea, just information on the former’s elections (see here, here, and here), the Communist Party of Bolivia, the Constitution of Bolivia, Morales’s criticism of the orange menace, a page on the website of the U$ State Department, and a page on labor stats by the ILO.
[5] Sebastian Strangio, “North Korea’s New Friend?,” The Diplomat, Aug 14, 2011; Go Cambodia, “North Korea seeks Cambodia’s help,” 2017; Jack Board, “The curious case of North Korea in Cambodia,” Channel NewsAsia, Apr 23, 2017; Luke Hunt, “North Korea-Cambodia Relations: The Sound of Silence,” The Diplomat, Mar 2017; Prak Thun Thul, “Jailing of Khmer Rouge leaders ‘sends message to North Korea’: U.N. envoy,” Reuters, Nov 23, 2016; Elizabeth Shim, “North Korea intervenes in Cambodia, U.N. human rights dispute,” UPI, Nov 10, 2016.
[6] Daniel Wertz, JJ Oh, and Kim Insung, “DPRK Diplomatic Relations,” issue brief, National Committee on North Korea (NCNK), August 2016. A version of this is also on a webpage currently on their website, but also archived here. NCNK is a NGO, which is part of Mercy Corps (a 501 (c) charity) of those with “significant expertise in and diverse perspectives on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” which aims at “fostering mutual understanding and trust between the governments and peoples of the U.S. and DPRK, facilitating engagement and cooperation, reducing tension, and promoting peace on the Korean Peninsula through education, information-sharing, and relationship-building.” While it is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ploughshares Fund, Henry Luce Foundation, and Pacific Century Institute, Inc, it claims that “donations from individuals are also an integral part of NCNK’s financial base.”As such, it is a bourgeois group (this is evident from looking at its members) but something can be taken from it of course. Its a bit like 38 North.
[7] At the present, controversy led Botswana to move from an ally of Juche Korea to cut ties with it completely!
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in February 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Some changes have been made.
Note: This article was written in late October 2017, so it is a bit dated. This article is the second of a four-part series, which never got published on Dissident Voice. I wrote this before I had defined the Zionist state fully as a murderous Zionist apartheid state, but what I say here is still valid in that regard.
Continuing from the previous article of this series, which focused on Stalin’s words about self-determination and supporting national struggles, especially in regards to the “Kurdistan” referendum, comes the words of another revolutionary: Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin’s words on self-determination
Lenin, like Stalin, also strongly supported the right of self-determination, in the waning days of the Russian revolutionary fervor which would eventually blossom into the Great October Socialist Revolution, called the “Russian Revolution” in the West, creating the world’s first socialist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) by 1922 after many years of a Soviet/Bolshevik government. In 1913 he said that that the expediency of self-determination is something different from the right itself, saying that this right is important in the “fight against the abscess of nationalism in all its forms.” This is different from the broadly “accepted” definition of self-determination in current political discourse, especially in bourgeois politics in the West. [1] Basically, Lenin was saying that nations had the right to secede and form an “independent national state.” While Stalin, seemed to imply that when a state is “tied up with certain imperialist groups, and…cannot escape the great play of forces that is going on outside,” using Yugoslavia as an example, that it should not be supported, saying that the right to self-determination is not an obligation or duty but rather something that a nation may take advantage of or not, Lenin took a clearer stand.
In 1914, Lenin wrote that “the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements” and that there is a tendency of every national movement towards “the formation of national states.” He further made the conclusion that “self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state,” noted that all sorts of states are “entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of the “rich” bourgeois countries” with such countries beginning to “oppress other nations and to enslave colonies.” In the following chapter of this book, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, he noted that the “categorical requirement of Marxist theory in investigating any social question is that it be examined within definite historical limits” and having an account taken distinguishing the country from others “in the same historical epoch,” taking into account “historical and concrete state conditions.” In the case of “Kurdistan” in northern Iraq, no state currently exists, and is not technically a nation as the whole nation of Kurds would, if we are to accept the claims of bourgeois scholars, cover the borders of varying countries in the region. Historical context and distinguishing it from other nations is important going forward.
Before getting to that point it worth recalling that the bourgeoisie often assumes “leadership at the start of every national movement,” even while the proletariat has different goals, with absurdity coming into the picture with a “demand for a “yes” or “no” reply to the question of secession” as it leads to “subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie’s policy.” In terms of the current referendum, this subordination has undoubtedly happened, as only two choices were afforded them: Hiyat (no) and Evet (Yes). No other choices were floated. This seems to imply, using Lenin’s wording, that the referendum itself was tailored in such a way to benefit the up-and-coming Kurdish bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. No other choices were offered if one views the ballot, in Assyrian, Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish. Translating the Turkish wording, the question for the referendum is almost a leading question, imposing, almost hard to say “no” to:
Do you want the establishment of an independent Kurdish state, including the Kurdistan Regional Administration and the contested areas?
This makes it no surprise that by a sweeping margin, the Kurds of northern Iraq voted for independence. Due to that, President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) declared that the non-binding referendum was “a normal, legal right of our people,” and is about the “about the destiny of a whole people,” which was originally voted on in 2005 in a non-binding measure, one year after the US and UK-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority ended its governance of Iraq. [2] Barzani also bellowed that anyone who opposes the referendum is against the “the peaceful, democratic right of people to express their own decisions about their destiny” and ultimately “against democracy,” a powerful charge.
Lenin goes on to say, that in some cases, the masses “resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse” meaning that, as a result, “the interests of capitalist development and of the freedom of the class struggle will be best served by secession.” He adds that self-determination of a nation is connected to the “self-determination of the proletariat within a given nation,” fighting for equal rights of nations, and a “close, unbreakable alliance in the class struggle of the proletarians of all nations in a given state…irrespective of any reshaping of the frontiers of the individual states by the bourgeoisie.” He even says that to “brush aside the mass national movements once they have started, and to refuse to support what is progressive in them means, in effect, pandering to nationalistic prejudices,” and that there will predictably be “hopeless confusion on the national question” disseminated by “a group of nationalist philistines” who want to split the proletariat. It is an open question if the whole conception of Kurdish independence is meant to create confusion and split the proletariat in the region. This is not beyond question. There will continue to be “bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness” without a doubt.
As thoughtful individuals and committed comrades, we should also demand freedom of self-determination for oppressed nations, but also want the “fusion of nations…on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis.” At the same time, Lenin argued that while the “real eradication of national oppression leads to the fusion of nations,” the freedom to secede is “the best and the only political means against the idiotic system of petty states and national isolation.” In the case of “Kurdistan,” it could be argued that the current federalist system, could be considered a fusion of nations. The constitution itself would hint at this…
“[Article 1:] The Republic of Iraq if a single federal, independent and fully sovereign state in which the system of government is republican, representative, parliamentary, and democratic…[Article 3:] Iraq is a country of multiple nationalities, religions, and sects…[Article 4:] The Arabic language and the Kurdish language are the two official languages of Iraq…[Article 5:] The law is sovereign. The people are the source of authority and legitimacy, which they shall exercise in direct, general, secret ballot and through their constitutional institutions…[Article 10:] The holy shrines and religious sites of Iraq are religious and civilizational entities…[Article 13:] This constitution is the preeminent and supreme law in Iraq and shall be binding in all parts of Iraq without exception…[Article 14:] Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, origin, color, religion, sect, belief or opinion, or economic or social status…[Article 18:] Iraqi citizenship is a right for every Iraqi and is the basis of his nationality…[Article 20:] Iraqi citizens…shall have the right to participate in public affairs…[Article 22:] Work is a right for all Iraqis…[Article 109:] The federal authorities shall preserve the unity, integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Iraq and its federal democratic system…[Article 117:] This Constitution, upon coming into force, shall recognize the region of Kurdistan…as a federal region”
However, it is not, by reading through the constitution “truly democratic” or even “truly internationalist,” only a little bit of both, so this isn’t the “fusion of nations” that Lenin was writing about one bit.
In 1916, Lenin wrote about self-determination again in two more pieces. In the first, he noted that part of “victorious socialism” was not only achieving complete democracy and bringing about “the complete equality of nations,” but supporting the “right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession,” freeing such “enslaved nations” and establishing religions with them “on the basis of a free union.” He further adds that self-determination of nations is feasible with “the domination of finance capital” not possible with simple reforms, with the “fundamental demands of political democracy” actionable under imperialism but only in an “incomplete, in a mutilated form and as a rare exception.” He later adds that “freedom to settle the [national] question of secession by means of a referendum” is not the same with a “demand for secession, for partition, for the formation of small states.” In the case of “Kurdistan,” in Northern Iraq, it falls more under a demand for partition and follows the rhetoric of Lenin on incomplete results of political democracy under imperialism, even though making federation of nations a principle is part of Lenin’s thinking. It is worth remembering that bourgeoisie in oppressed nations always convert the “slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers” and democratic demands become an “an instrument of the bourgeoisie” for the same goal. In the case of this referendum, it is possible for it to be an instrument to deceive the proletariat in this Kurdish region.
In the second piece, Lenin defined annexation. He argued that annexation, which violates a nation’s self-determination, involves the “conception of force…conception of oppression by another nation…and sometimes the concept of violation of the status quo” with the establishment of state frontiers which are “contrary to the will of the population.” After all, it is clear that “that no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.” It is worth this that the Zionists enter the picture.
The Zionists enter the picture
While Lenin and Stalin seem to put support of oppressed people on solid ground, in terms of “Kurdistan” in this instance, the role of the Zionist state, called the murderous Zionist state in the rest of this article, throws this into question. Undoubtedly, this state and nation, as could call it, has engaged in annexation and national oppression as defined previously by Stalin and Lenin. Most recently reported is that the murderous Zionist state, is planning to annex almost “19 Palestinian settlements and uproot some 125,000 to 150,000 Palestinian people.” This is fundamentally a form of violence. Even Stalin recognized this in 1913, in Marxism and the National Question, 35 years before the illegal creation of the murderous Zionist state, naming Zionism as one of the forms of “crude chauvinism” which swept forward, “threatening to engulf the mass of the workers” with such nationalism only countered with “the tried weapon of internationalism…the unity and indivisibility of the class struggle.” In a footnote, he defined Zionism as a “reactionary nationalist trend of the Jewish bourgeoisie, which had followers along the intellectuals and the more backward sections of the Jewish workers.” He further argued that Zionists aimed to “isolate the Jewish working-class masses from the general struggle of the proletariat.” Some would further argue that the murderous Zionist state is settler-colonialist like the United States and Canada. Regardless, there is no doubt that the murderous Zionist state is “the only country in the world with Judaism as its official state religion” as it abuses its “hold” on Judaism to demand that all Jews be Zionist although they are under no obligation to hold that position. [3]
The Zionists are strong supporters of an independent “Kurdistan.” With war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu supporting the effort openly, Zionist sympathizer, David Patrikarakos, followed suit, saying gleefully that many in “Kurdistan” see the murderous Zionist state as a model for their “new state,” and that this new state could “check Iran’s growing influence across the Middle East.” He ends his article by declaring that
an independent or even more autonomous Kurdistan – secular, oil-rich, battle-hardened and pro-Israel – is the perfect ally for Jerusalem in a Middle East…For Israel as a Jewish nation, support for Kurdish independence is a moral imperative; for it as a Middle Eastern state it is a strategic necessity…Israel must hold fast…it must not let the Kurds down.
Others in the region recognized this reality. MP Mowaffak al-Rubaie of the Shiite National Alliance, In Iraq, argued that the referendum was a step “taken by some racists in Kurdistan will bring instability to the entire region for years to come.” He further added that the Iraqi government “should take decisive, forceful, strong, and practical steps against those who made adventures with the destiny of the people of Kurdistan.” In Iran, Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of the Expediency Council, added that Kurdish independence is in the “interest of Israel and those who want to expand insecurity in the region,” further adding that countries in the Mideast need to “preserve the territorial integrity of countries and prevent the change of geographical boundaries.”
The ties between the murderous Zionist state and these Kurds is nothing new. While Zionist Daniel Pipes’ think tank, Middle East Forum, declares that the father of Masoud Barzani, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, allied himself “more closely with the United States, Iran, and Israel” by the 1970s, after reportedly getting support from the Soviets, the connection with the murderous Zionist state goes back even farther than that. They date all the way back to 1950-1951, with ties first “facilitated by Iraqi Kurdish Jews, who left Iraq for Israel” but was strengthened when Mossad officers went to northern Iraq so they could aide Barzani. By the 1960s, secret ties grew with Mustafa Barzani leading a war against the Iraqi government as part of a “series of uprisings headed by the Barzani family since the establishment of the modern Iraqi state.” It was during this time that the murderous Zionist state provided “intermittent security assistance and military training to the Kurds” as an “anti-Saddam play” in order to keep Saddam Hussein “distracted as Israel fought two wars against coordinated Arab neighbors.” Recently, Yair Golan, a major general in the IDF who compared the murderous Zionist state to 1930s Nazi Germany, approved of the idea of an “independent Kurdistan” declaring recently to the Zionist and jingoist Washington Institute of Near East Policy that “…looking at Iran in the east, looking at the instability (in) the region, a solid, stable, cohesive Kurdish entity in the midst of this quagmire — it’s not a bad idea,” and recalled, of course, the murderous Zionist State’s “good cooperation with the Kurd people since the early 1960s.” [4] While some say that by the 1970s, the relationship between the Kurds and Zionists “was scaled back” but reports of “Israeli security, medical, and economic aid continue[d] to circulate,” other Zionist applications question this assertion. In a 2013 article in the Zionist rag, Tablet Magazine, it quoted Eliezer Tsafrir, “a former Mossad operative…[who] head[ed] of covert Israeli operations in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1975,” the same year that Saddam fought a “Kurdish rebellion led by Mustafa Barzani.” Tsafrir was quoted approvingly in an article which supported the idea of a Kurdish “dream of independence” because the county could “emerge as an unexpected new ally for Israel in Iran’s backyard.” He declared that
Under the Barzanis, Jews in Kurdistan did not suffer. On the contrary, they were their friends. Ties with Israel ran deep and began when Mustafa Barzani sent emissaries to Israel through Europe and told us Kurds, like Jews, were ignored by everybody and needed help [including running training camps for Kurdish soldiers]…We decided against it [sending in Centurion tanks] because we thought the Kurds were better off fighting an asymmetrical war…We were in a big hurry to burn papers [before the Iraqis reached the headquarters of the “rebel” Kurds]. I had to get out of there before the Iraqi army turned me into a kebab…I want to be Israel’s first consul general in Erbil
While his supportive, disgusting Zionist viewpoint is laughable and distorts the reality undoubtedly, what he says makes it clear that the murderous Zionist state sees the Kurds as a reliable ally to achieve their geopolitical aims. Some of the Kurds have clearly reciprocated this. In September 2016, “Kurdish activists” held a memorial service for Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of the murderous Zionist state, who met with Mullah Mustafa Barzani in the Shah’s Iran. The organizer of the event declared that “we want to give a message to Israeli media and foundations, that I am 100% sure we will have independence and relations with Israel. [Peres] previously supported Kurds and was continually defending and supporting our rights. In the 1960s, we had relations with Israel.” As the Zionists also recall, in their own publications, the Kurds reportedly “helped Jewish families…escape to Israel from Kurdistan through the mountains” and Mossad gave assistance to the Kurdish Peshmerga “against Baghdad” with the murderous Zionist state keeping “military advisers at the headquarters of Mulla Mustafa Barzani,” training and supplying “Kurdish units with firearms and field and anti-aircraft artillery in until the 80’s.” [5] Simply put, in the 1960s and 1970s, Israel cooperated with the Shah’s Iran to “fight against its Arab enemies – Iraq, Syria and Egypt,” sending Lt. Colonel Tzuri Sagi to “build up a Kurdish army to fight Iraqi troops in northern Iraq,” which became the Peshmerga, with this general responsible for the “Israeli assassination attempts against Saddam Hussein.” The New York Times even admitted this in their front-page article on the topic last month:
In the modern era, Kurdish Jews departed en masse for Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948, leaving Kurdish civil society so bereft that some recall its leaders still lamenting the Jewish exodus decades later. Ties between the two have only grown warmer and more vital since the 1960s, as Israel and the Kurds…have repeatedly come to each other’s aid. The Kurds have long patterned their lobbying efforts in Washington on those of Israel’s supporters…83-year-old Tzuri Sagi, a retired brigadier general, has more reason than most Israelis to root for Kurdish independence…In the winter of 1966, Mr. Sagi’s commanders sent him on a secret mission, via Israel’s then-ally, Iran, to aid Mullah Mustafa Barzani and his peshmerga rebels in Iraqi Kurdistan [and they won] [6]
If that wasn’t enough, cooperation matured with meetings “between Israeli and Kurdish officials” including Mustafa Barzani’s visits to the murderous Zionist state in 1968 and in 1973, with Israel appealing repeatedly to the United States for “additional support for the Kurds” while Henry Kissinger was U$ Secretary of State (1973-1977). Since that time, as the Jerusalem Post casually admits, “reports surface about Israeli special ops training Kurdish forces and Mossad agents using the northern mountainous area to launch operations in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.” All signs point to continuing cooperation between the Kurds and Zionists. As Sarah Abed notes, the Kurds are not only “allied with Syria’s fiercest enemy,” but almost all of the major Kurdish political groups in the region have “longstanding ties to Israel” and have engaged in “major ethnic violence against Arabs, Turkmens and Assyrians” by varied accounts. Not only has the murderous Zionist state given the KRG weapons and training prior to its encounters with Daesh but it has floated the idea of using “Kurds and ethnic minorities to topple the Iranian government.” More directly, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s open support for an independent “Kurdistan” is at “odds with nearly every other major player in the Middle East,” he sees this as a strategic decision: a “breakaway Kurdistan could prove valuable to Israel against Iran, which has oppressed its own Kurdish population” as the New York Times notes. Additionally, flags of the murderous Zionist state can be “routinely be seen at Kurdish rallies in Erbil and across Europe” and some 200,000 Kurdish Jews are clearly allies of such a state as well. [7]
One commentator, Urooba Jamal, wrote in Telesur English about this very issue. While original support of “Kurdistan” was the idea of a “second Israel” in the Mideast which was meant to “undermine the idea of a united pan-Arab socialist state” by solidifying ties “with non-Arab Muslim actors,” it could also apparently give the murderous Zionist state “cover” for its oppression of Palestinians. Additionally, it would also allow the latter state to increase its ties with this new state in “the areas of agriculture, technology, education and sports.” Jonathan Cook gave even more context. He noted that while “many ordinary Palestinians were delighted” by the Kurdish referendum since they, like the Kurds, in his estimation, “Palestinians have found themselves trapped in different territories, oppressed by their overlords,” the Zionists felt differently. They feel that an independent “Kurdistan” would be a “bulwark against Iran transferring its weapons, intelligence and know-how to Shia allies in Syria and Lebanon.” Also, they would gain because “the Kurds sit on plentiful oil…[and] are keen to sell to Israel,” and such an independent state makes the Oden Yinon’s plan proposed years ago come to fruition with the ‘implosion of the Middle East, breaking apart the region’s key states…by fueling sectarian and ethnic discord.” Once again, it worth noting that “Tehran is…the target of efforts by Israel and its allies” and the unraveling of the map of the region originally drawn by the British and French would likely “lead to chaos of the kind that a strong, nuclear-armed Israel, with backing from Washington, could richly exploit,” furthering pushing the “Palestinian cause” from the list of priorities of the international community.
There is further context worth mentioning. For one, in 2006, Massoud Barzani, declared that “it is not a crime to establish ties with Israel. If Baghdad sets up diplomatic ties with Israel, we will have them open a consulate in Erbil” while the PYD was then, at “against relations with the Zionist state” but is not the same way anymore. This raises the question of what will happen after the referendum since logistics of a landlocked independent state are problematic to say the least. This is important to recognize since Iran fears the Zionist state’s close relations with “Kurdistan,” seeing it clearly as a proxy state, aligning with the declarations by the Washington Institute of Near East Policy that “a Kurdish state in northern Iraq would be a win for Turkey, the United States, and Israel, all regional and international rivals of Tehran” with the Iranian government’s “hardliners” seeing a future “alliance between an independent Kurdistan and Israel against the Islamic Republic.” This would also seem to indicate that the US is in support of an “independent” Kurdistan but perhaps covertly rather than openly. With an independent “Kurdistan,” violence by the Zionists will expand. As Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah argued that these Zionists do not have “correct picture” of the war, declaring that such Zionists “will have no secure place in occupied Palestine.” [8] Still, it worth recalling that if “the West continues to prioritize Iraqi and Turkish interests over those of the Kurds,” then Kurdistan will not stay an ally of the West, leaning toward Iran perhaps, even as “a Western-oriented Kurdistan could present a difficult challenge to Iranian ambitions in the region.” In the end, perhaps Erdogan is right in one regard: “this administration (in northern Iraq) has a history with Mossad, they are hand-in-hand together…Only Israel supports you…An independent state is not being founded in northern Iraq…[instead] a continuously bleeding wound is being opened.”
Notes
[1] Self-determination is a word that is thrown around a lot these days. Online dictionaries define this as the “determination by the people of a territorial unit of their own future political status” (Merriam-Webster), “freedom of the people of a given area to determine their own political status” (American Heritage Dictionary), “the right of a nation or people to determine its own form of government without influence from outside” (Collins English Dictionary), and “the determining by the people of the form their government shall have, without reference to the wishes of any other nation, especially by people of a territory or former colony” (Dictionary.com), to name a few. The UN’s Millennium Declaration in 2000 declares that UN member states should support “the right to self-determination of peoples which remain under colonial domination and foreign occupation.” Some even say that the concept itself is “confusing,” question if state sovereignty should override a desire for self-determination, with a case involving the USSR on this issue as noted in an article published 11 years ago or in other conflicts. One could also take into account the dissenting views on the case in which the International Court of Justice at the Hague voted in favor of Kosovo. The dissenters varied. Some said that the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo was “unlawful and invalid” and provides an open door for all groups, apart from decolonization efforts, to break apart from states, that the court does not have jurisdiction with a lack of response on the issue from the UN General Assembly. Clearly, there are different “shades of meaning,” as one bourgeois scholar puts it, to the term “self-determination” even as it is widely recognized as a “fundamental principle of international law.” As was declared by the UN General Assembly in December 1960, “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” This idea has involved from the time of Wilsonian imperialism to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which says that “all peoples have the right of self-determination…All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation…The States Parties to the present Covenant…shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right.”
[2] Campbell MacDiarmid, “Masoud Barzani: Why It’s Time for Kurdish Independence,” Foreign Policy, Jun 15, 2017.
[3] The same Pew Research survey notes that funding is skewed toward official religion of Islam in Iraq, that the official state religion of Iraq and Iran is Islam, with Islam only a preferred religion in Turkey. This survey also adds that “In the Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, all laws and regulations must be based on “Islamic criteria” and the official interpretation of sharia” and that only “three countries – Sudan, Syria and Turkey – favor Islam but do not declare it as the state religion.”
[4] Jonah Mendel, “Israel sees benefits in independent Kurdistan: experts,” AFP, Sept 19, 2017.
[5] United With Israel, “Understanding Kurdistan – The Friends of Israel,” Nov. 27, 2014.
[6] David M. Halbfinger, “Israel Endorsed Kurdish Independence. Saladin Would Have Been Proud,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2017.
[7] Some reported that the purported movement of “200,000 Israelis of Kurdish origin” to Kurdistan from Israel after independence, with previous motives being the attack of Egypt and Syria, would support the new state. There were some immigration in the past, thanks to the “goodwill” of US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, as well.
[8] Reuters Staff, “Hezbollah says Israel pushing region to war,” Oct 1, 2017. It is also worth recounting a 2003 article in the Jewish Telegraph Agency saying that “the war in Iraq has ended, and the Kurds in the country’s north emerge as one of the war’s great victors, liberating themselves from Saddam Hussein’s oppressive rule and declaring an independent state” with the top leaders of the Kurds “actually Jewish” with possible indications that “the nascent Kurdish country will forge a close alliance with Israel, giving the Jewish state another toehold in the Middle East and access to the oil riches of the Iraqi north.” One Kurdish website also adds that Israel is trying to take advantage of the Kurds by “colonizing Kurdistan,” with the Barzani family taking an “authoritarian” turn, abusing and stealing people’s wealth.
Editor’s Note: This post has been re-posted on a pro-Palestinian website, likely because it is so good and insightful of the reality of the Zionist state. For that, I am glad, without question.
More of the world is finally recognizing the murderous Zionist state, often called the “state of of Israel,” for what it truly is: an apartheid state. As South African diplomat Clinton Swemmer put it, “Israel is the only state in the world that can be called an apartheid state. We remain deeply concerned at the denial of the right of self-determination to the Palestinian people, in the absence of which no other human right can be exercised or enjoyed.” [1] At the same Universal Periodic Review by the UN Human Rights Council, many criticized the Zionist state for “human rights abuses” and called on the government to not only “cease settlement construction” but to allow “for a creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.” Of course, the Zionist representative declared that the critics were not using “appropriate language of the UN” and were “politicized.” Others, like Prof. Richard Falk and Desmond Tutu have also called the Zionist an “apartheid state,” with the Zionists claiming in response that Arab countries engage in “apartheid,” in conjunction with Zahava Gal-On, leader of a left-wing party, within the Zionist state, named Meretz, saying that “the occupation must be a temporary solution. We turned it to a permanent solution. There is one name for this: apartheid.” [2] This article will prove these charges correct, while noting that the murderous Zionist state is a unique form of apartheid. This means that this Zionist state does not have to be compared with apartheid in South Africa, which even some pro-Palestinian individuals do, as this comparison gives the upper hand to the Zionists. [3]
Under the Rome Statue, the “crime of apartheid” is easily defined, in Article 7 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.” Such inhumane acts, constituting crimes against humanity, since they are “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” may consist of the following:
murder
extermination
enslavement
deportation
imprisonment
torture
rape
sexual slavery
enforced prostitution
forced pregnancy
enforced sterilization
enforced disappearance of persons
Along with any sort of “persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity” on “political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender” grounds, or any similar inhumane acts which cause “great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.” The International Convention on the Crime of Apartheid, (also see here and here) also called the apartheid convention, which the murderous Zionist state has not signed, defines the term as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” specifically saying that these acts include:
“Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person”
the “murder of members of a racial group or groups”
“the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity”
subjecting members of a racial group “to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”
“arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups”
“Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part”
“Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association”
“any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof”
“Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour”
“Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid”
In this case, both the Rome Statue and Apartheid Convention will be used to define the murderous Zionist state as an apartheid state without question. While Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston, acclaimed scholars Angela Davis and Barbara Ransby say that the Zionist state is one that has apartheid, reactionary leftist Noam Chomsky claims that whatis happening now is “much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel,” showing how much he serves the imperialist centers of power by refusing the utter the words “apartheid” and “Israel” together. It shows that Chomsky doesn’t understand that the word apartheid is a word with a “very specific legal meaning” rather than a “slur” as the Zionists would like to call it.
Table of contents of sections within this sub-section:
Palestinian women hold a banner likening the situation in the Gaza Strip to a pressure cooker during a protest in Gaza City demanding that Egypt open Rafah crossing, 1 January, via Electronic Intifada
As mentioned before, inhumane acts include, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and enforced disappearance of persons. For a state to commit inhumane acts, it does not have to do all of these things, but only some of them, as not every state is a horror house. These are specific aspects that a state commit, making it an apartheid state: the denial of the “right to life and liberty of person,” murder or serious “bodily or mental harm” on a racial group(s), “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” which includes torture, and “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment.”
ECOWA (Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia) notes, in their full report which the Zionists and U$ imperialists didn’t want the world to read, that social racism plays a “vital role in apartheid regimes, by providing popular support for designing and preserving the system,” adding that a “finding of racial discrimination is based less on how groups are labelled than how they are treated.” They further add that the claim of Palestine as the “exclusive homeland of the Jewish people rests on an expressly racial conception of both groups,” the “Israelis,” and Palestinians. Furthermore, they add that in the war after independence, this racism became state policy:
…the Zionist movement took over territory far beyond what had been assigned to the Jewish State under resolution 181(II) and, by so doing, rendered moot its labyrinthine provisions, including acquiescence by the internationally recognized representatives of the Palestinian people
It was reported in 2009 by bourgeois media, relying on a report by a nonprofit Palestinian group named SAWA, that “trafficking and forced prostitution in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza operate on a small-scale basis,” rather than an activity which is sophisticated and organized. [4] However, it was noted that forced prostitution and trafficking is “frequent and widespread” with women and girls involved in it having “few means of escape” with poverty and unemployment playing a huge role in “pushing girls and women into prostitution” which makes them “vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers.” Furthermore, it was noted that those who engage in prostitution, and ultimately drawn into human trafficking, were “violently abused by their families,” specifically their fathers, even forced into marriages, with traffickers threatening “girls with violence if they refuse sex with clients.” Even if women somehow escape these horrific circumstances, there are “few social networks or shelter houses” they can turn to, and may be “ostracized by their communities and families” with the law treating them as criminals. Specifically there is a lack of willingness by “law enforcement to investigate these cases and prosecute the traffickers.” This basically means that the Zionists and the PA are turning a blind eye to prostitution and human trafficking, showing that they are allowing these inhumane acts to happen to the Palestinian people, specifically Palestinian women, which is disgusting.
The conditions of prisoners are also horrific. Repressive tactics used in U$ prisons mirror those used by the Zionists, with 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in the latter state going on hunger strike for 40-days ending in May 2017 with the threat of force-feeding (with actual force-feeding seemingly abandoned because of public outcry) and other repressive measures, with many of the hunger strikers hospitalized after the hunger strike ended. [5]
UNICEF revealed in a report in September 2017 that there was “rampant child abuse…including rape, forced marriages, and beatings” in occupied Palestine, and Palestinian communities in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan (likely because of unsavory elements), noting that “in the State of Palestine, 70 per cent of students are exposed to violence at school.” [6] Of course, a so-called “human rights NGO,” Human Rights Voices (HRV) was angry about the report, saying it “place[s] the blame for Palestinian behavior on everyone but Palestinians, results in other shocking conclusions,” angry that the report blamed the Zionist occupation as the “root cause of the violence Palestinian Arab children experience” even though this is the reality. Not surprisingly, it turns out that HRV,claiing it is even-handed on its website, has stories blaring about “Palestinian terrorists,” Gazans “carrying knives,” along with extensively quoting the Zionist ambassador, and basically claiing the UN is “bias” against the Zionists, even advocating for the orange menace to follow through on his threats to UN funding!
These is more than these horrific acts. The Zionist occupiers, as noted by the spokesperson of Gaza’s ministry of health Dr. Ashraf Elqedrah, declared war on the Gaza strip in 2006 after Hamas won elections there,implementing a blockade, with the health sector devastated, with “medicines, medical consumables, laboratory materials and blood banks have all been hit by the siege. Dr. Elqedrah added that there are deficits in medical supplies, with spare parts unavailable if medical equipment breaks down, with daily power cuts meaning that hospitals “rely on back-up generators…intended for emergency use,” with these generators breaking down, and needing fuel to operate which is short supply. Furthermore, Palestinians in Gaza used to be able to travel abroad for surgery, but the Rafah Border Crossing, “the only window to the outside world…has been closed by Egypt for months on end.” If that isn’t enough, military offensives against the people of Gaza have “targeted hospitals and medical facilities” with some facilities still not repaired from the last bombing, with “development of existing facilities…affected by the severe shortage of materials caused by the Israeli-led siege.” This is coupled by “punitive measures taken by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Ramallah” with thousands of health workers are affected, hurting the local economy. In the closing of his article, Dr. Elqedrah states the obvious, showing the murderous nature of the blockade:
The Israeli blockade is sold to the world as a matter of “self-defence” in order to “defeat terrorism”, but the reality is that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in an act of collective punishment that amounts to a serious crime under international law. Unless and until the world wakes up to this fact and moves to end the blockade, the health sector in the Gaza Strip will break down completely. Is the international community ready to accept such an eventuality?
If that isn’t enough, as a recent book argued, the Zionists have engaged in covert state-sponsored killings. These killings, numbring nearly 2,700, taking place from after World War II to the present, are mostly “against Palestinians, but also Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others.” They likely even used “radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who was the founder of the Fatah movement that was part of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” Furthermore, Zionist tactics were “later adopted by the US, especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and recently by the former President Barack Obama, who launched several hundred targeted killings”! Hence, an assassination machine was formed by the Zionists, taking the form of “car bombs, mail bombs, airstrikes and explosive devices attached to cars by operatives on motorcycles,” along with other methods. Clearly, the Zionists would do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain control.
Every day, Zionists call for killing and other violence against more Palestinians, whether it be rape, injury, and imprisonment. This has manifested itself in airstrikes by Zionist warplanes targeting sites in the Gaza strip in response to “rockets coming from the Gaza Strip,” and blowing up “tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip.” Just recently, a Palestinian 19-year-old was shot in the head by the IDF as Palestinians resist apartheid while those like horrid Thomas Friedman openly advocate the killing of Palestinians.
In October 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” Michael Lynk, wrote that there had been “continued use of administrative detention, punitive demolitions, movement restrictions and other measures continue to negatively affect the human rights of the Palestinian people on a continuous basis.” They added that “attacks and alleged attacks by Palestinians against Israelis are…responded to with disproportionate and deadly force” with a sense of “desolation and desperation among children” with “psychological and physical ailments” including, but not limited to, “bed-wetting, anxiety and depression” as a lack of accountability leads to a “cycle of continued violence” with the message being sent that “Palestinian lives do not matter, while the Palestinian population becomes both more fearful and more desperate.” By October 2016, there were more than “6,000 detainees currently held on alleged security grounds, as well as approximately 700 administrative detainees.” Lynk also wrote that detainees are “often deprived of basic legal safeguards,” held on secret evidence, subjected to abuse, and subjected to “Israeli military law…while Israeli settlers in the same geographic area are subject to the Israeli civil and criminal legal system.” These are, as they concluded, some of the measures employed “on a case-by-case basis, that often amount to collective punishment” meaning that the entire group is punished “for the actions of a particular individual.”
Deliberate living conditions “calculated to cause its or their physical destruction” of the Palestinian nation
One of the 11 infographics on a pro-Palestinian website, explaining part of “Israel-Palestinian apartheid”
A report by Jad Isaac of Applied Research Institute, based in Palestine, noted that the Zionist occupiers imposed new environmental rules and restrictions, “yet another chapter in the long legacy of environmentally disruptive policies and actions.” The Zionist restrictions plated a major role in causing environmental changes in occupied Palestine, such as “land degradation, depletion of water resources and the degradation of water quality” which impacted the social fabric, helping to induce threats to public health, inadequate “distribution of social institutions,” and “economic hardship.” Specific restrictions include severe limits to water sources and wells, strict instructions for drilling, and more limited grazing areas available to shepherds coupled with military orders issued to facilitate “confiscation and closure of land” and efforts to deprive “Palestinian farmers from using their full share of water and other natural resources.” Additionally, many Palestinian farmers have been “forced to leave their land and join the labor market in Israel,” with many Palestinian workers relying on work in Israel proper as “their only source of income,” while sizable areas of land “have been neglected and returned to semi-desert.” In short, there has been “environmental destruction and human displacement” caused by “27 years of land confiscation, and settlement and road building,” with the Zionist occupiers depriving “Palestinians of their natural agricultural potential” and now control “70% of the West Bank…[and] 22% of Gaza” as they exploit Palestinian water resources meaning that only 5.5% of West Bank land cultivated by Palestinians is irrigated, while “about 70% of the area cultivated by Jewish settlers is irrigated,” with Jewish settlers paying lower prices for water than Palestinians!
Issam Abu-Ghallous of the University of Mississippi added to this in an academic article on child labor in occupied Palestine. They noted that impositions by Zionists in response to the Intifada in Palestine severely restricted “movement of people and goods,” with the movement of Palestinian laborers into the Zionist state blocked, creating “temporary high unemployment,” with deterioration of job availability in years to come and as a result, “the probability of younger Palestinian children joining the labor market increases.” Furthermore, by 2009, 70% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were described as poor by UNICEF, with families across Occupied Palestine pulling their “kids out of school” so these kids can work due to “severe economic needs” and child labor has become “necessary for the employment of parents”! The study concluded by saying that
…economic shocks in Palestine as a result of Israeli policies have significant…effects on child labor supply. The restriction of labor force movement and the closure of the Israeli labor market reduced child labor. On the other hand, the reduction of income, which leads to increase in poverty, following Israel’s holding of the Palestinian aid funds, caused an increase of Palestinian child labor supply…it does not seem that the economic crisis in Palestine after the second Intifada contributed to the creation of child labor phenomenon. Due to reliance on the Israeli labor market and the effect of Israeli regulations on the Palestinian economic performance, Palestinians have always relied on child labor. What can be inferred from this study is that the recent economic crisis augmented the child labor supply
So, basically, the apartheid system is causing child labor to increase and be maintained in occupied Palestine! In 2004, UNICEF released a report, saying that after the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000,
Unprecedented restrictions have been imposed on the movement of Palestinians between different areas, and the land has been truncated into 300 isolated ghettos, enforced by 120 Israeli military checkpoints, in addition to the destruction of many main roads and side roads inside the cities, and the closure of many others with barricades. The Israeli occupation forces displaced over 75,000 Palestinians by enforcing the complete demolition of 720 houses, and the partial demolition of 11,560 houses. Education was similarly affected as Israel closed down 850 schools completely…[with Zionist aggression in response to the Intifada] facilities belonging to the security services and to some of the other Palestinian civil institutions were destroyed. The Palestinian airport (the building of which cost US$ 19 million) was destroyed, and the groundwork for a Palestinian seaport under construction in Gaza was also destroyed…Palestinian society is living in a situation of general instability.
Take for example what happened in mid-2006. International aid was frozen and Gaza suffered from “an interruption in electricity and water supplies after its power plant was bombarded by Israel,” showing that the Zionist occupiers don’t care if Palestinians die at all, wanting to be the oppressors and dominating force. [7] At the present, in Gaza, as Palestinians are suffering “health issues,” as a direct result of food restrictions by the Zionist occupiers, with the latter embarking on “destruction, displacement and deprivation” as they continue their colonial conquest. It is clear that the Zionists wish to reflect “similar repercussions on the remaining fragments of Palestinian territory and there is no swifter way to achieve this than by inviting the international community to participate,” forcing a form of dependency on those living in Gaza.
There is a related measure aiming to weaken and erase the Palestinian nation: “using tourism and infrastructure projects in order to legitimize its illegal Jewish-only settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank”! This adds to the more than 130 demolitions that “took place in East Jerusalem,” last year, while “hundreds of Palestinians were displaced,” with a “strict permit system to marginalize Palestinian residents in Jerusalem” to eliminate Palestinian culture from the city! This is not a surprise considering the violent birth of the Zionist state, showing it to be genocidal:
The Zionist militias that orchestrated the genocide of the Palestinians prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 merged together to form the Israeli army; and the leaders of these groups became Israel’s leaders. Israel’s violent birth in 1947- 48 was the culmination of the violent discourse that preceded it for many years. It was the time when Zionist teachings of prior years were put into practice and the outcome was simply horrifying…The ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the time was orchestrated by several Zionist militias. The mainstream Jewish militia was the Haganah which belonged to the Jewish Agency. The latter functioned as a semi-government, under the auspices of the British Mandate Government, while the Haganah served as its army. However, other breakaway groups also operated according to their own agenda. Two leading bands amongst them were the Irgun (National Military Organization) and Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang). These groups carried out numerous terrorist attacks, including bus bombings and targeted assassinations. Russian-born Menachem Begin was the leader of the Irgun which, along with the Stern Gang and other Jewish militants, massacred hundreds of civilians in Deir Yassin…Some of the other terrorists-turned-politicians and top army brass include Begin, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Shamir. Each one of these leaders has a record dotted with violence…So, when government ministers like Ariel and Bennett call for wanton violence against Palestinians, they are simply carrying on with a bloody legacy that has defined every single Israeli leader in the past. It is the violent mindset that continues to control the Israeli government and its relationship with Palestinians; in fact, with all of its neighbors.
Ramzy Baroud added in CounterPunch that for the Palestinian people there are few options: “perpetual Apartheid or ethnic cleansing, or a mix of both” with the ‘Regularization Bill,’ which passed in February 2017, allowing the Zionist government to “retroactively recognize Jewish outposts built without official permission on privately-owned Palestinian land.” While the UN General Assembly says that the settlements are illegal, the response is the building of “new housing units…throughout the Occupied Palestinian territories,” and paving the “way for the annexation of large swathes of the Occupied West Bank” with the construction of “more ‘Jewish-only’ bypass roads will be constructed, more walls erected, more gates to keep Palestinians away from their land, schools and livelihood will be put up, more checkpoints, more suffering, more pain, more anger, and more violence.” The Palestinian leadership is not blameless, as it foolishly entrusted the “the US, Israel’s main enabler, with managing a ‘peace process’ that has allowed Israel time and resources to finish its colonial projects, while devastating Palestinian rights and political aspirations,” a terrifying result.
There are varying practices of the Zionists which are aimed at breaking apart feelings of Palestinian nationalism as noted by Michael Lynk: “the use of punitive home demolitions” (re-instituted in 2014), restricting the freedom of movement by making populations go through “Israeli security arrangements,” having a long-standing land/air/sea blockade on Gaza (which started in 2007), “planning practices and policies” aimed against Palestinians, the division of the Palestinian economy (making it hard to build a “sovereign economy” as occupied Palestine is a “captive trading market” for Zionists), and turning the West Bank “into an archipelago of small islands of densely-populated areas disconnected from one another.” Additionally, a lack of secure transit access, inhibiting 35% of Gaza’s farming land by decreeing that a strip of land 300 meters within Gaza is a “restricted buffer zone,” tightly restricting the “maritime zone that Gazan fishermen can utilize” have been other attempts to weaken the unifying effect of Palestinian nationalism. For Gaza, as Lynk wrote in his report, there has been “widespread social anguish” while in the West Bank it it not as hellish, but it is not “flourishing.” Additionally the Zionists have illegally annexed East Jerusalem, entrenched a “colonial-like regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” which has created “two separate and unequal systems as regards laws, roads, justice regimes, access to water, social services, freedom of mobility, political and civil rights, security and living standards.” There are also discriminatory measures toward Bedouins in the West Bank who “are often subject to relocation plans developed by the Israeli Government.” [8]
In 2010, the humanitarian imperialist Human Rights Watch even released a report saying that the Zionists differently treat “Jewish settlements” compared to “nearby Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem” with a “two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel operates for the two populations in areas in the West Bank under its exclusive control, which provide preferential services, development, and benefits for Jewish settlers while imposing harsh conditions on Palestinians.” They specifically argued that the different treatment “on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin and not narrowly tailored to meet security or other justifiable goals, violates the fundamental prohibition against discrimination under human rights law.” [9] Like their other report, civil society groups provided information and assistance, including ACRI, Al Haq, B’Tselem, Bimkom, EAPPI, OCHA, Peace Now, Yesh Din, and Who Profits.
Just recently, the Zionists seemed to be “worried” about Gaza, even saying publicly that” Gaza’s economy and infrastructure stand on the brink of collapse” which people have been saying for years, as their army has, for over 10 years, enforced a “a blockade on goods coming in and out of the tiny coastal enclave that left much of the 2-million-strong population there unemployed, impoverished and hopeless.” As a result, three separate military assaults have been launched, destroying “Gaza’s infrastructure, killed many thousands and left tens of thousands more homeless and traumatised” which has made Gaza, effectively an overcrowded “open-air prison.” But, the reason the Zionists are concerned is that “diseases will quickly spread into Israel” if epidemics break out, and that “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could be banging on Israel’s door” if the economy in Gaza collapses. However,U$ and Israeli politicians are not “taking the army’s warnings to heart” with things seemingly set to be even worse with Netanyahu declaring that that there”could be no improvements, no reconstruction in Gaza until Hamas agrees to give up its weapons” and the U$ is cutting aid. Perhaps this will lead the PLO to sever their ties with the Zionists completely, as they seem set to do.
The horrid living conditions are evident. At the height of summer 2017, the Zionists cut off water to a Palestine village, while there were purposeful efforts to disable Palestinian teenagers, annexing territories which will uproot 100,000 Palestinians, and plundering of Palestinian resources by German firms that tried to whitewash their activities! If that isn’t enough, Palestinians in the West Bank are literally drowning in the waste of Zionist settlers, which is horrifying:
…many Israeli settlements do not have proper waste treatment facilities. About 12 percent of settlement sewage remains untreated and travels down into streams near Palestinian communities…Palestinian communities are severely affected by settler-produced waste owing to many of their villages having been forced to move to lower agricultural lands after Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory…the pollution had caused the local extinction of several species that had once inhabited the area, including deer, rabbits, and foxes. Boars are now the only animals left alive there…Since the 1980s, the Bedouin village of Wadi Abu Hindi, located in a valley squeezed between Israel’s Maale Adumim and Qedar settlements near the town of al-Eizariya, east of Jerusalem, has been affected by a massive nearby dumping ground for Israeli rubbish…In addition to the landfill and fears of a forced eviction from Wadi Abu Hindi, the residents also have to contend with Israelis from the Qedar settlement releasing their pool water into the below valley where the Bedouin reside…Caused by Israeli dumpsites, settler waste, and Israeli restrictions on Palestinians preventing them from developing waste treatment facilities. More than half of all waste produced by Palestinians in the West Bank remains untreated
Such efforts go beyond what happened in 2014 in Gaza: six UNRWA schools were bombed, Gaza’s only power plant was destroyed, and plunging thousands into darkness.
Efforts to prevent Palestinians “from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life” of the Zionist state and creating conditions “preventing the full development” of the Palestinian people
Israeli soldiers patrol a street in the West Bank city of Hebron’s Old City on 14 January, courtesy of Electronic Intifada
In particular these efforts, which can be legislation or not, deny members of a racial group(s) “basic human rights and freedoms” such as the rights to work, “form recognized trade unions, education, “to leave and to return to their country,” to a nationality, to “freedom of movement and residence,” to freedom of opinion and expression, and to “freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”
The ECOWA full report on apartheid Israel says specifically that Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 who had not fled or been expelled became citizens but were administered under emergency laws, with denial of their civil rights such as the franchise to vote, until 1966! Furthermore, there is a “race-based immigration policy” with measures in place which are specifically “designed to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel from challenging the doctrine and laws that purport to establish Israel as a Jewish State.” More specifically, the summary ECOWA report argues the “right of return” for Palestinians is denied to over 6 million people.
Freedom House, an appendage of the murderous empire, of course, claims that Palestinians have an active role in the Zionist state, saying that they pushed against Israeli occupation starting from 1921 onward. [10] However, they even have to admit, in a chapter written by a seemingly well-respected Palestinian scholar, that even as Palestinian women face obstacles from “within their own culture and society,” including restrictive “personal status laws” on the domestic front, they face impositions “as the result of occupation, war, and civil unrest,” writing that
…the Israeli occupation…heavily influences the ways in which the PA conducts its affairs, how Palestinians conduct their daily lives, and the personal security of all Palestinians. The areas under PA rule are not contiguous, but are separated by numerous checkpoints, roadblocks, and other physical and administrative barriers erected by the Israeli authorities. These barriers have significantly curtailed Palestinians’ freedom of movement, and combined with a general lack of security, they have had a devastating effect on the local economy…[the apartheid wall in the West Bank has caused women to] experience further separation from their families, farmlands, water resources, schools, and hospitals. When the wall is completed, it will stand eight to nine meters tall and stretch more than 700 kilometers, adversely affecting the lives of an estimated one-third of the Palestinian population in the West Bank…Palestinian women and men from the West Bank and Gaza who marry Palestinians with Israeli citizenship face difficulty in transferring citizenship to their family members…Israeli checkpoints and barriers, including the separation wall, also restrict freedom of movement. The separation wall in particular has made women the “most isolated social group” in Palestine…Such restrictions on free movement have prevented some women from reaching hospitals and health care centers in time to give birth; as a result, several have died in transit at checkpoints… Many women—and some men—holding Jerusalem identity cards and married to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza cannot obtain Jerusalem identity cards for their spouses, meaning the spouses are not allowed to live in Jerusalem…Palestinians from Jerusalem risk losing their residency status if they are unable to present documents demonstrating continuous residence for the past seven years and proving that their “center of life” is in Jerusalem. Those who lose their status are effectively barred from returning to their native city…Women and men are generally free to assemble peacefully within the PA-administered areas, so long as they avoid Israeli checkpoints.
The rest of the report isn’t worth quoting here as it mainly focuses on internal Palestinian laws by the PA and Hamas, saying they are restrictive, with diatribes against them. Still, the above shows that the apartheid nature of the state is clear in that this report acknowledges restrictions against Palestinians, especially Palestinian women, making the apartheid system utterly sexist and, even more accurately, patriarchal.
The denial of freedom of movement is evident. Just recently, the Zionist occupiers deported a Palestinian child who was reportedly in Jerusalem without a military permit and did not notify the parents. Then there are infringements on workers rights allowed in the West Bank by 206 companies, as noted in a recent UN report, which are “doing business linked to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and it urged them to avoid any complicity in “pervasive” violations against Palestinians,” companies which “play a central role in furthering the establishment, maintenance and expansion of Israeli settlements.” 143 of these companies are “located in Israel or the Jewish-only settlements, followed by 22 in the United States” with 19 from “other countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain.” The report says that settlements lead to violations which are “pervasive and devastating, reaching every facet of Palestinian life,” with restrictions on “freedom of religion, movement and education and lack of access to land, water and jobs.” It further said that businesses operating in occupied Palestine have a responsibility to “carry out due diligence” and consider if they can even do business there in a “manner that respects human rights.” Of course, the Zionists attacked this report, saying it was “fundamentally illegitimate” and proves the UN’s “bias to try to delegitimize Israel” since they fear that the list of 206 companies could be “used by the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” At the present, about 600,000 Jewish settlers “live in over 230 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” and they tend to be “ultra-conservative Jewish people that reject the idea of a Palestinian people or state and believe that the West Bank should be part of the Israeli state,” the perfect people for furthering the colonialist goals of the Zionists.
With this, the Zionist state is undeniably not a “moral democracy,” as it has pursued a “discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders” but is rather a democracy that “only applies for the masters of the system” meaning that on almost every level, “from official legislation through governmental practices as well as social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group…that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore.” Furthermore, even with the reputation by the Zionists that they are “outwardly liberal and open, there are still recently opened racially segregated schools.” Such “institutionalised discrimination and systematic oppression over any group based on race is the definition of apartheid.” Even James “Mad Dog Mattis” warned the Israeli right-wing in 2013 [11] that
If I’m Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there’s 10,000 Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to include them, 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.
In 2014, Professor Iian Pappe argued that the Zionist state had passed the crossorads, deciding if it “wants to be a democracy or to be a racist and apartheid state, given the realities on the ground” and it made the decision that it “prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy,” which it hopes would be given license by murderous empire, proving it “with the immunity to continue with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, wherever they are.” Add to this that the education system of Arabs within the Zionist state has “been placed under the control of the general intelligence apparatus” with no school headmaster or teacher “appointed without the approval of the intelligence services.” Even the syllabus itself is supervised by “specialists” in order to “domesticate the Arab population and turn it into a loyal one.” At the same time, Zionist authorities have issued orders to demolish thousands of homes and impose “heavy fines on Arab citizens” with the net effect being the “exhaustion and impoverishment of the Arabs.” This is made worse by the fact that corporations benefit from “the low cost of Palestinian agricultural labor in settlements.” [12] Additionally, the Zionist state is currently maintaining a “system of formal and informal housing segregation both in Israel and in the occupied territories” while the “Jewish residents of the occupied territories enjoy various rights and privileges denied to their Palestinian neighbors.” The “educational systems for the two populations in Israel (not to mention the occupied territories) are kept largely separate and unequal” and it is “not legally possible in Israel for a Jewish citizen to marry a non-Jewish citizen.” [13]
That’s not all. There are dozens upon dozens of discriminatory laws ranging from stop-and-frisk, anti-NGO measures, laws against stone throwers, and anti-boycott measures. Some, as noted by the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel or Adalah are as follows:
There are pages, pages, and more pages of many other laws as well. These laws undoubtedly restrict freedom of expression, opinion, and assembly, fulfilling yet another aspect of an apartheid state.
There is no written constitution in the Zionist state, and even the basic law of human dignity and liberty asserts that there can be violations of rights of the populace through laws “befitting the values of the State of Israel, enacted for a proper purpose, and to an extent no greater than is required” with these values including keeping the “State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” which is already inherently racist, with the “freedom of occupation” provision since repealed. Adding to this, as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote, while the Palestinian labor movement had its roots stretching back to 1920, it was
effectively destroyed during the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1947–48, when the newly established state of Israel expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians and occupied 78% of what had been historic Palestine. By the mid-1950s all Arab organisations, including trade union bodies, of pre-1948 Palestine had ceased to exist…Today, the Palestinian labour force in Israel is still faced with problems similar to its situation in pre-1948 Palestine, i.e. concentration in the low-wage sector, unequal pay, lack of infrastructure and other obstacles that contradict the principle of decent work, including the lack of labour law enforcement and inspections…In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where unemployment averages more than 50%, numerous unions come together under the umbrella of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU). Under conditions of military occupation, with checkpoints, barriers and the Wall, it is not easy for unions to function properly, but the PGFTU has been at the forefront of drafting labour legislation and campaigning to safeguard the rights of both workers and the unemployed.
So, that shows that trade unions are not allowed anymore. As for nationality, Palestinians are seen as second-class citizens without a doubt, so their nationality is seen as sub-par to that of Jewish citizens. This is evident by the fact that Israel had to be declared a “national home” rather than a state because there were well-established Palestinians already in the country, with the “national home” being for Jewish people specifically and aimed to make the area a “Jewish state.” Even in 1919, a U$ legal scholar wrote in the New Republic that “Zionists are quite willing to ignore the rights of the vast majority of the non-Jewish population of Palestine” with this undoubtedly happening after the state was created with UN sanction. As one Washington post columnist Richard Cohen admitted, state of Israel “is the legal creation of the United Nations,” and did not exist prior to 1948. [14]
Ever since the Zionists “launched a surprise attack against Egypt [in 1967] and began its military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and Syrian Golan Heights,” the Zionists have “ruled over millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories by military decree, granting them no political rights while relentlessly colonizing their land” and because this is so entrenched, it has led many “observers to conclude that the creation of a sovereign and territorially contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel (i.e. the two-state solution) is no longer possible.”
Efforts designed to divide the population along racial lines
Prof. Richard Falk, as quoted above, in an interview in October 2016.
Specifically, these efforts, which include the “creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups,” prohibition of “mixed marriages among members of various racial groups,” and the “expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”
The summary of the report by ECOWA, which the murderous empire and murderous Zionists didn’t want the world to see, just like the full report, makes these efforts abundantly clear. This summary, which “anchors its definition of apartheid in international law,” argues that the Zionist government was designed inherently for apartheid, renders any opposition to this system of racial domination illegal, rejects “the return of any Palestinian refugees and exiles” which total “some six million people” to territory under control of the Zionists, and the Palestinian people are strategically fragmented. Furthermore, these fragments are “ostensibly treated differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from the apartheid regime.”
The full ECOWA report is even more explicit, adding that the state itself is “politically constructed” as for the Jewish people, with the mission of preserving it that way compelling or even inspiring “general racial policies.” These include “demographic engineering, in order to establish and maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel” and designing domestic governance “to ensure that the State upholds and promotes Jewish nationalism.” As a result of this, the State has an “essentially racist character,” with “racial-nationalist privileges” embedded in the state’s “legal and doctrinal foundations,” and is “designed to be a racial regime” with different forms of administration used to “control Palestinian populations depending on where they live.” If that isn’t enough, the state “maintains an apartheid regime by administering Palestinians under different bodies of law” by pursuing efforts to “weaken the Palestinians politically and contain their demographic weight.” This manifests itself in the fact that the fragments which constitute “occupied Palestinian territory,” as the UN defines it (the West Bank, of the Jordan river, and Gaza Strip) are dominated by a similar system. The 4.6 million Palestinians who live in these fragments, “2.7 million in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip” are governed by military law, rather than civil law, which is “codified as orders issued by the commander of the territories and administered by the…IDF” along with other “designated arms of the occupying power.”
In July 2017, Matthew Vickery wrote in TruthOut that every month it seems the Zionists move to “expand the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,” with these settlements splitting “the West Bank into Palestinian islands surrounded by settler-only land, roads, and military zones,” and integral part of the “Israel’s military occupation and a major aspect of the continued, decades long, suppression of the Palestinian people.” Such divisions undoubtedly divide the populace along race lines as, child workers, as he writes, are “poverty-stricken, and the lives these villagers used to live before occupation…has been completely destroyed” with the land stripped away from them, annexed by the Zionists, with restrictions on Freedom of movement, hemming the workers “into islands of Palestinian land surrounded by Israeli settlements, roads, and military controlled zones.”
Even evidently problematic and likely anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon, who falsely claimed that calling the Zionist Israel a “‘colonial state’ and an ‘apartheid’ apparatus” was introduced “for the obvious reason that they wanted to disguise the extent of the crime committed by Jewish nationalism” (this is false because it was posited by the racist prime minister of South Africa in 1961 and later used by Palestinians) admitted that the Zionist state is “a racially driven ethnic cleanser, it wants the Palestinians gone” in an article titled “call it colonialism, call it occupation – just don’t call it ‘apartheid.'” Others, who are more credible, has said the same. Tanya Williams, the Green candidate for Twickenham, South West London argued that “it needs to be pointed out that they [Israel] are a racist state and an apartheid state.” Even John Kerry declared infamously in April 2014 [15] that
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.
Add to this what the anti-Zionist and British-based group, No To Pinkwashing, argues. They write that the Zionist state claims that they “support LGBTQ…rights to try to divert attention from their human rights crimes against Palestinians” with the pinkwashing playing on the racist stereotypes “that Muslims and Arabs are all violently homophobic and transphobic, while Israelis are western and “civilised”.” However, the reality is that there is an “apartheid state built on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” with the Zionists not wanting peace as “Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land to build settlements,” and attacks on Gaza killing thousands.
As Ben White wrote, the Zionist state is founded on violence. When it was established in 1948, “around 90 percent of all Palestinians who would have been inside its borders were expelled, and prevented from returning” with millions of Palestinians still denied access to “their homeland, their lands and properties expropriated, purely because they are not Jewish.” Furthermore, the Zionists have “systematically discriminated against Palestinian citizens” and for 49 years of its existence, subjected “non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to a military regime characterised by colonisation and segregation.” This meant that by the mid-1970s, the”average Palestinian village in Israel had lost 65-75 percent of its land.” At the present, there has been the expansion and establishment of “more than 100 illegal settlements, in defiance of international law” with these settlements build on stole Palestinian land with the settlers being Israeli citizens meaning they are not “ruled by military law.” As White concludes, at the present, there is “a de-facto single state…between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” maintained by the Zionists, with successive governments, since 1967, incorporating “the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, into the fabric of the state, through settlements, a road network, and so on.” As a result, within this state, “Jews and Palestinians are afforded or denied rights based on ethnicity, ID card, and geography.” That sounds like racial division without a doubt. This merged state can be called the murderous Zionist apartheid state, or Zionist state for short, as to not use the term “Israel.”
In international institutions, there seems to be no recourse for such institutionalized racial discrimination. While the Zionist state signed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1979 (which criminalizes “racial segregation and apartheid“), policy reforms did not follow, as it refuses to “comply with its international law obligations” with state discrimination against “non-Jews.” From this, the CERD (Committee) on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination) concluded that “Israel systematically segregates and discriminates against non-Jews,” saying that they are
articularly appalled at the hermetic character of the separation of two groups, who live on the same territory but do not enjoy either equal use of roads and infrastructure or equal access to basic services and water resources. Such separation is concretized by the implementation of a complex combination of movement restrictions consisting of the Wall, roadblocks, the obligation to use separate roads and a permit regime that only impacts the Palestinian population…The Committee draws the State party’s attention to its General Recommendation 19 (1995) 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 and which violate the provisions of article 3 of the Convention…[there is] increased concern that Israeli society maintains Jewish and non-Jewish sectors, which raises issues under article 3 of the Convention. Clarifications provided by the delegation confirmed the Committee’s concerns in relation to the existence of two systems of education, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, which except in rare circumstances remain impermeable and inaccessible to the other community, as well as separate municipalities: Jewish municipalities and the so-called ‘municipalities of the minorities.’
Furthermore, they rejected the argument about “military exigencies,” saying that the Zionists must “ensure equal access to justice for all persons residing in territories under the State Party’s effective control,” while denouncing the treatment of Palestinian children. Later, in 2000, “five judges ruled on Ka’adan v. The Israel Lands Administration,” saying that “discriminatory housing and land policies” are illegal with CERD wanting this enforced, and saying that the “discriminatory Law for the Regulation of the Bedouin Settlement in the Negev” should be eliminating, arguing that it legalizes the “ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities.” However, even as “CERD’s observations and recommendations are important…it lacks enforcement authority” with the Zionists talking “full advantage” of this without a doubt.
In 1976, the Koenig Memo or Koenig Document was published, making recommendations as”to how to deal with Palestinians living inside the state of Israel, who are considered citizens according to Israeli law” with its open publication “seemingly part of a plan to incite intimidation and hostility towards Palestinians.” This document was the first to state “hidden truths” with the assumption throughout that “Arab citizens are to be regarded as enemies and backwards, lacking understanding of modernity or democracy” while saying that their should be a “strategy aimed at domesticating Arabs and guaranteeing Jewish supremacy” with the latter including the crushing of Arab defiance, weakening Arab leaders, denying work and educational opportunities to Arabs, and tighter control. Basically the document advocates “racial discrimination against Arab citizens,” perceiving “Arabs as a superficial and backwards community that need special treatment and constant observation,” creating a new “fascist reality that haunts Arabs in every aspect of their lives.” Furthermore, it says Arabs should migrate while denying “them their legitimate rights as citizens of the state.” While no documents or official papers show the Zionists adopted this, it is well-known that it is “binding for the Israeli government” and it has become “a strategy, indeed almost a constitution, adhered to by successive Israeli governments.” With the memo’s adoption and implementation, it has been used as a “reference point and as an essential source for successive Israeli governments, and as an agreed strategy against the Arab population” with some calling it a “constitution for an apartheid system that has been established inside the occupied territories of modern day Israel.”
There are other aspects as well. There is a racist trade union called Histadrut which was “key Zionist organization responsible for the formation of the Israeli state,” seen as a “normal trade union” outside the Zionist state. Additionally, in March 2013, buses “running from the West Bank into central Israel” started to have “separate lines for Jews and Arabs,” showing that racial segregation is alive and well despite official denials. [16]
Exploitation of the labor of Palestinians, particularly by “submitting them to forced labour”
Palestinian civilians who were “captured during the fall of Lydda and Ramle around the time of July 12, 1948 and taken to [forced] labour camps. In the July heat they were thirsty and were given a drop of water carried by a child under soldiers’ guard” as noted by a pro-Palestinian site, reprinting from Al-Akbar EnglishThere is no doubt that there is exploitation of Palestinian labor, as the Zionist state is inherently capitalist. In the Investment Climate Statement of the U$ State Department, a report written for U$-based investors in June 2017, this is clear. [17] The economy of the Palestinian fragments is described as “small and relatively open” with several large “holding companies dominating certain sectors” with Palestinian businesses having a “reputation for professionalism as well as the quality of their products” and large Palestinian enterprises “internationally connected, with partnerships extending to Asia, Europe, the Gulf, and the Americas.” However, the local market is small, movement and access of goods and people between the Palestinian fragments is restricted, and external markets imposed by the Zionists has a “deleterious effect on the private sector and limit economic growth.” Furthermore, they grumble that Hamas’s control of the Gaza Strip eliminates “opportunities for meaningful foreign direct investment in Gaza are few,” but admit that the economy of the West Bank is de-coupled from Gaza, along with restrictions by the Zionists “on the flow of imports and exports.” That’s not all. Citing data of the Palestinian Authority (PA), they write that the unemployment rate, in 2015 was about 27% overall, being about 18% in the West Bank and about 42% in Gaza, with the overall unemployment rate among women being about 45%, among those aged 20-24 it is about 43% in the West Bank and about 58% in Gaza. They say, moderately that these Palestinian fragments create a “challenging business environment affecting domestic and foreign investors alike.” Of course, the PA will not really help solve these problems, even with their National Policy Agenda for 2017 -2022, described in the report as putting forward a “path to independence, government reform, and sustainable development” which are just rhetorical words as it translates to deregulation, supporting petty bourgeoisie, and looking ahead to “economic opportunities following the resolution of the political conflict with Israel.” If Palestine was to become a state under the PA, it would like engage in deregulation and likely privatization (which currently hasn’t occurred) as it has “participated in the 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015 WTO Ministerial meetings as an ad hoc observer” and is looking to gain permanent observer status for the PA itself. Currently, as the report notes, the major sources of inward direct investment in the country are: the U$, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, and Cyprus.
The report of the U$ State Department is telling, but of course it doesn’t tell the whole truth, but only enough of what is told to investors. These reports are definitely more accurate about the reality than the human rights reports which are utter propaganda without question. After all, it is evident that thousands of Palestinians (mostly male) were interned in 22 “Israeli-run prisoner of war camps” during the 1948 war, with conditions of utter slavery, and these Palestinians were “expelled from the country at the end of the war”! More specifically, these Palestinian civilians were made into forced laborers, exploited “to support its war-time economy,” with those imprisoned forced to “do public and military work,” in camps “surrounded by barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and a gate with guards” where established “after the unilateral declaration of Israel’s statehood on May 1948.” Before that “prisoners were a burden in the beginning phases of the ethnic cleansing,” with four “official” camps which were on or adjacent to military installations, administered by former British officers, and visited by the ICRC (International Crescent of the Red Cross) actively. Along with one other recognized camp, there were 21 “unrecognized” camps, with smaller amounts of prisoners, not noted in official sources! Most of the camps were within “the borders of the UN-proposed Jewish state” although four camps were in the “UN-assigned Arab state and one was inside the Jerusalem “corpus separatum.”” While it is known that 5,000 individuals were interned in the four “official” camps, it is not known how many were interned in the other 22 camps, with abuses by prison guards “systematic and rife” in the camps themselves with some avoiding such abuse because of their political ideology or because they knew their rights. This was coupled with wide-scale “kidnapping and imprisonment of Palestinian civilians,” in 1948, with campaigns like Operation Dan ” when 60-70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the central towns of Lydda and Ramleh” or Operation Hiram with a large “round-up of civilians came from villages of central Galilee,” some of which were taken to concentration camps. It would be until 1955 that “most of the Palestinian civilian prisoners would finally be released” while the Zionists ignored the condemnations of the ICRC and other groups! This story which has been barely mentioned at all in most histories and was only recently unearthed and brought together in the Journal of Palestinian Studies, showing that the current discriminatory nature of the apartheid system are an inherent part of the state’s history, meaning that a new state must be formed. As one book put it, the apartheid state is a bourgeois republic with Zionism permeating “all aspects of life” and is led by a bourgeois leadership, meaning that in this state the working people will be exploited, oppressed, and “governed” in this class-divided society.
Such forced labor has continued at the present. Even humanitarian imperialist Human Rights Watch (HRW) discovered in a 74-page report, released in July 2015, that hundreds Palestinian children, as young as 11 years old, are “being employed under dangerous conditions in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.” [18] Only being given 13 pounds a day, some children worked outdoors in 100-degree temperatures, with even “hotter conditions inside greenhouses” meaning that settlements the West Bank are “profiting from rights abuses against Palestinian children” as one director put it, while children are dropping out of school, taking on this “dangerous work” because they feel they have no choice. Much of the produce that they pick, clean, and pack is exported to the EU or the U$, with the children working up to 12 hours a day and many suffering injuries, with the whole thing denied by the occupation authorities of course. The original report by HRW, which has only limited suggestions for “change” distinguishing not just the media summary, shows it is even more horrific [19]:
The work that children perform can be both grueling and hazardous. Some children who work on settlement farms described vomiting, dizziness, and skin rashes after spraying pesticides with little protection, and experienced body pain or numbness from carrying heavy pesticide containers on their back. Many suffered cuts from using sharp blades to cut onions, sweet peppers, and other crops. Heavy machinery also causes injuries…None of the children interviewed received medical insurance or social insurance benefits, and the majority of those who needed medical treatment due to work injuries or illness said they had to pay their own medical bills and transportation costs to Palestinian hospitals…[there are] many examples of children working in Israeli agricultural settlements in violation of international law as well as Israeli and Palestinian law…Another factor underlying abuses against Palestinian children in settlements are Israel’s policies that severely restrict the traditional Palestinian economic activity in the Jordan Valley – agriculture – while supporting settlement agriculture
With research assistance by groups such as the Jordan Valley Solidarity Center, the Ma’an Development Center, and the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, this report is definitely more legitimate than others on countries the empire hates without a doubt.
This HRW report is not unique as their is undoubted exploitation of Palestinians. In July 2017, Matthew Vickery wrote in TruthOut that illegal Israeli settlements “provide employment to thousands of Palestinians — men, women, and children as young as 12,” constructing and building structures “that deconstruct their own aspirations for self-determination.” He remarks that these child workers are “often forgotten about by the outside world and activists, vilified by their fellow Palestinians, and used as propaganda by settlement companies and the Israeli government,” adding that these workers “talk of dangerous conditions, of life-altering injuries, of being paid well below the legal Israeli minimum wage (to which they are entitled), and being subjected to humiliating and threatening treatment” at hands of employers, IDF soldiers, and “unscrupulous middlemen.” With their traditional livelihoods destroyed, they feel that working in settlements is the “only viable way for thousands of rural Palestinians to steadily provide for their family” with the work “forced upon them by occupation,” with many Palestinians having trouble even getting to the settlements because of the Zionist military’s restrictions. Still, the Zionist occupiers and explicit policies has “forced workers into taking up such degrading employment” with the settlement work basically serving as a “nuanced form of forced labour” with workers “exploited for economic gain and forced to build and reinforce occupation with their own hands” with 15% of the workers working on “land that was stolen from their family”!
Other reports have shown the prevalence of child labor. A 2011 dissertation said that “lack of employment opportunities and lack of employment opportunities with adequate income for adults is probably the underlying cause for child labor in Palestine” which are conditions undeniably caused by the Zionist occupiers. The International Trade Union Federation noted back in October 2008 that “Israeli checkpoints make a natural gathering place for child workers because of the permanent queues of people waiting to pass through the barriers” with these children at “significant risk of being caught in crossfire or being abused by other children, the Israeli army or the Palestinian police,” with conditions leading to this including home demolition, with “the homes of over 12,000 people were demolished in the West Bank and Gaza Strip” demolished between 2000 and 2003. In 2004, UNICEF released a report, writing that
Most of the children referred to the importance of the bad economic conditions of the household as a main factor that makes them enter the labour market and the intervention of this factor with other social, psychological and institutional factors…[with] meeting household basic needs…Contribution in improving the household living conditions…Feelings of responsibility for helping the father in his work…Feeling the need for pleasing one of the relatives especially the father…Gaining “value“ within the family…Learning a craft…Hatred to school and considering it as unfruitful…Provision of personal needs…Inheritance of a business owned by the household…Planning to improve future living conditions…Fatalism…Influence of peers and desire to socialize…[and] Preparing girls for marriage [were reasons these children engaged in labor]…In some cases, children were forced to work and in other cases, children entered the labour market despite the opposition of the family. In many cases, children enter the labour market gradually without being “noticed“ by family members or school teachers. A “code of silence“ smoothes the entry of children into the labour market…Most of the children declared that their work is important for the household and that they work for the benefit of their households…Exploitation of children in the Palestinian labour market was manifested in many aspects. It was shown that one-half of the working children are below 15 years of age, and work for long hours that exceed 6 hours a day and reaches 14 hours for some children…30% of working children are enrolled in schools while 70% of them dropped out…Many of the children have the feelings of shouldering the responsibility and solving the problems of their families and they work driven by these feelings…Although the children could not express in-depth understanding of human rights and child rights and do not have clear knowledge about laws and legislation, but in identifying the required
interventions, they showed that they are the most capable to identify their problems and propose solutions.
Persecution of persons and organizations, depriving them of “fundamental rights and freedoms” just because they oppose the apartheid system
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah on 14 January. During a two-and-a-half-hour speech Abbas declared that “today is the day that the Oslo accords end,” courtesy of Electronic Intifada
The summary of the ECOWA report, cited earlier, said that any opposition to apartheid has been rendered illegal. The full ECOWA report adds that constitutional law in the Zionist state has made “resistance to oppression illegal” with any Palestinian parties “legally prohibited from challenging the racial regime itself”!
For years, it was evident, even among the intelligence agencies of the murderous empire that “Israeli occupation would become permanent if it did not end quickly” with the political orthodoxy funding, fueling, and protecting the apartheid state while they “attempted to render illegitimate all forms of resistance to it.”
More recently, similar to apartheid South Africa, the Zionist occupiers have begun banning groups from coming into the apartheid state for their involvement in the BDS movement, a “BDS blacklist” as people are calling it. These include CodePink, led by reactionary leftist Medea Benjamin (who, to her credit, seems like a dedicated pro-Palestinian activist who once learned about “communal living and socialism” but obviously doesn’t hold those beliefs now), War on Want, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, American Friends Service Committee, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, France-Palestine Solidarity Association, BDS France, BDS Italy, European Coordination of Committees and Associations of Palestine, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, The Palestine Committee of Norway, Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden, BDS Kampagne, American Muslims for Palestine, National Students for Justice in Palestine, BDS Chile, BDS South Africa, and BDS National Committee. [20] Outside the apartheid state, there has been censorship by the patrons of the state, with anti-BDS moves in Canada, the murderous empire, and in Western Europe.
The Zionists argued that this ban was necessary because they (the BDS movement) are harming “Israeli civilians,” declaring that “no country would have allowed critics coming to harm the country to enter it. These people are trying to exploit the law and our hospitality to act against Israel and to defame the country. I will act against this by every means.” There’s no need to defame the apartheid state, because its own spokespeople already do that!
Beyond this, within the apartheid state, a Palestinian MP got 6 months in jail without a trial, citizenship was revoked for another individual without a trial, and Palestinians are systematically imprisoned on no or false charges! Such actions have been happening for years. In 2014, police harassed those protesting against the Gaza invasion inside the apartheid state (also see here) and killed others in the West Bank. In the West, there have been efforts by Zionists to suppress the BDS movement.
The racist nature of Zionism
Tiamiou Ajibade, ambassador to the UN at the debate, in 1975, over the resolution declaring Zionism to racist. Dohomey was changed to Benin in 1975 when the country became the People’s Republic of Benin which would be officials Marxist-Leninist until 1989,although it seemed to abandon these principles by the later 1980s, if the summary of this republic by Wikipedia has any merit.
In 1975, the United Nations debated a resolution calling Zionism a form of racism. Of course, the Zionists opposed it, but so did the Costa Ricans, the UK, and the U$, while Dohomey supported the resolution (as indicated by the above picture). Zambia was also supportive, with the UN representative there telling the UN General Assembly that
Mr. President, my country broke off diplomatic relations with Israel because of sympathy in support of our Arab brothers. We still condemn the expansionist policies of Israel and the racial overtones of its territories in the occupied territories.
The roll call for the resolution shows that many of the African countries voted for calling Zionism a form of racism, with the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or East Germany also voting for it. [21] It passed, with 72 votes in favor, 32 votes opposed, and 35 abstentions! Right after that, the video shows a U$ ambassador angry the world isn’t listening to them. The full resolution passed that day, November 10, 1975, determining that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It was a glorious victory for the world, against Zionism, and in favor of Palestinians, without a doubt. As Mondoweiss put it, “the countries that voted against the resolution were primarily colonial powers and/or their allies. The countries that voted for it were overwhelmingly formerly colonized and anti-imperialist nations.”
Sadly, in December 1991, with pressure from the murderous empire and the Zionist state, the UN General Assembly voted to revoke the resolution, with the Soviet Union disgustingly voting in favor, as did countries across the Americas, except for Cuba. The same was the case in Europe, with some support even across Africa. Still, apart from Cuba, there were a core of countries which opposed the resolution, and rightfully so:
Afghanistan
Algeria
Brunei
Bangladesh
People’s Korea
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Jordan
Lebanon
Libya
Malaysia
Mauritania
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Syria
UAE
Viet Nam
Yemen
This revocation was a propaganda coup for the murderous empire and the Zionists, showing hat the political landscape of the world had changed from 1975 to 1991, in favor of the capitalist poles of the world! This resolution passed because “the Soviet bloc, which helped pass the resolution, had collapsed; and two, Israel and the US demanded that it be revoked or they refused to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference” as one site put it.
Of course, the ADL, Tablet Magazine, and Jewish Virtual Library, to name a few, scoff at the idea that Zionism is racist. However, as Bill Christison and Kathleen Christisonwrote in CounterPunch in 2003, in the drive to “establish and maintain a state in which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return” with the dirty secret being that “this is blatant racism.” They continued, writing that
…Israel’s drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology…[the] small minority of Palestinians…faced considerable discrimination…[we must not ignore] Zionism’s fundamental racism…the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel…has always been a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist…house demolitions [are] the preeminent symbol of Zionism’s drive to maintain Jewish predominance…the advance of Zionism has been a process of displacement…Zionism’s racism has,…been fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories…After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine’s population (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law…from the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people…racism…underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality of Zionism’s racism…Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as immutably hostile and intransigent…most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be horrified to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have become commonplace…The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has a greater right to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or a greater right to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to that land is extremely racist…Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes unnoticed by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism is a racist system? Certainly not…There is also a strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism as racist…This is a racist philosophy. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism.
Some Zionists have openly admitted Zionism’s racist character. Take Abe Foxman who declared that “every nationalism is racist. It sets its laws of citizenship, it sets its own capital” but said that only calling Zionism racist is anti-Semitic somehow, even though it isn’t. Specifically, Zionist ideology is the “purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat.” Israeli aggression, as one writer put it, shows that Zionism is racist. Furthermore, there are a number of other reasons that Zionism is racist:
Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians
Zionism was always about settling on Palestinian land and expelling the indigenous population; it is a racist, settler-colonial ideology
As an officially Jewish state, Israel is an officially racist state
Zionism has a history of collaboration with anti-semitism
Some may be ringing their hands that Zionism isn’t “defined.” Well, if we use the definition of “political Zionism” posed by post-structuralist Judith Butler (whose views on gender I will discuss in another post) at the beginning of her book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, here to mean Zionism in general, it means the “massive dispossessions of Palestinians in 1948, the appropriations of land in 1967, and the recurrent confiscations of Palestinian lands that continues now with the building of the wall and the expansion of settlements.” She further adds that this means “colonial subjugation in the West Bank and Gaza” which is characterized by “violent dispossession, surveillance, and ultimate control by the Israeli state over Palestinian rights to mobility, land, and political self-determination.”
You could argue that this definition is too limiting and does not recognize that Zionism is a movement. However, as other have argued, not only is there a strong anti-Zionist Jewish tradition but when practiced “Zionism is indistinguishable from the Israeli nationalism that sees the oppression of Palestinians like Ertefaa or Munib as necessary collateral for Jewish survival” meaning that “Israel does not speak for all Jews.” [22] There is no doubt, however, that varied legal authorities and international organizations consider the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be occupied, including the International Court of Justice, International Committee of the Red Cross, UN Security Council resolutions 446, 465, 478, UN General Assembly resolution 58/292, the UN’s OSHA oPt (see here and here), the European Union (in a confidential report and here), the UN Human Rights Council,and even humanitarian imperialists Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. International law expert, David Kretzmer said at one point that he couldn’t “understand how someone claims that Israel is not an occupying force in the West Bank, after over forty years of government petitions to the High Court of Justice, citing authority as an occupying force in an occupied territory.”
The idea that Zionism is racist is nothing new and even goes back before 1975. At the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of Israel, they argued that Zionism is a form of bourgeois nationalism which promotes capitalist interests. Furthermore, as noted by a Soviet writer, not only is Zionism based on the idea of a “chosen race” but it was criticized by Vladimir Lenin himself, who said that the idea that Jews form a nation is “reactionary politically,” with such critical comments of Jewish action, especially nationalism dating back to Karl Marx himself, with none of these comments being anti-Semitic in any way. Stalin held a similar but different critique of Zionism as well.
…the Bund’s third argument, which invokes the idea of a Jewish nation, is undoubtedly of the nature of a principle. Unfortunately, however, this Zionist idea is absolutely false and essentially reactionary…that is precisely what the Jewish problem amounts to: assimilation or isolation?—and the idea of a Jewish “nationality” is definitely reactionary not only when expounded by its consistent advocates (the Zionists), but likewise on the lips of those who try to combine it with the ideas of Social-Democracy (the Bundists). The idea of a Jewish nationality runs counter to the interests of the Jewish proletariat, for it fosters among them, directly or indirectly, a spirit hostile to assimilation, the spirit of the “ghetto”…to call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a “fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat” is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle…Instead of proclaiming war on this historically evolved isolation (further increased by the general disunity), they [the Bundists] elevated it to a principle, seizing for this purpose on the sophistry that autonomy is inherently contradictory, and on the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation
A book, published in 1934, titled “Lenin and the Jewish Question,” reprinted a number of Lenin’s writings on the subject. Lenin argued in 1919 that Jews are “comrades in the struggle for Socialism” while noting there is a small group of “Rich Jews,” and arguing specifically in 1913 that “liberal bourgeois nationalism” (which can apply to Zionism) corrupts workers minds, with Jews as a caste rather than a nation. Elsewhere he says that acknowledging the historical “legitimacy of nationalist movements” does not mean one should have “apology for nationalism” by supporting only what is “progressive” in such movements, an interesting comment which shows that a stand for self-determination does not have to apply to every single nationalist effort. In yet another refutation of anti-Semitism, the People’s Commissars in August 1918 said that “the Jewish bourgeois are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeois. The Jewish worker is our brother.”
“America’s unsinkable aircraft”: Imperialist support for the Zionist state
Some time ago, FLAME, a Zionist group put an ad in The Nation, of all places, calling the Zionist state, “America’s unsinkable aircraft in the Middle East,” the same magazine whose editors claimed that firing rockets into the Zionist state is “just as atrocious as the far more deadly Israeli barrages”! This is as bad as Howard Zinn’s declaration that “the demands of the Palestinians are just, but I don’t think that terrorist acts are justified, on both moral and pragmatic grounds.” [23]
Imperialist support started with the British commitment to a Jewish “national homeland” with the Balfour Declaration, along with others like one of the so-called “Paris Rothschilds.” [24] By the 1940s, however, the British became “fearful that the Americans would try to eject them from the Middle East.” They felt that the U$ imperialists would deny them control of the oil reserves in a region “considered central to [British] imperial strategy.” [25] Ibn Saud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia,was then an important person to the British Empire. However, he was not in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine,and was even reassured by FDR in 1945 that the U$ government would not “change its Palestine policy without consulting the Arabs.” [26] This later would be disregarded. As the murderous empire supported the creation of the Zionist state, Saud declared it would “be a death to American interests in the Arab world,” saying the Arabs would destroy this state, as he said he would punish the empire “by canceling the Aramco [Arab-American Oil Company] concession,”alarming the military and foreign policy establishment and related companies. [27] With the UN’s General Assembly recommending partition (passing by the 2/3 majority) into an Arab state and a Jewish state, a proposal which Arab states opposed. Violence increased throughout Palestine, with the British withdrawing in 1948, with the new Zionist state proclaimed by the Jewish National Council on May 14, which was recognized quickly by the Soviets (who had worked to counter a US-backed trusteeship in Palestine) and the U$. [28] This was extremely disliked by the neighboring Arab states. They soon “launched a full-scale attack” against the Zionist state, with Saud saying that “sanctions against American oil concessions,” would be applied, but this didn’t happen, with the Saudi government, still formally hostile against Zionism, but Saud arguing that oil royalties helped Arab states resist “Jewish pretensions” and was still able to work with the empire,not surprisingly. [29]
With all of this, the demographics of Palestine were changing. The colonial British claimed they were an “arbitrator between the Arab and Jewish communities,” putting a “ceiling on Jewish immigration,” due to demands by Palestinian Arabs, which was reversed as a result of the “horror of the Holocaust.” [30] Furthermore, the war in 1948 led to hundreds of thousands of refugees, with the murderous empire giving aid to the Zionists and feeling there could be anti-Soviet operations there, mostly Palestinian and Muslim. Even more than that, between 1946 and 1967, over 700,000 Arabs emigrated into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, while between 1948 and 1964, almost 900,000 Jewish people immigrated into Palestine, with many more Jews coming in than the Arabs who were leaving, with the changed demographics affecting the political environment for years to come.
With the end of the Nakba in 1948, the Zionists had taken over many lands not given to them in the UN partition, showing they would not heed Harry Truman’s suggestion, in December 1947, that “…the Jews must now display tolerance and consideration for the other people in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be neighbors” with raids of “restribution” into the Gaza Strip (then controlled by Egypt) and into the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan) in the 1950s and 1960s, along with numerous killings and massacres in the years to come, with 300,000 Palestinians expelled or fleeing before the Zionis state was even created! [31] This was further evident by the fact that in 1967 they had taken over control of the Golan Heights, West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, and Gaza Strip. While Sinai was later relinquished back to Egypt, the Golan Heights, which is sovereign Syrian territory, is still held illegally. With this war, the Egyptians wanted to avenge “Israel’s battlefield successes in 1956” (and likely before as well) helped by Jordanian forces, but the Zionists went on the offensive, leading to many deaths of the Egyptians, Syrians, and some Iraqis. [32] Years later, the Egyptians again want on the offensive. The Zionists were caught off guard in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, with key victories in the war’s first days, with the murderous empire resupplying the Zionists, leading to an oil embargo by Arab states after the Iraqi proposal to nationalize “all American business n the Arab world” was rejected by these same states. [33] In years to follow, the Egyptians would implement economic policies favoring the poles of capitalism,and the Iranians would back Palestinian groups in their fight for liberation. With the wars in Gaza (2006, 2008-2009, 2014) causing the death of thousands, a Jewish South African judge named Richard Goldstone released a report arguing that “Israel used disproportionate military force against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip” while also condemning “Israel for border closures, the blockade, and for the wall…in the West Bank,” leading his vilification by the Zionists without a doubt. [34]
For years, since at least 1965 (if not earlier, with elites siding more with Arab states before that time), the murderous empire has backed the apartheid state. Not only is aid from the empire used to give the Zionists planes and tanks “used to attack Palestinians” but it is used to “build new settlements on Palestinian land and buy US-made warplanes and helicopter gunships,” showing the empire is supporting Zionist terrorism. [35] After the war in 1967, the empire sold jet fighters to the apartheid state, with sales jumping to over $2 billion by 1974, with a total of over $97 billion in aid given between 1949 and 2004! There is undoubtedly a bipartisan consensus on giving the Zi0nist state weapons of war, shown by $351 million to expand the Iron Dome system and Congressional resolutions blaming Hamas, while polls show rising discontent with the apartheid state. Even a Palestinian independent weekly, named Hebron Times, was closed down in 2002 by the CIA for being “overly critical of Israel and US policy towards Palestinian people.” [36] From 1972 to 2017, the empire has used its veto 40 times to veto resolutions on:
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (Dec 2017)
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (Feb 2011)
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (Nov. 2006)
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (July 2006)
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (Oct 2004)
Middle East situation, including the Palestinian question (Mar 2004)
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (Oct 2003)
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (Sept 2003)
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (Dec 2002)
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (Dec 2001)
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (Mar 2001)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Mar 1997)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Mar 1997)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (May 1995)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (May 1990)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Nov 1989)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Jun 1989)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Feb 1989)
The situation in the Middle East (Dec 1988)
The situation in the Middle East (May 1988)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Apr 1988)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Feb 1988)
The situation in the Middle East (Jan 1988)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Jan 1986)
The situation in the Middle East (Jan 1986)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Sept 1985)
The situation in the Middle East (Mar 1985)
The situation in the Middle East (Sept 1984)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Aug 1983)
The situation in the Middle East (Aug 1982)
The situation in the Middle East (Jun 1982)
The situation in the Middle East (Jun 1982)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Apr 1982)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Apr 1982)
The situation in the occupied Arab territories (Jan 1982)
The question of the exercise by the Palestinian people of its inalienable rights (Apr 1980)
The question of the exercise by the Palestinian people of its inalienable rights (Jun 1976)
The Middle East problem including the Palestinian question (Jan 1976)
The situation in the Middle East (Dec 1975)
The situation in the Middle East (Sept 1972)
Not surprisingly this leads to anger from Palestinians. Some even have said it has led to a form of “blowback,” noting that Osama Bin Laden said that policies of the empire toward Palestine angered him, although this idea is fundamentally flawed as has been discussed on this blog in the past. [37] The support of the empire of “Israel’s brutal apartheid regime,” as even Chris Hedges describes it, of the “occupying power” has led to a confluence of policy. The Zionists transferred Stinger missiles to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, became a nuclear weapons nation as the empire turned a blind eye, even to the use of depleted uranium, leading to horrifying health effects. [38] Additionally, the economy of the apartheid state is based in high technology, with government subsidies, and “homeland security” products, but excluding anyone who isn’t of Jewish descent, with this economy expanding in “direct response to escalating violence” and built on continual warfare. Of course, the gap between the capitalists and proletariat have widened, with the Palestinian economy in a horrid state.
In the West, the Zionists have created linkages with prominent politicians/public figures. One of these individuals is Killary who declared she fully opposed BDS in a letter released online, saying it “delegitimizes” the Zionist state, with the letter itself released by a the PR agency of one Haim Saban, a dedicated Zionist (and former IDF member), Clinton partisan, and owner of Univision. [39] Obviously the letter is absurd and Zionist propaganda, claiming there is a “vibrant democracy” in Palestine and other horrible lies, with her slander about BDS easily countered by the BDS movement’s website itself. The letter is not unique, as one of the Clinton emails released show her anti-BDS sentiments relating to the Edinburgh Film Festival giving back money from the Zionist embassy.
These views are not altogether unique. The biblical-historical arguments that Zionism has a basis for a state in Palestine seem weak, basically showing it is racist. [40] For many years, the bourgeoisie loved the idea of Jewish state in Palestine, supported by Oliver Cromwell, advanced by Napoleon, and the Zionist movement gaining more steam by the 1840s with the advocacy for a state in Palestine diverting Jews from the “political struggle of the proletariat.” By 1914, the Germans asked the Turks to help the obtain a “protectorate” in Palestine, but the British were successful in the world war, leading the Balfour Declaration in 1917, as mentioned earlier, which supported a “national home” for Jewish people in Palestine, making the Zionists smile with glee. This was also supported by the U$ Senate and House of Representatives in 1922, and the League of Nations giving Britain a “mandate” in Palestine, coming to force in September 1923. The British had a hard time holding onto the area, not liking the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine pushed by the Zionist bourgeoisie while they provoked conflicts between the Arabs and Jews, meaning that by 1939 the British had to act like their policy was “pro-Arab,” even though it was that at all, since they needed Arab support in the second World War, with a massive Arab liberation movement forming in Palestine. Meanwhile, the U$ imperialists seemed to support the Zionists but claiming they were “neutral,” with the empire fully backing a Zionist state by 1947, even offering to provide financial aid!
In years since, the Zionists have been assisted by the British and French imperialists, the Germans, and many other imperialists, apart from the murderous empire.
What should be done?
“Palestinian protesters confront Israeli occupation forces near the Gaza-Israel boundary on 19 January amid ongoing demonstrations over the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,” courtesy of Electronic Intifada
ECOWA, in their summary report, says that with the “weight of the evidence” showing “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Zionist state is “guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people, which amounts to the commission of a crime against humanity” this means that states have a “collective duty…not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful,” not to aid or assist this state in “maintaining an apartheid regime” and in cooperating with the United Nations or “other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end.” The full report of ECOWA is even more explicit, endorsing the aims of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement:
This report establishes…that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid…the extreme gravity of the charge requires prompt action…Civil society institutions and individuals also have a moral duty to use the instruments at their disposal to raise awareness of this ongoing criminal enterprise, and to exert pressure on Israel to dismantle apartheid structures…The competent bodies of the United Nations should consider seeking an advisory opinion from the ICJ as to whether the means used by Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian people amount to the crime of apartheid and, if so, what steps should be taken to end that situation promptly…Efforts should be made to broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives among civil society actors…the “country” in which Palestinians are being deprived of rights could be the Palestine that was never allowed to form, and arguably should form.
As good comrades, we should follow their lead. The group, Movement for Black Lives has already done this, saying that “Israel [is] a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades,” arguing that there should be “invest/divestment campaigns that ends US Aid to Israel’s military industrial complex and any government with human rights violations” and fighting the “expanding number of Anti-BDS bills being passed in states around the country” with these these bills not only harming the “movement to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but is a threat to the constitutional right to free speech and protest.”
Various communist parties in occupied Palestine and the surrounding region have sounded off on Palestinian resistance. The Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) argued that te murderous empire is not a neutral broker, that there could be “escalation of the resistance of the Palestinian people” in days to come, and that there needs to be a “new Palestinian political strategy” with great “importance in strengthening the anti-imperialist secularist line in the Palestinian “resistance”” although there is “a strong influence of the religious movement.” They further said that there needs to be a strengthened “role of the Palestinian left, to unify its political vision and activity on the ground, [and] to renounce its differences.” The Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) argued that the U$ illegitimate recognition of Jerusalem as the “capital” of the apartheid state “calls for the unity of all Palestinian factions to confront this new aggression and gives the incentive to escalate the resistance, all forms of resistance in the face of occupation,” adding that the PLO is an “organization that lost its revolutionary character after it renounced the provisions of the Palestinian National Charter” and what is needed to to “restructure the Palestine Liberation Organization on a revolutionary national democratic basis” with support for the PLO “after its restructuring.” Then there’s the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) which argues that the murderous empire has no right to claim Jerusalem is “the capital of Israel” in a “first rank colonial, imperial decision.” They add to this that the decision undermines “all possibilities for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian issue and undermines the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” making the decision “no less dangerous than the Balfour Declaration exactly 100 years ago.” The CPI also says that now the way is opened “for the Palestinian national forces to play their national and liberating role by confronting this decision,” saying that there needs to be “an international conference to resolve the Palestinian issue, which will impose its will on the Israeli side and to rid the Palestinian people of suffering and oppression,” and noting that “Israeli society is still subject to the influence of radical Zionist ideology and embraces the entire religious narrative with regard to Jerusalem.” After noting that the CPI and the PPP issued a joint statement condemning the U$ decision, they said that Netanyahu has been part of a “campaign of racial and fascist incitement against the Palestinian Arab national minority…and the enactment of racist laws that promote the phenomena of fascism in Israeli society.” They added to this that the CPI seeks to “deepen and develop the struggle to hasten the overthrow of this government” while pushing for the end of “occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state within the borders of June 4th with East Jerusalem as its capital alongside the State of Israel with West Jerusalem as its capital.”
With 16 million communist farmers in India joining the BDS effort, we should join this effort, along with holding an anti-Zionist line like Albert Einstein. Furthermore, however, the apartheid nature of the Zionist state, giving it the name of the murderous Zionist apartheid state, is part of its being. Zionism and apartheid will need to be eliminated totally and completely in order to make a more peaceful region. With this, a revolution seems to be needed to put in place a government in the region which respects the rights of the dispossessed rather than the right-wing settlers in the West Bank and those of Jewish descent within “Israel proper” over the rights of everyone else. The aid from imperialists has to end, of course, and there should be a push from those in the imperial core against such aid and Zionist influence without question. All in all, those across the world should stand with the oppressed Palestinians and the other minorities at the bottom of the racist hierarchy in the Zionist state as a whole.
Notes
[1] Raphael Ahren, “South Africa levels apartheid charge at Israel, drawing seething response,” Times of Israel, Jan 25, 2018.
[2] Michia Moncho, “LETTER: The last apartheid state,” BusinessDay, Feb 1, 2018; Debbie Mankowitz, “LETTER: Do not compare Israel with apartheid SA,” BusinessDay, Feb 2, 2018; Middle East Monitor, “Opposition party: Israel measures in Palestinian territories ‘apartheid’,” Feb 1, 2018; “Desmond Tutu asks U.S. Christians to recognize Israel as apartheid state,” Israel and Stuff, Jun 17, 2014; Jimmy Carter, “Don’t Give Up on Mideast Peace,” New York Times, April 12, 2012. Late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1999, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and retired retired South African ambassador to Israel Ismail Coovadia all said that Israel was an apartheid state as well.
[3] As ECOWA puts it in their report, calling Zionist Israel an apartheid state is not anti-Semitic, with the “the question of whether the State of Israel is constituted as an apartheid regime springs from the same body of international human rights law and principles that rejects anti-Semitism: that is, the prohibition of racial discrimination.” They further write that it would be “not to present the evidence and legal arguments regarding whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses the Palestinian people as a whole.” Furthermore, they add that the Zionist state is “bound by its obligations to end a crime of apartheid if authoritative findings determine that its practices and policies constitute such a criminal regime,” notes that the term of apartheid has “universal application in international law and is accordingly not confined to the South African case” and concludes that ending the apartheid regime would not “constitute destruction of the State itself.”
[4] “Report lifts veil on trafficking, prostitution of Palestinian women,” CNN, Dec 11, 2009.
[5] Azadeh Shahshahani and Audrey Bomse, “Resisting injustice: Hunger strikes in US and Palestine,” Al Jazeera (opinion), Jun 28, 2017.
[6] Gary Willig, “UN report: Widespread child abuse in Palestinian Authority,” Israeli National News, Sept 13, 2017.
[7] Suheir Azzouni, “Palestine: Palestinian Authority and Israeli-Occupied Territories,” Freedom House, a report which is a “chapter in Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance, ed. Sanja Kelly and Julia Breslin (New York, NY: Freedom House; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),” accessed February 3, 2018. The report says Azzouni is a “Palestinian expert on gender and human rights.”
[8] In August 2015, the OHCHR was told by Bedouins that there were “night raids, the use of police dogs, and the ensuing psychological impact on them” with women, during these operations “subjected to humiliating treatment in the presence of their families.” The OHCHR team also said that “continued exploitation of natural resources in the occupied territories in clear violation of international humanitarian law” and talked about other matters affecting the Palestinian people.
[10] Suheir Azzouni, “Palestine: Palestinian Authority and Israeli-Occupied Territories,” Freedom House, a report which is a “chapter in Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance, ed. Sanja Kelly and Julia Breslin (New York, NY: Freedom House; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),” accessed February 3, 2018. The report says Azzouni is a “Palestinian expert on gender and human rights.” According to some searches, she seems to be in favor of Palestinian rights, even writing an article in Mondoweiss! Interesting she would write for Freedom House though.
[11] Jeffrey Goldberg, “An American General Warns the Israeli Right,” Bloomberg, Jul 25, 2013.
[13] Saree Makdisi, “Does the term ‘apartheid’ fit Israel? Of course it does,” LA Times, May 18, 2014. She is described as a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, and the author of “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.”
[14] Richard Cohen, “A fight for Israel’s existence,” Washington Post (opinion), Jul 21, 2014.
[15] Peter Beaumont, “Israel risks becoming apartheid state if peace talks fail, says John Kerry,” The Guardian, Apr 28, 2014.
[16] Chaim Levinson, “Israel Introduces ‘Palestinian Only’ Bus Lines, Following Complaints From Jewish Settlers,” Haaretz, March 3, 2013.
[17] “West Bank and Gaza,” Investment Climate Statement, June 29, 2017, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, accessed February 3, 2018.
[18] Robert Tait, “Israeli settlements using Palestinian child labour, report says,” The Telegraph, Apr 13, 2015.
[19] “Ripe for Abuse,” Human Rights Watch, Apr 13, 2015, accessed February 3, 2015. Also see the summary of the report at “Israel: Settlement Agriculture Harms Palestinian Children” published the same day. Their suggestions for the occupying Zionists are prohibiting “all settlers from employing Palestinian children,” imposing penalties “employers or contractors who illegally employ children,” lifting “unlawful restrictions on Palestinians in occupied territory,” dismantling the “civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank.” For the EU they say that all “settlement agricultural products” should not be eligible for preferential tariff treatment, and that “European importers” should “cease imports of settlement agricultural products.” For the U$, they say that “settlement agricultural products” should be excluded from the free trade agreement with the Zionists, and that US importers should “cease imports of settlement agricultural products.” For Palestine, they say that there should be “enforcement of laws on children’s free and compulsory education and prohibitions on child labor in areas where there is Palestinian jurisdiction,” membership in the ILO, and pressing “foreign governments to cease imports of settlement agricultural products.” Finally they say that all Businesses Active in Israeli Settlements should “cease activities in the Israeli settlement agricultural sector.” While these changes would be welcome, they are almost cosmetic, as they basically infer that the Zionists will stay as the occupying force, with all of these changes still leaving the oppressive system in place.
[20] Medea Benjamin, “I am American, Jewish and banned from Israel for my activism,” The Guardian, Jan 15, 2018; Asad Rehman, “Israel’s BDS blacklist is straight out of apartheid. The UK can’t condone it,” The Guardian, Jan 8, 2018; Peter Beaumont, “Israel imposes travel ban on 20 foreign NGOs over boycott movement,” The Guardian, Jan 7, 2018; Noa Landau, “Israel Publishes BDS Blacklist: These Are the 20 Groups Whose Members Will Be Denied Entry,” Haaretz, Jan 7, 2018. In November of last year, “Israel denied entry to a US employee of Amnesty International as part of its anti-boycott offensive under the same rules” but “Amnesty is not on the list of 20 groups published on Sunday” interestingly enough.
[21] Some Zionists in Forward and Tablet Magazine claim that “the idea that Zionism is synonymous with racism is actually rooted in Soviet Cold War tactics” citing some book by a former deputy chief of the Romanian intelligence service, Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, as a “source.” This does not recognize that opposition of Zionism was due to the policies of the apartheid state, nothing more, nothing less.
[22] Ray Fillar, “Why I am an anti-Zionist Jew,” OpenDemocracy, Apr 26, 2016.
[23] Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p 26.
[24] Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p 61.
[25] Ibid, p 396
[26] Ibid; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 414.
[27] Yergin, The Prize, pp 425-426.
[28] Ibid, p 426. There were debates within Truman’s cabinet about the recognition of Israel, with some saying that if there was a plan to “win Jewish votes, it failed” with it seeming that Truman advisers exaggerated “the importance of the “Jewish vote,” in their efforts to convince Truman to recognize the apartheid state.
[29] Ibid.
[30] F. Robinson, The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, reprint), pp 105-106; Geoffrey Barraclough, The Times Concise Atlas of World History (London: Times Books Limited, 1982), p 141.
[31] A. Kober, Israel’s Wars of Attrition: Attrition Challenges to Democratic States (New York: Routledge, 2009), p 55; U Eilam, Eilam’s Arc: How Israel Became a Military Technology Powerhouse (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), p 27; Z. Ganin, An Uneasy Relationship: American Jewish Leadership And Israel, 1948–1957 (Syracuse University Press, 2005), p 191; A. Shlaim, The Iron Wall (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), p 91; B. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp 258-259.
[32] Yergin, The Prize, pp 554, 555-558.
[33] Ibid, pp 602-603, 607, 608-609, 663-665; Robinson, The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, pp 113-119. Some, like former Israeli official Avner Cohen, Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein claim that the Zionists originally created Hamas, but it isn’t worth going down that road.
[34] Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), pp 148, 149-156.
[35] Z. Sardar and M.W. Davies, Why Do People Hate America? (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2002), pp 5-6, 47-48, 51; Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p 116, 117, 118-119; William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000), p 30.
[36] Sardar and Davies, Why Do People Hate America?, p 203.
[37] Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Second ed., New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2004), p xi, 3; Zinn, Terrorism and War, p 13; Michael Scheuer (originally “Anonymous“), Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Washington, D.C.: Brassley’s Inc., 2004), pp 134, 135, 227, 229-230, 257.
[38] Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2010), p 142; Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, p 28; Johnson, Blowback, pp 13, 66, 123; Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s military-industrial-complex (New York: New Press, 2002), p xxxi, 44, 157, 158; Kevin Philips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), p 269; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), pp 541-543, 547-8, 550, 551, 552, 555, 556, 557, 558.
[39] Annie Karni, “In letter, Clinton condemns Israel boycott movement,” Politico, Jun 6, 2015; “Hillary Clinton Condemns BDS in Letter to Haim Saban,” Forward, Jul 6, 2015; Barak David, “Clinton ‘Alarmed’ Over Calls for Israel Boycott, Urges Bi-partisan Action,” Haaretz, Jul 6, 2015; Scott McConnell, “Hillary’s Sheldon Adelson,” The America Conservative, Nov 12, 2014; Eddie Scary, “Univision owner: ‘When Hillary Clinton is president…’,” Washington Examiner, Apr 17, 2015; Connie Bruck, “The Influencer,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2010; Hadas Gold and Marc Caputo, “Inside the Univision-Clinton network,” Politico, May 12, 2015; “Hollywood, hedge fund heavies giving to Clinton super PAC,” AP, July 2, 2015; “Lawmaker Is Said to Have Agreed to Aid Lobbyists,” New York Times, April 20, 2009; “Schlepping to Moguldom,” New York Times, September 5, 2004.
[40] Galina Nikitina’s 1973 Soviet work, “The State of Israel: A Historical, Economic, and Political Study” notes that there is no clear data on Hebrew tribes before their settlement in Palestine, adding that by 135 C.E. Hebrew people lost all ties with Palestine, with Arab groups in the region intermarrying with other Arabic people.
Leftist Critic 
