This Is Apartheid

By Rann

The Israeli Supreme Court approved a law yesterday denying West Bank and Gaza Palestinians married to Israeli Palestinians residence or citizenship in Israel. As the linked Ha’aretz editorial states, this is a disgrace. Moreover, this is yet another grounding of apartheid by the Israeli ‘justice’ system.

“… not one single Western country discriminates against some of its citizens by passing laws that apply only to them, and that impose limits only on their choice of a partner with whom they can live in their homeland.”

Yes, five out of the eleven judges voted against the law. Yes, those included both the current president of the court and his replacement. Yes, this law has been contested over and over again and the legal system allowed it to be.

But no, that does not make a bit of difference. As of now, Israeli Palestinians who just happen to fall in love with someone from the West Bank or Gaza cannot do a thing about it.

I guess it’s just one more element to add to the list:

• Separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank (and Gaza pre-disengagement) – see Road Networks in the legend here.
• Different ID cards, giving different privileges (see here).
• Massive discrimination on access to water (see here).
• Israeli Palestinian districts inside Israel get far less funding for schools, health and other services than Jewish areas (see here).
• Israelis can move around…see here.

And so on and so forth…

The country I was born in is a racial pseudo-democracy. That makes me sad and extremely angry. So many of the comments on the Ha’aretz article linked above are sickeningly racist: “Arabs commit horrible acts of terror and behave like animals, and they expect equal rights?!?”

You see? They are animals, they are terrorists. All of them. Sound familiar?

Therein lies the essence of racism: generalization. This law is fundamentally racist in that in it punishes enormous numbers of innocents for the actions of the very very few.

¡YA BASTA!