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And it’s finally becoming less controversial to point that out.

WilliamCharles 8 May 11
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Israel is a lot better than the Muslim nations around it.

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More dangerous still, Israel is a NUCLEAR armed apartheid state!

And our Congress ignores the Symington Amendment.

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"More than a decade ago, former US president Jimmy Carter incurred the wrath of Israel’s partisans in America by suggesting that Israeli rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories was comparable to apartheid. While his bestseller book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” broke a taboo, in many ways it added to the confusion surrounding discussions of Israel. Since then, others, including John Kerry, when US secretary of state, and former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have warned that Israeli rule in the occupied territories is in danger of metamorphosing into “apartheid” – though the moment of transformation, in their eyes, never quite seems to arrive.

It has been left to knowledgeable observers, such as South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to point out that the situation for Palestinians under occupation is, in fact, worse than that suffered by blacks in the former South Africa. In Tutu’s view, Palestinians under occupation suffer from something more extreme than apartheid – what we might term “apartheid-plus”.

There is a notable difference between the two cases that hints at the nature of that “plus”. Even at the height of apartheid, South Africa’s white population understood that it needed, and depended on, the labor of the black majority population. Israel, on the other hand, has a far more antagonistic relationship to Palestinians in the occupied territories. They are viewed as an unwelcome, surplus population that serves as a demographic obstacle to the political realization of a Greater Israel. The severe economic and military pressures Israel imposes on these Palestinians are designed to engineer their incremental displacement, a slow-motion ethnic cleansing."

[jonathan-cook.net]

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"The situation for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel is often referred to as ‘apartheid’. But what does this mean? Is it accurate – and what about the comparison with South Africa? To look at these questions and more, read on.

What is apartheid?

Apartheid is a system of separation and institutionalised racism. It is prohibited as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Rome Statute (the treaty which established the ICC) defines apartheid as “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalised 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.”1 Apartheid is also outlawed in the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, where it is described as a “grave breach”, and, in the words of legal scholar John Dugard, “without any geographical limitation.”2

Earlier still, in 1973, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.3 The definition includes “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 … [including] the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.” The definition also includes “the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group.”

Finally, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1969, which Israel ratified in 1979, includes (in Article 3), a condemnation of “racial segregation and apartheid”, and obliges state parties “to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under their jurisdiction.”4 In 1995, the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination clarified that while the reference to apartheid originated with South Africa, “the article as adopted prohibits all forms of racial segregation in all countries.”5"

[palestinecampaign.org]

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