Siegman: Israel = apartheid
In a essay for The Nation, Henry Siegman, a one-time leader of the American Jewish Congress who jumped to the think-tank world, plays the apartheid card against Israel:
Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world. ...
The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem. ...
When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.
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For Henry Siegman’s full article “Imposing Middle East Peace” -
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/siegman
["Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America."]
Also available online: Henry Siegman, The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam, London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 16 · 16 August 2007
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-siegman/the-great-middle-east-peace-process-scam
[Excerpt] “The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.”
Prof. Siegman has added as much to the Israeli-Arab conflict as the benighted Jimmy Carter - ZERO! He is nothing more than a shill for the, oh soo, “enlightened” Norwegian Peacebuilding Center in Oslo that commissioned this “objective” report. The Norwegians who awarded the worthless Nobel Prize for Peace to the equally worthless B.H. Obama have a proud tradition of anti-Semitism and cooperation with the Nazis; after all,the name of their beloved “Leader”, Vidkun Quisling, entered the dictionary as the definition for a Nazi collaborator. Siegman is of the same ilk as the Kapos in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps.
“Professor” Siegman evidently never heard of the legal rights of Israel, as they were set in the early 1920s under international law. He can talk about the “occupied West Bank”, the “apartheid state” and the other usual distortions of the State of Israel, once he wrapped himself in a thick cloak of ignorance.
It’s instructive to note how Siegman’s critics have lined up here to attack/dismiss him while glibly ignoring the substance of his argument.
The Arab-occupied dismembered parts of the Jewish homeland known as the “Palestinian” territories are Judenrein by demand and yet the world ignores such apartheid? Both the United States and Israel acquiesce to such irony (remember Ariel Sharon?) and expel Jews when Israel would do well to expel their sworn Arab enemies, as Meir Kahane courageously called for saying they must go - reminding the nation of the Law of Moses that instructs them to enforce peace through strength.
Not only do self-hating Jews and Israel-bashers expose their woeful ignorance of the facts on the ground in Israel, they reveal a disturbing lack of education when it comes to apartheid as formerly practiced in South Africa before the ANC communists and terrorist Nelson Mandela were empowered to destroy the nation.
Not only is Siegman delusional but he is even out of step with Arab Israeli citizens who in no way want their towns turned over to “Palestinian” control
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/palestian_identity_and_statehood_posted
When suggestions to include Israeli-Arab towns such as Umm el-Fahm in a land swap were debated in anticipation of the Annapolis talks in 2007, the heads of all of the Arab regional councils and cities in Israel objected in an official letter:
We wish to express our sharp opposition to any initiative taken by the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority with regard to our civil, political and human rights [...] We wish to make it clear that as citizens of the State of Israel since 1948-1949 [...] the proposed moving of borders will deprive us of these human rights and tear apart the social and economic ties that have been constructed on the basis of a long and difficult struggle.”
I can’t believe how laughable it is that David Ben-Ariel is trying to convince us that Apartheid was not that bad. (This is aside from the eerie parallel to holocaust denial, which isn’t laughable at all.)
There are only two logical conclusions from what David is saying:
1) That pro-Israel folks should be less offended when Israel’s policies are compared to Apartheid, or…
2) That the comparison to Apartheid understates the evil of the occupation.
Is the “apartheid”? Yes. But the victims are comfused. The fact is that no Jews or Israelis are supposed to live outside of the 1967 borders where Arabs or Muslims live. It strange, in the extreme, as to the analysis of this situation.
Why should the issue of future borders means that “no Jews are to live here”?
And I’m shocked that not a single voice have I heard, Jewish or otherwise, objecting to the prohibtion of Jews living outside of 1967 Israel. Why? Is Israel to be thought of as some huge “Gheto,” or the new “Pale of Settlement (Tsarist Russia/Poland)?
Why must a “Jew-free” Palestine be the future state of the Palestinians? After all, Israel wasn’t, and isn’t, “Palestinian -free.”
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Herbert Kaine
01/11/10 06:33 PM
Henry Siegman is a professional Israel basher who is in part responsible for the plight of the Palestinians by supporting their most radical demands without combating the incitement that makes peace impossible. I would like to know who funds him