“…the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. It’s army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.”
Shulamit Aloni, January, 2007
Former Education Minister under
Yitzhak Rabin *
“Article 7 of the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists apartheid as one of several ‘crimes against humanity.’ The crime of apartheid is defined as inhumane acts such as torture, imprisonment, or the persecution of an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or other grounds ‘committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.’ When the emphasis shifts to an identifiable national, ethnic or cultural group, as opposed to a racial group, Israeli policy in the West Bank clearly constitutes a form of apartheid with an effect on the Palestinian people much the same as apartheid had on the non-White population in South Africa.
Both have their genesis in the desire by the minority to control land occupied by the majority. To achieve this result, the Israelis have imposed a legal framework on the Palestinians in the West Bank that ensures perpetual economic, political, and social dominance.”
Ronald Bruce St. John, “Apartheid By Any
Other Name” Counterpunch, 2/2/07
The first week of March was observed worldwide as the 6th Israeli Apartheid Week. It is a key event at which time educational programs are presented in the universities which describe Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people and explains what is being done to stop these crimes and create a more just situation for the Palestinian people living within 1948 Israel, on the West Bank, and in Gaza. One of the major tools is the BDS campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which was used to end South Africa’s apartheid.
The campaign must be having considerable success because Israel’s influential Reut Institute in Tel Aviv (2/14/10) has called the movement an “existential threat” to Israel. It urged Israel to use it’s resources to “attack” and, if necessary, engage in “sabotage” (which Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines as a “destructive or obstructive action to hinder or hurt”) of this movement which they believe delegitimizes Israel. The strategy suggested by Reut is “aimed at frustrating, delaying, and distracting attention from the fundamental issue: that Israel – despite it’s claims to be a liberal and democratic state – is an ultranationalist ethnocracy that relies on the violent suppression of the most fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians, soon to be a demographic majority, to maintain the status quo.” (Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 16)
Against this background a meeting took place at New YorkUniversity on March 4th which was organized by NYU Students for Justice in Palestine. The subject was Indigenous Struggle: A Call for the Boycott of Israel. It linked the struggle of the Palestinian people with the indigenous people’s in the US and with the fight of the indigenous people of South Africa against apartheid.
The first speaker, Melissa Franklin, was part of a youth delegation to Palestine. She is a student at Haskell College, in Kansas, which was once one of the federally funded boarding schools that Native Americans were sent to. Their 3 person delegation to Palestine was housed with Palestinian families in refugee camps. They worked on some art and music projects with the youth there but mostly they shared stories of generations of oppression and occupation, and of intergenerational trauma and grief. One of the most emotional subjects of discussion for both groups was the right of return. For the Palestinians it was a matter of 60+ years but for the Native Americans it was 500 years.
The next speaker was Nada Khader who teaches the history of the Middle East and is the Director of WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition). She said that from the beginning Israel didn’t want Arab laborers – Arab people were never welcome there. Today Gaza is a giant ghetto comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto. The infrastructure was severely bombed, including the water treatment facilities. The people can’t trade because Israel controls what goes in and what comes out. So farmers and manufacturers cant sell their goods. Fishermen are shot at while in their boats. Arable land is being made toxic. There are open sewers. There is a deliberate shortage of food and medicine. Teenagers smuggle essentials through tunnels which sometimes collapse. People struggle with each other because of the scarcity and sometimes betray each other to survive. The attitude of the world can be summed up as, let Israel finish them off, it’s just a breeding ground for terrorists.
On the West Bank there is apartheid and land stealing. Palestinian people have a spiritual connection to their land and their olive trees, some being 1,000 years old. All is being taken from them. They have asked for UN Peacekeepers to protect them from the Israeli military and the settlers but Israel, of course, won’t allow it. Khader concluded that BDS was a humane response to a very inhumane system of violence.
The final speaker was Gilad Isaacs, a South African activist and graduate student at NYU. He said that Israel started out sounding benign, a land without people for a people without land but they knew that the area was inhabited by the Palestinians. The same thing happened in South Africa. Apartheid would create 2 groups living separately but equal. But separate is never equal. Israel is an apartheid state and the term is defined by international law. Is Israel a democracy? One cannot have a democratic Jewish state – it is an oxymoron. Israel is a theocracy, only democratic for the Jews. Israeli apartheid is worse than what existed in South Africa. The pass system was not as bad as the permit system on the West Bank with all the check points. In South Africa there was no wall, no troops in the townships, no armed settlers, and they weren’t bombed as Gaza was. The anti-apartheid movement worked, they had the moral high ground, what was right and what was wrong was very clear. It was non-violent and legitimate under international law. However, there are obstacles that have to be dealt with in Israel that did not exist in South Africa. Israel doesn’t want to use Palestinian labor whereas South Africa needed Black laborers who were united in strong unions. It was good for South African businesses to end apartheid – that isn’t an issue in Israel. South Africa was of no strategic value to the US, but Israel is. BDS can isolate Israel internationally, quarantineing apartheid. By amplifying public opinion public action can be created.
The presentation was followed by a Q & A period. As that was about to start an official of NYU came into the room, introduced himself, and said that he was going to remain there to see to it that all the university’s rules were followed. That seemed odd. Then the questions began. Some were honest, looking for answers, and others seemed to be trying to waste time challenging the speakers with nonsensical questions. For example, there are Arabs in the Knesset who are in the minority, and there are Republicans in congress who are a minority, does that mean that the US is an apartheid state? Or, since the original name of Israel is Judea, doesn’t that mean that the Jews are the indigenous people? Or, isn’t BDS really an anti-Israel violent movement? This went on for quite awhile. Many of the “wise guy” type questioners were reading their questions. And many were wearing tee-shirts that said “Buy Israel” on the front and ”The David Project” on the back. This was an organized plan of disruption.
Sadly, the good, well intentioned, and wise people sitting at the table in front of the room were not able to handle this barrage. They got caught up in the minutiae. They didn’t have the facts or figures at their fingertips and they were unable to bring the subject back to the very serious issues of dropping white phosphorous on children, bombing hospitals and schools, shooting grandmothers, stealing land, genocide, torture, and apartheid. Outside of a court of law, does it really matter if, while the definition of apartheid fits the West Bank perfectly, it doesn’t fit 1948 Israel proper as perfectly – despite the 20 laws that discriminate against Palestinians? Is spending considerable precious time on that really worthwhile? The genuine substance of the evening was lost.
In the future speakers will have to be better prepared factually and better prepared for the kind of serious challenges the organized opposition will present. Omar Bhargouti, Ali Abunimah, and Norman Finkelstein can’t be everywhere.
* The quote from Shulamit Aloni was in the article by Ronald Bruce St. John, “Apartheid By Any Other Name” in Counterpunch, 2/2/07
U.S. Jewish activist: Why I am protesting the Friends of the IDF dinner
By Donna NevelWhy am I protesting the $1,000-a-plate Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dinner honoring Chief of the IDF Staff Gabi Ashkenazi at the Waldorf on March 9?
Like many American Jews, I grew up hearing that the IDF was the most moral army in the world. An honest look at the historical and current evidence, however – most recently documented in the report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Israeli Invasion of Gaza (the Goldstone Report)- reveals a very different reality.
As a college student in the 1970s, I defined myself as a socialist Zionist and attended Israeli consulate-sponsored “hasbara” workshops.
The literal translation of hasbara is “explanation,” but specifically refers to Israel’s campaign to promote its public image. These sessions taught a simple strategy for “dealing with” Israel’s critics on college campuses.
Begin by speaking about Israel as having the most moral army in the world. Never address the content of your opponents’ allegations.
Reference the Holocaust repeatedly, emphasizing the need for a Jewish homeland with a strong army so that those who hate the Jews will “never again” prevail.
And be sure to question the integrity of Israel’s critics, insinuating that they are anti-Semitic (or, in some cases, self-hating Jews). Those of us in the room who supported a Palestinian state (and there were a few) recognized ourselves in their descriptions of who to watch out for.
I remained active on Palestine-Israel but left my identity as a Zionist far behind, recognizing the incompatibility of Zionism (and the reality of what it was) with my support for justice for the Palestinian people.
Recently I experienced deja vu when I saw the exact strategy I had been taught so many years ago being used by the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment as part of a relentless hasbara campaign to denounce and discredit Justice Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report.
On this past International Holocaust Day, as part of this campaign, the Israeli government shamefully used this day to further its attack on Justice Goldstone and the report.
The attack has been particularly virulent, perhaps because this evidence-based report, whose lead author is internationally respected and known as a supporter of Israel, revealed the immorality of the IDF’s actions with powerful legal authority.
The IDF is not a “defense” force. It is an illegal occupying army that is brutalizing the Palestinian people. Why am I marching with 22 organizations to protest the Friends of the IDF dinner and the war criminal it is honoring? Quite simply: How could I not?
Donna Nevel, a community psychologist and long-time organizer for Israeli-Palestinian peace and justice, is a member of Jews Say No!, one of the organizations co-sponsoring the protest on March 9th.
we are roughly 1 km from the norther border, in an area which was doused by bombs during Israel’s winter 2008-2009 massacre of Gaza. the area, with the norther border near, the sea a few kilometres away, and the eastern border within earshot, is regularly inundated with the Israeli army shelling and shooting that others hear less frequently, padded by city walls or cafe music.
the children living here are among Gaza’s poorest, largely from bedouin families whose herding-based incomes have been been decimated by the absence of growth, fodder, for their flocks, by the bombings, by the siege.
the children are traumatized multiple times over, by Israel’s war games, by their poverty, by their geographical isolation.
GIVE and Local Initiative, two Gaza-based organizations, are visiting these 50 or so children, throwing a party today, alleviating their stress and boredom, if temporarily.
the groups bring loud-speakers for the music which will drown out Israeli gunfire from border towers and military jeeps, drown out the zananas’ whines or F-16s roars.
they bring kleenex and string and proceed to ingeniously craft a line of streamers to liven up the drab, largely treeless surroundings (bulldozed over the years), and balloons to add colour and festivity to the party.
they set up a simple cardboard frame decorated with universally-favoured childrens’ animation characters and call the children to form a circle, hold hands.
the music starts, the children squeal, and the animators get them dancing, reveling.
children are called to the cardboard frame, now a puppet house for the dancing rabbit; they sing, they are stars for a moment, they are special and they glow from it.
6 life-size costumed characters come out dancing, tails flinging, and the kids get to go crazy. they dance, some show off their beginnings of dabke steps, they hold one anothers’ shirt-tails and the costumed creatures actual tails, and dance in circles, song after song.
hours pass and we’ve all been transported away from the siege, the Israeli military threat. we’ve all become gleeful kids.
the children will remember this tomorrow and in the weeks to come.
the two organizations are off to another area in a few days time, to repeat the activities with more marginalized children longing for a childhood in the most impossible of circumstances.
many likewise impoverished children are working, gathering stones and sand, selling 1 shekel items on Gaza’s busy streets as the party ensues, as life under siege ensues.
abdullah is here today. it’s been over a year since i saw him the first and only other time, at another children’s event, this one in Jabaliya. he is a clown. Really. At that party he was among the most captivating animators.
today he tells me he’s upset. i think maybe he’s going to chide me for not visiting his organization, but instead i le arn that it’s about his wife.
he gestures to his foreheard, pointing at it with his hand like a gun. “She was killed in the war,” he says, referring to the massacre. “She was pregnant.”
he’s lost his will, for most everything. “i’m not able to work, i have no desire to do anything, really. But i came today because its a party for the children.”
then he tells me he wants to leave Gaza. but not because he’s had enough. he wants to study. “circus,” he says. There’re no opporunities here to develop beyond his basic tricks. but he yearns to become professional, and bring it home to teach others, to brighten children’s lives like they’ve done today.
my colleague and i both remark, on the way home, that no where else have we seen such devotion to and adoration of children, and we’ve been around the world.
March 03, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination.
In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad’s criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.
Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.
The position adopted by the Daily Alert and the PMAJO in defense of Israel’s international terrorist act followed several lines of attack, which will be discussed below. These include: (1) blaming the victim, (2) claiming that extra-judicial, extra territorial murders are legal, (3) minimizing the murder of ‘one’ individual, (4) deflecting attention from the Zionists by blaming ‘other Arab’s, (5) favorably comparing Mossad assassinations to US killings in Afghanistan, (6) trivializing and relativizing world condemnation, (7) citing “self-defense”, (8) praising the high tech ‘operational details’ of the assassination and (9) discrediting the Dubai police investigators rather than the Israeli perpetrators.
Abridged articles, cited in the Daily Alert, have appeared in the op-ed pages of several US, UK, Canadian and Israeli newspapers, as well as in rightwing magazines like Forbes and Commentary. The mainline Zionist propaganda technique is to avoid any discussion of Israel’s egregious crimes against sovereignty, due process, international law and the personal security of individuals. In doing so, the Daily Alert adopts the propaganda techniques common to all totalitarian regimes practicing state terrorism.
(1) Blaming the Victim
On February 22, the Daily Alert (DA) headlined two articles, which were entitled: “Killed Hamas Official betrayed by Associates says Dubai Police Chief” and “Hamas: Assassinated Operative put Himself at Risk”. The DA forgot to mention that Israeli secret police had been tracking their prey for over a month (having failed to assassinate him on six previous attempts) and that the Dubai Police Chief was not blaming Hamas officials but was in the process of accumulating evidence, witness statements, videos and documents proving the Israeli identities of the assassins. Needless to say, if we were to accept the American Zionists’ argument that any leading opponent of Israel, who travels without an army of bodyguards, is “putting himself at risk”, then we must acknowledge that ours is a lawless world where Israeli hit squads are free to commit murder anywhere, any time.
(2) Extra-Judicial, Extra territorial Murder is “Legal” (At least if the killers are Mossad)
The February 22 and February 24 issues of the DA include two articles arguing that Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder is legal. One article is entitled, “The Legality of Killing of Hamas Mahmoud al Mabhoud” and the other, “The Proportionate Killing of Mahmoud al Mabhoud”. These avoid any reference to international law, which emphatically rejects cross-border, state-sponsored murders. Legality, for the PMAJO, is whatever the Israel’s secret police apparatus deems expedient in pursuit of its goal of eliminating leaders who oppose its colonial occupation and expropriation of Palestinian lands. If Israel’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder of an adversary in Dubai is legal, why not assassinate opponents in the US, Canada, England or any other country where they might travel, live, work or write? What if the critics and opponents of Israel decided that it was now “legal” to murder Israel’s supporters wherever they lived citing the Daily Alert’s definition of legality? We would then find ourselves in a lawless world of “legal” murder and totalitarian cross-border surveillance.
(3) Minimizing the Murder
The Feb 22, 24, and 25 issues of the Daily Alert deflect attention from the Mossad murder by making comparison to the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by US drone attacks. The claim is that “targeting individuals” is less a crime than mass killings. The problem with this argument is that for decades Mossad has “targeted” scores of opponents overseas and killed thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories (where they work with the domestic secret police, Shin Bet, and the military, IDF). Moreover, this argument linking Israel’s extra judicial assassinations with US colonial killing of Afghans is hardly a defense of either. By implicating the US in its defense of state terror, Israel is holding up the worst aspects of American imperialism as a standard for its own political behavior. One state’s crimes are no justification for another’s.
(4) Blaming the Arabs: Deflecting Attention from Israel
The DA Feb. 22 article entitled “The Assassination Heard Around the World” insinuates that the murder was a “result of a Hamas power struggle” or by one of “many Arab groups who loathes the Islamist Hamas”.
In other words, all the forged or stolen European passports of Israeli dual citizens, and the Dubai security videos of Mossad operatives in various costumes, not to mention the jubilant affirmation by top Israeli leaders of the killing, was in reality ‘Arab tricks’. This crude propaganda ploy by the most prominent Jewish American organization reveals their own descent into a fantasy land of self-delusion, possible only in the closed world of US Zionist politics.
(5) Technical Proficiency
The DA published several articles praising the technical details of the Mossad assassination in Dubai, an aspect of the operation, with which few Israel security experts would agree. The Feb. 24 DA article entitled, “Assassination Shows Skillful Planning” chastises Israel’s critics for not recognizing the high quality of the “operational aspects” of the killings and recommends its “lessons for all intelligence services around the world”. Like sociopaths and serial killers, US Zionists openly promote Israeli death squad techniques to all fellow state terrorists. In the DA, professional techniques of assassination are far more important than universal moral repugnance of political murders.
(6) Discrediting the Investigators While Defending the Perpetrators
The DA on Feb. 25 cited a long and tendentious attack on the Dubai police, published in Forbes Magazine, which ridiculed their meticulous investigations uncovering Mossad’s roles in the murder. In this article, the Dubai authorities were condemned for uncovering Israeli involvement while not investigating the source of the murder victims’ … Iraqi passport! Instead of encouraging the Dubai police pursuit of justice, the Daily Alert published a long diatribe implicating Dubai in the attacks of 9/11/2001, its continued trade with Iran, its ‘involvement’ in international terrorism etc. There was no mention of Dubai’s relatively friendly position to Israel and Israelis prior to Mossad’s blatant violation of its sovereignty.
Conclusion
The American Zionist propaganda campaign in defense of Israeli state terror and, specifically, Mossad’s murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai, relies on lies, evasions and specious legal arguments. This “defense” violates all precepts of a civilized society as well as the most recent American federal laws prohibiting all forms of support for international terrorism. The PMAJO can pursue its defense of Mossad’s acts of international terrorism with impunity in the US because of its power over the US Congress, the Obama White House and the American mass media. This ensures that only its version of events, its definition of legality and its lies will be heard by legislators, echoed by Zionist activists and embellished by its solemn defenders in academic and journalistic circles. To counter the American Zionist defense of Israel’s practice of extra-territorial, extra-judicial executions by the Mossad, we need American writers and academics to step forward. It is time to expose their flimsy arguments, bold-face lies and audacious immorality. It is time to speak out against their impunity, before another Israeli secret police murder takes place, possibly inside the USA itself and with the shameless complicity of Zionist accomplices.
The authorities in Dubai have found clear evidence that the Mossad assassination team received support from European Zionists. The hotels, air tickets and expenses were paid with credit cards issued in the US. Two of the killers may be in the US now. Will a time come when American Zionists, who are unconditional public defenders of Mossad killings, cross the line between propaganda for the deed to become accomplices of the deed? The robust American Zionist defense of Mossad’s overseas assassinations does not augur well for the security of Americans in the face of Israel’s willing U.S. accomplices.
Below: - 6th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week - Israeli Apartheid Video Contest - PACBI – 2009 BDS Campaign Year In Review ——————————————
The Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week Solidarity in Action: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions March 2010 www.apartheidweek.org
Mark your calendars – the 6th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) will take place across the globe from from the 1st to the 14th of March 2010! Since it was first launched in 2005, IAW has grown to become one of the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar. Last year, more than 40 cities around the world participated in the week’s activities, which took place in the wake of Israel’s brutal assault against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. IAW continues to grow with new cities joining this year.
IAW 2010 takes place following a year of incredible successes for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on the global level. Lectures, films, and actions will highlight some of theses successes along with the many injustices that continue to make BDS so crucial in the battle to end Israeli Apartheid. Speakers and full programme available soon at
itISapartheid.org in partnership with Stop the Wall announce the first international
**Israeli Apartheid Video Contest**
As part of the colonial conflict in Palestine, Israel has instituted a policy of apartheid that separates Palestinians from Israelis and Palestinians from each other, creating an oppressive and racially discriminatory system. It denies basic Palestinian rights to land, education, movement, and housing while devastating the economy, trying to undermine civil society, and forcing continuous displacement upon the majority of Palestinians.
You are invited to submit short [less than 5 minutes] videos on the theme of “Israeli Apartheid.”
Videos should reflect the nature, realities, and/or consequences of the apartheid policy in Israel, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.
The contest is Co-Sponsored by: Badil, Code Pink, Friends of Sabeel North America, ICAHD-USA, and Unitarian-Universalists for Justice in the Middle East; AJJP Boston Endorsers: MECA, Lajee Center, Al-Rowwad Center, and Al-Rowwad USA,Boston Palestinian Film Festival, ADC American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee Massachusetts and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. =================
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has compiled a newsletter with most of the major BDS campaign successes for 2009.
The demonstrations grow bigger every week…. AGAINST the illegal evictions in Occupied East Jerusalem. The homeless are living in tents outside of THEIR homes as Jewish settlers illegally occupy and enjoy the warmth of homes that DO NOT BELONG TO THEM!
This week, scores of Israeli schoolchildren joined in….
In a much-appreciated effort aimed at highlighting and exposing Israeli racism and terrorism against the Palestinian people, many university campuses around the world are marking Israel’s apartheid week.
Activities include lectures, demonstrations, films and other multi-media events as well as cultural performances and hearing testimonies from human rights activists and Palestinian victims of Israeli apartheid.
Speakers from many countries, especially occupied Palestine, will describe the deepening persecution of Palestinians which in many aspects has surpassed the worst measures ever adopted against the black majority by the defunct South African apartheid regime.
It is hoped that these events will encourage and generate more opposition to the criminal Israeli regime, especially in light of Israel’s murderous onslaught against the Gaza Strip last year when the Israeli army, air force and navy ganged up on the nearly totally defenseless inhabitants of the coastal enclave, mercilessly killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians and destroying the bulk of the region’s civilian infrastructure.
Exposing Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity should therefore be viewed as an essential component in the enduring Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. It is also a pre-requisite for undermining the mendacious Israeli narrative, notoriously based on lies, half-truths and distortion of history.
Ultimately, the Palestinians and their allies and supporters can’t expose Israeli criminality without first defeating Israeli hasbara efforts. However, if we succeed in exposing Israel for what it really is, namely a criminal state that thrives on terror, theft and lies, as well as practicing ethnic cleansing and even genocide, we will be able to make a significant achievement which could signal the beginning of a strategic retreat of the Zionist scheme.
However, in order to go about achieving this task, we have to observe a number of principles that would help us avoid unnecessary mistakes and blunders.
First, we should maintain a continually-updated data bank containing a comprehensive and cohesive body of information pertaining to Israeli criminality and racism, including the Zionist state’s routine violation of human rights of non-Jews. This digitalized data bank is indispensable for fighting a successful battle for the hearts and minds of the world. Needless to say, this data bank should contain accurate statistical information about such topics as the number of civilians murdered by Israel, the number of homes demolished by the Israeli army, and the number of families ethnically cleansed by the Zionist state. It should also contain detailed information on the Jewish settlement expansion activities, the confiscated land, the annexation wall, as well as the organized pogroms and attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians by Nazi-like Jewish settlers.
Second, we should have detailed data on the increasingly rampant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Jewish racism in Israel, which in many respects resembles the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda in Germany in the early and mid 1930s which eventually led to the mass murder of millions of people by the Nazis during World War II.
The Israeli media often publishes criminally racist remarks by Jewish religious and political leaders brazenly advocating mass murder of Palestinians. Such quotes, now readily available via the internet, can be used as an effective tool to expose the general Israeli discourse before the court of international public opinion. Needless to say, such quotes are neither anecdotal nor coming from marginal figures, and one would not really exaggerate much by saying that these poisoned views have come to represent a sizeable plurality if not an outright majority in the Zionist state.
Third, We should not hesitate to make comparisons between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what Nazi Germany did to Jews and non-Jews in the course of the Second World War. True, such comparisons would initially raise eyebrows in many quarters, especially in North America and Western Europe. However, as people get themselves emancipated from the stranglehold of Zionist propaganda by way of accessing irrefutable evidence pertaining to Israeli criminality and depravity, which is readily available, the raised eyebrows will eventually disappear as honest people would have no choice but to call the spade a spade, even when seen in Jewish hands.
In the final analysis, any group of people, including Jews, when behaving and acting like Nazis, should be compared with the Nazis. And Israel has been and is behaving like Nazis as we saw recently in Gaza when the Israeli army created firestorms over blockaded territory and exterminated hundreds of innocent people often by bombing their homes as they slept therein.
Fourth, in exposing Israeli criminality, we must always make meticulous efforts to deprive Israel of any opportunity to exploit unintended remarks or slips of the tongue to accuse us of indulging in anti-Semitism.
We must therefore make it abundantly clear that we are against anti-Semitism as much as we are against Zionism, and that we are struggling against Zionist Jews not because they are Jewish but rather because they are oppressors and murderers.
This is probably one of the most effective ways of thwarting Israeli attempts to lump anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in one category.
Israeli apologists and hasbara doctors would get mad at you, they would even go hysterical, as did former Israeli official Ra’anan Geisen recently during a debate with Professor Norman Finkelstein.
Maintain your calm, and don’t be intimidated by vociferous tactics and ravings. Then start refuting and debunking their arguments point by point, and never be tempted to fall into the trap of their distraction tactics.
They would invoke all types of diversionary arguments, such as gratifying themselves with talks about the number of Israeli Noble Prize laureates and Israeli achievements in science and technology. They would even invoke other atypical issues for the purpose of creating confusion.
You can retort briefly to these arguments by saying that while scientific achievements are important, pursuing justice and human decency is much more important. Remind your audience that the Nazis, too, had made strident steps in the fields of science and technology but that didn’t prevent them from committing some of the most horrible crimes under the sun.
They would repeat the claim that Zionists were only “returning” to their original homeland. Try to respond to such disinformation by asking a simple question like: “would you give up your home if someone came to you and told you that the home belonged to his ancestors 2000 or 3000 years ago? Through this very logical argument, you should be able to explain that the creation of Israel was an act of rape from the very inception and that it would remain an act of rape until the end of time.
Try to convince the audience that a country that builds hundreds of settlements on occupied land and transfers hundreds of thousands of its citizens to live on land that doesn’t belong to them doesn’t really want peace.
In fact, pro-Palestinian activism must get organized as much as possible, especially with the issue of countering Zionist propaganda. Hence, the proposed data bank should be constantly fed with every conceivable Zionist argument covering all aspects of the Palestinian plight, coupled with the best refutation. Luckily, a huge body of information is already available through the internet, which can tremendously facilitate this task.
Finally, it is important to make it amply clear that the cause of justice and freedom in occupied Palestine is not really about Palestinian nationalism, although a certain element of that dimension is always present.
The Palestinian struggle for justice and peace is undoubtedly the epicenter and ultimate test for humanity’s struggle for a future of peace and justice.
Hence, our message to the world should be that every decent and honest man and woman in this world should get involved in the efforts to isolate Zionism at every level. Zionism is a cancer upon the conscience of humanity and would eradicate us if we don’t eradicate it.
