Those of us who have been veteran comrades in the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine have quite often been frustrated by the inability to galvanize enough support in the political and media establishments in the West against the brutal occupation of the West Bank and the strangulation of Gaza. We believed that clear cut evidence of the oppression and the highly visible criminal policies that raged since 1967 should have at least triggered a world reaction similar to the one that now takes place against Libya, and even more so.But we know all the reasons why it did not, and will not happen. And yet we may have overlooked one particular reason, indeed one successful ploy of the Israeli peace camp that seems to have aborted any such effort in its buds. The liberal Zionists believe strongly in the existence of two discrete entities one Israel and one that lies on the other side of the 1967 green line which have very little in common. The acceptance of this line as a hard fact is the main justification given in the West for the inaction against Israel (one which is also supported by some of Palestine's best friends and of course the Palestinian Authority). The line drawn is not just a political boundary it is mainly a moral border. Everything that is happening in the occupied world is diametrically opposed to life in democratic Israel and hence the argument is that if you treat Israel as a pariah state then you will also harm the 'good' part, the pre-1967 state. This is also the basis to the continued support for the two states solution that bases peace on the ability of moral Israel to re-invent itself in the pre-1967 borders.
Here, Pappe delineates the crux of the issue. Referring to Israel as the Apartheid State of Israel (ASOI) he observes Israel's unique international record in human rights abuses:
Read the rest of the article hereASOI is now one of worst apartheid regimes in the world. It controls almost all of Palestine (apart from Gaza which it imprisoned hermetically since 2005). It has, in absolute terms the highest number of political prisoners (China was reported to have less then 1000, Iran has few thousands); Israel holds nearly 10,000 of them. It has the largest number of apartheid laws and regulations than any country in the world and apart from the Arab regimes that are now collapsing and rogue states such as Miramar and North Korea, has the longest imposition of emergency laws and regulations that rob citizens of their most basic human and civil rights. Its policies against the discriminated native population, now composing nearly half of the overall population in ASOI, include atrocities such as barring people from using water sources, from cultivating their fields, building more houses, from getting to work, schools or universities and it bans them from commemorating their history and in particular the 1948 Nakbah.ASOI is protected by left wing philosophers, mostly Jewish but not only, in the USA and the West as well as by the new members of the European Union whose deplorable record during the holocaust may explain their unconditional support for ASOI. It enjoys the unconditional backing of many Jewish communities in the World, Christian Zionists and cynical corporations who benefit from ASOI's military elite's proclivity to use lethal weapons at will and from the state's progressive banking system and a high tech know how.
