by Bernd Debusmann
TIJUANA, Mexico - What do Tijuana, Baghdad and Jerusalem have in common?
They all have walls that divide neighbors, cause controversy and form part of an array of physical barriers around the world that dwarf the late, unlamented Iron Curtain.
There are walls, fences, trenches and berms. Some are reinforced by motion detectors, heat-sensing cameras, X-ray systems, night-vision equipment, helicopters, drones and blimps. Some are still under construction, some in the planning stage.
When completed, the barriers will run thousands of miles, in places as far apart as Mexico and India, Afghanistan and Spain, Morocco and Thailand, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
They are meant to keep job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers out, thwart invaders, and keep antagonists apart.
Their proponents cite the proverb “Good fences make good neighbors” but critics say they are a paradoxical result of globalization in so far as goods and capital can move freely but migrants cannot.
By an irony of history, the United States — the country that hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — has emerged as a champion wall builder.
The latest wall to divide city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in April, built by American soldiers using 12-foot (3.7-metre) high grey concrete slabs weighing more than six metric tons each. The 3-mile-long construction separates a Sunni Muslim district from a Shi’ite area.
It provoked protests from both communities and Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr termed it “racist.”
The wall that snakes through Jerusalem to seal off the eastern (Arab) part of the ancient city from the West Bank is of similar construction and inspires similar charges.
In contrast, the people of the Mexican border city of Tijuana have become resigned to the wall of thick, rusty corrugated metal that runs from the surf of the Pacific beach up and down the California hills, separating them from the U.S. city of San Diego. (The official border crossing is the world’s busiest — around 17 million cars and 50 million people a year.)
Further inland, the wall turns into a 17-foot (5-meter) fence, with metal mesh so fine prospective climbers cannot get their fingers through, and an overhanging portion to make scaling even more difficult. It stretches east for 14 miles.
ARE WALLS EFFECTIVE?
The United States is planning to build a 700-mile double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile border with Mexico under the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Proponents point to Tijuana and argue that physical barriers are effective in keeping unwanted foreigners out.
Since the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, anti-immigrant groups in the United Sates have linked illegal immigration with security concerns, and political pressure for tighter border controls grew exponentially.
The Tijuana wall stopped the “banzai runs” of groups of up to 50 illegal crossers who swarmed past border guards in the knowledge that at least some would get past. Before the wall was built, arrests totaled around half a million a year, and have steadily dropped to around 130,000 last year.
But opponents of walling off the United States point to the unintended consequences: a booming industry in building tunnels under the wall (the longest to date, almost half a mile, was discovered in San Diego last year) and in forging identity documents.
And as would-be crossers detoured around the fence and trekked across the Arizona desert instead, the death toll rose steadily, to an average of nine a week.
Latin American politicians in general and Mexicans in particular see the border wall as an affront, and a departure from the philosophy that prompted then President Ronald Reagan, standing before Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, to challenge his Soviet counterpart to “open this gate … tear down this wall.”
Two years later, the wall fell, and, not much later, so did what remained of the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences and minefields that sliced 2,500 miles through Europe and divided countries under communist rule from capitalist democracies.
Many of the ruses used when the Iron Curtain was still up — hollowed out hiding spaces in cars, tunnels, hook ladders — are still used now. Then, successful crossers were hailed as heroes of freedom. Now they are seen as a threat or a burden.
WALLS TO CEMENT TERRITORIAL CLAIMS
While security and immigration control are the most frequently cited reasons for building border walls, politics play a key role in some countries. In others, fortifications serve to translate territorial claims into concrete facts on the ground.
That applies to one of the least known but longest border barriers of modern times, built by Morocco in the 1980s to curb attacks by the Western Sahara independent movement, Polisario, on territory it claims for itself.
It lies behind a set of walls some 1,700 miles long and 10 feet high made of earth, rock and sand built in the 1980s.
The wall is defended by thousands of Moroccan troops and fortified by bunkers and fences, barbed wire and landmines — between 200,000 and several million of them, depending on who does the estimating.
To hear Palestinians and United Nations officials tell it, the grey concrete wall that splits Jerusalem from the West Bank and the fences and trenches that run through the West Bank have as much to do with Israeli expansionism as with the stated, and largely successful, purpose of keeping suicide bombers out of Israel.
The West Bank berms, barriers and fences are almost twice as long as Israel’s internationally recognized borders and run in a way that make major Jewish settlements in the West Bank a part of Israel.
Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank, as well as foreign critics such as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, talk of “apartheid walls”.
Israel’s wall has been a persistent target of Arab criticism but Arab countries have built or are building walls themselves.
Saudi Arabia has quietly invited bids for a 550-mile high-tech fence — complete with sensors, night vision cameras, face-recognition software, barbed wire — to seal off its border with Iraq.
CONTAINING IRAQ CHAOS
According to U.S. defense contractor sources, the project will cost several billion dollars and was prompted by fears that growing anarchy and unrest in Iraq will spill into Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis stopped work on a barrier along their border with Yemen — made up largely of huge pipelines filled with concrete — after Yemeni complaints three years ago.
Another neighbor of Iraq, Kuwait, has already sealed its border with electrified fences, berms and a two-meter deep trench running along the 135-mile (217-kilometer) dividing line, according to a senior Kuwaiti diplomat in Washington.
There is constant aerial surveillance of the line, across which Iraqi tanks rolled in the 1991 invasion of Kuwait.
East of the Arabian Peninsula, ambitious projects are underway to control movement between India and Pakistan; India and Bangladesh; and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Almost invariably, governments that decide on physical separation from a neighbor predict that it would reduce tension but, at times, that remains wishful thinking.
In April, for example, a firefight broke out between Afghan and Pakistani troops after the Afghans tried to tear down parts of a fence running through a tribal area.
Pakistan started building a fence along part of the 1,500-mile (2,500-kilometer) border under U.S. pressure to close the routes of Taliban fighters heading to Afghanistan to join the war against U.S. and multinational forces.
In Europe, two of the most infamous walls — the remnants of the Berlin wall and the “Peace Wall” in Belfast — have become tourist attractions. But Spain has built double fences 10 to 20 feet high and topped with razor wire around its wealthy enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco to keep immigrants out.
The fences have had an effect similar to the walls on the border between the United States and Mexico: would-be immigrants from poor countries looked for other ways to reach a rich country.
Stepped-up Spanish coastal patrols and better radar systems prompted African migrants to make riskier voyages to the Spanish-owned Canary Islands. Hundreds have drowned.
If history is a guide, no border fortification can seal off a country entirely. Even the mother of all walls, the Great Wall of China, at around 4,000 miles the longest border wall ever built, failed to keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was meant to protect.
Additional reporting by Robert Birsel and Simon Cameron-Moore in Islamabad, Kamil Zaheer in New Delhi, Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat, Sheikh Mushtaq in Srinagar, Daniela Deasantis in Paraguay and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix
© Reuters 2007
For Palestinians, memory matters, It provides a blueprint for their future
by George Bisharat
May 14, 2007
Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget?
That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust
Remembrance day in early spring to Monday's anniversary of Israel's declaration of
independence on May 14, 1948.
In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or intimidated into
flight, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society that had
existed in Palestine for centuries was smashed and fragmented, and a new society
built on its ruins.
Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of loss from that period -- an
uncle killed, or a branch of the family that fled north while the others fled east,
never to be reunited, or homes, offices, orchards and other property seized. Ever
since, Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.
No ethical person would admonish Jews to "forget the Holocaust." Indeed, recent
decades have witnessed victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but also
regaining paintings and financial assets seized by the Nazis -- and justifiably so.
Other victims of mass wrongs -- interned Japanese Americans, enslaved African
Americans, and Armenians subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced
Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings -- receive at least respectful
consideration of their cases, even while responses to their claims have differed.
Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans, Palestinians are repeatedly
admonished to "forget the past," that looking back is "not constructive" and
"doesn't get us closer to a solution." Ironically, Palestinians live the
consequences of the past every day -- whether as exiles from their homeland, or as
members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and
violent military occupation.
In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of Jewish people in World War II.
Our newspaper featured several stories on local survivors of the Nazi holocaust
around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli national holiday that is widely
observed in the United States). My daughter has read at least one book on the Nazi
holocaust every year since middle school. Last year, in ninth grade English
literature alone, she read three. But we seldom confront the impact of Israel's
policies on Palestinians.
It is the "security of the Jewish people" that has rationalized Israel's takeover of
Palestinian lands, both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the occupied
West Bank. There, most Palestinian children negotiate one of the 500 Israeli
checkpoints and other barriers to movement just to reach school each day. Meanwhile,
Israel's program of colonization of the West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly,
implanting ever more Israeli settlers who must be "protected" from those
Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of their homes and fields.
The primacy of Jewish security over rights of Palestinians -- to property,
education, health care, a chance to make a living, and, also to security -- is
seldom challenged.
Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust -- something morally incumbent on all
of us -- has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia
some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical
propriety that makes it unseemly, even "anti-Semitic" to question its denial of
Palestinian rights.
As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed: "Turning the Holocaust into a
political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When
the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so)
conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their
homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred."
What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can
remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.
Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a blueprint for the future -- a
vision of a solution to seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father grew up
in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the Palestinians expelled, when Muslims,
Christians and Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that past provides
a vision for an alternative future -- one involving equal rights and tolerance,
rather than the domination of one ethno-religious group over others.
Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is not just to forget their past,
but instead to forget their future, too. That they will never do.
George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
He writes frequently about the Middle East. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Unity and Struggle Episode 2, and April/May Newsletter for the People's Hurricane Relief Fund
Unity and Struggle Episode 2 and April/May Newsletter
Please spread far and wide!
***Unity and Struggle: Right of Return News and Views***
Episode 2: Price Gouging and Tenants Rights Mobilization on City Hall
Thursday, March 15th, 2007
http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352562
"Unity and Struggle: Right of Return News and Views" is a joint visual media initiative of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and 2Cent Entertainment to provide the world with up-to-date, cutting edge news and analysis of the struggle for the right of return, a people's self-determining reconstruction, and reparations in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
"Unity and Struggle" will document the political and social initiatives being organized by various grassroots organizations and institutions to rebuild the region and create a truly equitable democracy that will counter the program of Black ethnic cleansing currently being advanced and
executed by the United States government and transnational corporations. It will feature the initiatives of PHRF and those of our partners in the Oversight Coalition.
***"Second Lines" April - May 2007 PHRF Newsletter***
Download the PDF by visiting http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352563
or directly at
http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352564
For the latest news on the struggle for self-determination and a just reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, read "Second Lines", the bi-monthly newsletter of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF). You can download the latest edition of our newsletter from our website at http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352565.
You will also find constant updates, mobilizing actions, resources, and varying political perspectives on the struggle at our website. So, please visit regularly!
Special features in this edition include:
1. "Gulf Coast Survivors and Afro-Venezuelans Will Work Together", about the upcoming "From New Orleans to Caracas: Mutual Aid and International Solidarity Conference" in New Orleans May 24th - 27th. Contains interview with Janvieve Williams Comrie of the US Human Rights Network and Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Center. See http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352566 for more details.
2. "More Organizations Join Planning for 2nd Survivors Assembly", which contains Assembly mobilization updates and information about the forthcoming Planning meeting on May 9th.
3. A report back on the Atlanta Tribunal Hearing on Saturday, April 14th.
4. "US Human Rights Organizations continue to press United Nations to challenge US crimes against Humanity", focusing on the initiatives of the US Human Rights Network and Advocates for Environmental Human Rights (AEHR) to address various UN bodies and committee's like the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The struggle for the right of return still needs your support. You can support by making a donation to support our organizing, supporting our mobilizations and calls to action, and spreading the word!
Make checks out to PHRF. Mail checks to: Vanguard Public Foundation 383 Rhode Island Street, Suite 301 San Francisco, CA 94103.
You can also donate online at
http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=141164727&u=1352567
In Unity and Struggle,
Kali Akuno
Executive Director, PHRF
Iraq War Is Lost, but the Killing Goes On
by Max Elbaum
Washington's Wars and Occupations:
Month in Review #24
April 27, 2007
By Max Elbaum, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
IRAQ WAR IS LOST, BUT THE KILLING GOES ON
Add Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to the growing list of Washington heavyweights who have gone on record saying "the Iraq war is lost." Reid has caught up with the majority of U.S. people, who according to the latest poll foresee a U.S. defeat in Iraq. Two-thirds say the war
was not worth fighting.
But Bush says U.S. troops will never leave while he is Commander-in-Chief. He rejected the Baker-Hamilton Report's formula for a lower-profile occupation and a new diplomatic strategy. Now he refuses to make the slightest concession to Democratic Party-crafted legislation that places
restrictions on his actions but would leave loopholes for continuing an "occupation lite."
Bush's my-way-or-no-way stance keeps polarizing public opinion and is forcing confrontation on even reluctant Democrats. His promised veto of the start-withdrawing legislation just passed by Congress will only intensify the pro- vs. antiwar conflict; for information on the upcoming
nationwide post-veto protests, go to http://www.unitedforpeace.org
Equally stubborn White House approaches to other situations at home and abroad are causing massive human misery while creating the possibility of explosions with unpredictable outcomes. There is mounting anxiety in the U.S. elite that this course will lead to setbacks rather than gains for U.S. power.
IRAQ: FOUR MILLION DISPLACED
Bush's policies in Iraq have led to a rolling human catastrophe. Nearly four million people out of an Iraqi population of 24 million have been forced to flee their homes (half to neighboring countries thereby destabilizing the entire Middle East). Eight million are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance to sustain their lives. Violence is killing an average of 100 civilians a day.
The "surge" just moves the disaster around. Civilian deaths are down (slightly) in Baghdad but are higher in the rest of Iraq. So-called security continues to deteriorate: on April 12 a suicide bomber penetrated the heart of the Green Zone and killed at least 2 Iraq members of parliament right inside the Parliament cafeteria.
Not surprisingly, Iraqi opposition to the U.S. presence has grown ever greater in breadth and militancy. April 9, the fourth anniversary of the U.S. entrance into Baghdad, saw tens of thousands of Shi'ites march through the southern city of Najaf protesting the U.S. occupation. U.S. plans to build a wall between Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods in Baghdad united both communities in opposition, and with the Iraqi government blasting the proposal Washington was forced to back down. In a telling sign of Iraqi opinion, Iraq's Prime Minister likened the U.S. idea to the barrier Israel has constructed through the West Bank, widely referred to by Palestinians as the "Apartheid Wall."
Even in a mainstream U.S. press hungry for "good news" from Iraq, the scale of the disaster unfolding there cannot be completely hidden. Bush keeps insisting that even debate about withdrawal "helps the enemy" and "undermines the troops" but most of the U.S. public is no longer buying his fear-mongering and fantasy-tales. The political battle over "stay vs. get out " is headed for a steady boil. With the White House besieged on many fronts, it may just be possible for a re-energized antiwar movement and a disgusted public to blow the lid off.
OVER-REACH ACROSS THE PLANET
Explosions could also take place in a host of hotspots around the globe. Washington's militarist policies, which are producing both greater misery and greater opposition with each passing day, are both infuriating and in trouble. The U.S. is overstretched - both militarily and in the way its
"soft power" political and moral influence has fallen to record lows.
*Bush's policy of threats and "we-won't-talk-to" Iran is not going well for Washington. U.S. European allies don't want this confrontation. And Tehran gained from the episode of its capture and then release of British sailors. Iran showed it could act at will in a crucial waterway for world
oil shipments, and it also showed that serious and respectful dialogue (which the British government eventually turned to) can yield mutually beneficial results in a way that force cannot.
*Washington's war in Afghanistan is going very badly. The U.S.-supported government has little authority outside its own capital; the Taliban insurgents are staging a comeback and are embarked on a spring offensive; the population is more and more dissatisfied with U.S. and NATO occupation - not least because of widespread indiscriminate killing by Western militaries. In neighboring Pakistan, the U.S.-backed government of General Pervez Musharraf has essentially ceded control of regions along the Afghan border to anti-government tribal groups, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other foreign fighters. And there is popular unrest throughout the country that threatens the stability of this nuclear-armed regime.
*Bush's blank-check-for-Israel policy has hit its own wall. Israel is not letting up in its day-to-day brutality against Palestinians. But Tel Aviv is still reeling psychologically and politically from its failure against Hezbollah last summer. Continued exposure of Israeli war crimes during that conflict combined with Palestinian tenacity and a renewed diplomatic offensive by Arab states (even with all its limitations) has put Israel on the defensive. It has also thrown obstacles in the way of Washington's effort to form a tacit alliance between Israel and the Sunni-governed
Arab states against Iran.
*A month ago Washington turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its U.S.-advised and U.S.-armed military to expand the "war on terror" to the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia invaded Somalia, where an Islamic government had taken power from U.S.-backed feuding warlords. The U.S. and Ethiopia promptly re-installed its warlord-dominated government and declared a great victory over "Islamic terrorism." It's turned out to be another "Mission Accomplished" like Iraq: a rebellion is underway against the U.S.-backed regime. Somalia is experiencing its worst fighting and highest death level in 15 years. Tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing the country, and U.N. officials now say Somalia is headed toward its worst crisis ever. And Ethiopia is under criticism for massive human rights violations for its Abu Ghraib-style treatment of Somalis "renditioned" to the country for interrogation.
OVER-REACH AT HOME
Domestically, the Bush-Rove plan to entrench one-party rule for a generation is also running aground. The most recent blatant over-reach was the attempt to purge U.S. Attorneys who were not completely "loyal Bushies" and transform the Justice Department into an arm of the Republican Party. The uproar in response has divided Republicans and put the White House on the defensive.
As is so often the case in the U.S.A., racism stood at the cutting edge of this right-wing power-grab. Rove’s plan was to replace defense of minority voting rights with the suppression of people of color voting through bogus charges of "voter fraud." Joseph Rich, chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil right division from 1999 to 2005, went to the heart of the matter:
"Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections. It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to
2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in
minority and poor communities."
While this part of the Bush-Rove offensive has stalled, their pack-the-Supreme-Court success has already born bitter fruit with the April 20 decision undermining abortion rights.
Government attacks on immigrants continue, as does the threat of Congress passing even harsher anti-immigrant legislation. This May 1 the immigrant rights movement, which shook the country with the size of its grassroots mobilizations last spring, will again take to the streets.
STEP IT UP
On another key issue, the last year has seen the emergence of a new activist grassroots movement protesting the administration's intransigence on global warming. On April 14 the "Step It Up" campaign - go to http://www.stepitup2007.org - brought people into the streets in over
1,400 locations to demand radical action to stave off disastrous climate change. An all-out effort is underway to link this upsurge to the antiwar and other popular movements.
On all these battlefronts and more, the reactionary assaults of the Bush administration no longer shock, awe or get their own way. The Bushies are still pushing. But the new dynamic at play is the heightened push back. There is much at stake; time for us all to Step It Up.
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center
for Third World Organizing. Donations to War Times are tax-deductible; you can donate on-line at http://www.war-times.org or send a check to War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, c/o P.O. Box 99096, Emeryville, CA 94662.
Why Israel is After Me
Why Israel is after me
By Azmi Bishara
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bishara3may03,0,2351340.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
May 3, 2007
Amman, Jordan — I AM A PALESTINIAN from Nazareth, a citizen of Israel and was, until last month, a member of the Israeli parliament.
But now, in an ironic twist reminiscent of France's Dreyfus affair —
in which a French Jew was accused of disloyalty to the state — the
government of Israel is accusing me of aiding the enemy during
Israel's failed war against Lebanon in July.
Israeli police apparently suspect me of passing information to a
foreign agent and of receiving money in return. Under Israeli law,
anyone — a journalist or a personal friend — can be defined as a
"foreign agent" by the Israeli security apparatus. Such charges can
lead to life imprisonment or even the death penalty.
The allegations are ridiculous. Needless to say, Hezbollah — Israel's
enemy in Lebanon — has independently gathered more security
information about Israel than any Arab Knesset member could possibly
provide. What's more, unlike those in Israel's parliament who have
been involved in acts of violence, I have never used violence or
participated in wars. My instruments of persuasion, in contrast, are
simply words in books, articles and speeches.
These trumped-up charges, which I firmly reject and deny, are only
the latest in a series of attempts to silence me and others involved
in the struggle of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel to live in
a state of all its citizens, not one that grants rights and privileges
to Jews that it denies to non-Jews.
When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians
were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that
escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long
lived. The Israeli state, established exclusively for Jews, embarked
immediately on transforming us into foreigners in our own country.
For the first 18 years of Israeli statehood, we, as Israeli citizens,
lived under military rule with pass laws that controlled our every
movement. We watched Jewish Israeli towns spring up over destroyed
Palestinian villages.
Today we make up 20% of Israel's population. We do not drink at
separate water fountains or sit at the back of the bus. We vote and
can serve in the parliament. But we face legal, institutional and
informal discrimination in all spheres of life.
More than 20 Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews.
The Law of Return, for example, grants automatic citizenship to Jews
from anywhere in the world. Yet Palestinian refugees are denied the
right to return to the country they were forced to leave in 1948. The
Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty — Israel's "Bill of Rights" —
defines the state as "Jewish" rather than a state for all its
citizens. Thus Israel is more for Jews living in Los Angeles or Paris
than it is for native Palestinians.
Israel acknowledges itself to be a state of one particular religious
group. Anyone committed to democracy will readily admit that equal
citizenship cannot exist under such conditions.
Most of our children attend schools that are separate but unequal.
According to recent polls, two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to
live next to an Arab and nearly half would not allow a Palestinian
into their home.
I have certainly ruffled feathers in Israel. In addition to speaking
out on the subjects above, I have also asserted the right of the
Lebanese people, and of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
to resist Israel's illegal military occupation. I do not see those who
fight for freedom as my enemies.
This may discomfort Jewish Israelis, but they cannot deny us our
history and identity any more than we can negate the ties that bind
them to world Jewry. After all, it is not we, but Israeli Jews who
immigrated to this land. Immigrants might be asked to give up their
former identity in exchange for equal citizenship, but we are not
immigrants.
During my years in the Knesset, the attorney general indicted me for
voicing my political opinions (the charges were dropped), lobbied to
have my parliamentary immunity revoked and sought unsuccessfully to
disqualify my political party from participating in elections — all
because I believe Israel should be a state for all its citizens and
because I have spoken out against Israeli military occupation. Last
year, Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman — an immigrant from Moldova —
declared that Palestinian citizens of Israel "have no place here,"
that we should "take our bundles and get lost." After I met with a
leader of the Palestinian Authority from Hamas, Lieberman called for
my execution.
The Israeli authorities are trying to intimidate not just me but all
Palestinian citizens of Israel. But we will not be intimidated. We
will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to
being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world. Our
community leaders joined together recently to issue a blueprint for a
state free of ethnic and religious discrimination in all spheres. If
we turn back from our path to freedom now, we will consign future
generations to the discrimination we have faced for six decades.
Americans know from their own history of institutional discrimination
the tactics that have been used against civil rights leaders. These
include telephone bugging, police surveillance, political
delegitimization and criminalization of dissent through false
accusations. Israel is continuing to use these tactics at a time when
the world no longer tolerates such practices as compatible with
democracy.
Why then does the U.S. government continue to fully support a country
whose very identity and institutions are based on ethnic and religious
discrimination that victimize its own citizens?
