Israel’s racist ethnic cleansing

[IndianaGreen]

Israel’s racist ethnic cleansing

Tony Itlis
13 February 2009

Apartheid

Those who argue that Israel is a democracy point to the fact that following the 1948 ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian minority that remained inside the new Israeli state was granted citizenship.

However, not only does this minority suffer discrimination in employment, education and housing, racist Israeli law allows for Palestinian-owned land to be confiscated “for the public good” and given to the Jewish National Fund or other bodies for the exclusive use of Jewish people.

Such confiscations occur regularly in Galilee, where Palestinian farmland is taken to build suburbs for new Jewish immigrants. Palestinians comprise 72% of the rural population in Galilee, but own only 16% of the land.

Mass eviction of Palestinian public housing tenants in Israel is used to “Judaise” Israeli cities with a large Palestinian minority. Pogroms instigated by religious extremists from the West Bank settlements have become another tactic to achieve this end, for example the Yom Kippur pogrom in Acre in October 2008.

While the Palestinian citizens of Israel do have the right to vote and stand for office, the fact that the electoral commission banned two Arab parties from contesting the elections (following mass protests by Palestinian citizens of Israel in solidarity with Gaza), while subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, demonstrates the tenuous nature of this right.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/783/40326