It's simple apartheid

It's simple apartheid

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Israel's Jewish majority enjoys a thriving democracy. But Israel's non-Jewish citizens -- nearly 20 per cent of the population -- live a different reality. Palestinian citizens of Israel send their children to separate but unequal schools that receive less funding than Jewish schools, they cannot buy land or lease apartments in most Jewish towns, and they must often stand in a separate line at the airport from Jewish people.

While it is in the West Bank and Gaza that the apartheid analogy holds best, in many ways Palestinian citizens of Israel live under an apartheid-like legal regime. More than 20 Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews, including the law of return that grants automatic citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request, inviting them to settle on land that is not theirs, while denying that same right to Palestinians. Israeli housing and land policies are racially driven. Hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned land have been expropriated from Palestinians for the establishment of Jewish settlements.

The nationality and entry into Israel law prevents Palestinians from the occupied territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel from gaining residency or citizenship status. The law forces thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to either leave Israel or live apart from their families.

Israel's recently appointed deputy prime minister and minister for strategic threats, Avigdor Lieberman, considers Palestinian citizens of Israel to be a "demographic threat". Over the years, he has advocated ridding Israel of its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants to maintain a Jewish majority. His appointment did not elicit the same outrage as the 1999 victory of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria. Back then, Israel re-called its ambassador, Europe threatened Austria with economic sanctions and the US threatened to react swiftly to any expression of racism or anti-Semitism.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/825/op15.htm

to what happened in South Africa Apartheid system supported by Reagan and Israel.

Yes, the Palestinian Arabs within Israel do have it better. It is still a legal system that is unequal.

overlook them so that they don't have to hold Israel accountable.

South Africans see the parallel with wall, other methods Carter describes

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"With "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid," former President Jimmy Carter, the statesman who oversaw the first Middle East peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, has provoked a much-needed discussion that rarely ever transpires in U.S. politics and media.

Not surprisingly, some politicians took issue with the book's title before it was even released, including U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit, a cherished friend to the Arab-American community. He said the use of apartheid "does not serve the cause of peace and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong."

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"Perhaps he felt South Africans who lived under a brutal apartheid regime would be offended. Yet, interestingly, South Africa's own Bishop Desmond Tutu and others have referred to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Christians and Muslims as "Israeli apartheid."

In a 2002 speech in the United States, Tutu said he saw "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about." Back in 1999, former South African statesman Nelson Mandela told the Palestinian Assembly: "The histories of our two peoples correspond in such painful and poignant ways that I intensely feel myself at home amongst my compatriots."

South African author Breyten Breytenbach, who spent nine years in prison for resisting apartheid, wrote in 2002, "I recently visited the occupied territories for the first time. And yes, I'm afraid they can reasonably be described as resembling Bantustans, reminiscent of the ghettoes and controlled camps of misery one knew in South Africa."

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061227/OPINION01/612270319/1008