Apartheid is official in Israel

More than 80 years after Nazi Germany enacted what came to be known as the Nuremberg Race Laws, Israeli legislators voted in favour of the so-called "nation-state law". By doing so, they essentially codified "Jewish supremacy" into law, which effectively mirrors the Nazi-era legislation of ethnoreligious stratification of German citizenry.

Israel's nation state law stipulates in its first clause that "actualisation of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people". In other words, the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the native inhabitants who managed to remain in their homes when European Jews conquered parts of historical Palestine in 1948, shall be without sovereignty or agency, forever living at the mercy of Israeli Jews. 

In similar fashion, the first of the Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Citizenship Law, deemed citizenship a privilege exclusive to people of "German or kindred blood". The remainder were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights. 

Since there was no scientifically sound way to distinguish Jewish Germans from the rest of German society, legislators looked into people's ancestry to determine their Jewishness. Anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.

That will not be necessary for indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel because, since its creation in 1948, Israel put protocols in place to ensure that non-Jews do not assimilate into mainstream Jewish society. 

This brings us to the second Nuremberg Law: Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which sought to prevent mixing of Aryan blood, dubbed "race defilement". 

The new "nation-state law" may not mention "race defilement" but in Israel, anti-miscegenation laws are already in place, masquerading as legislation meant to protect traditional values. Marriage can only be performed by religious officials and the Orthodox rabbinate has exclusive purview over Jewish marriages. Interreligious marriage within Israel is strictly forbidden by law.

The Reich Flag Law which established black, red, and white as the national colours of Germany, and the swastika flag as the new national flag, was also part of the Nuremberg Laws.

The second clause of Israel's "nation-state law" regarding national symbols similarly indicates that "the flag of the state is white, two blue stripes near the edges, and a blue Star of David in the centre." Two days after it was passed, Israeli police and military soldiers arrested a Palestinian boy for holding a Palestinian flag outside the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem.

Reproduced from Al Jazeera

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/israel-nation-state-law-parallels-nazi-nuremberg-laws-180725084739536.html

Israel's nation-state law to unleash 'deepening apartheid'

Experts in London warn of new stage in 'settler-colonial' process amid fears for Palestinian citizens under 2018 law.

Palestinian citizens of Israel and their supporters participate in a rally to protest against Jewish nation-state law in Rabin square in Tel Aviv, Israel, August 11, 2018 [Ammar Awad/Reuters]

London, United Kingdom – Israel is poised to unleash a new round of oppressive apartheid policies against Palestinian citizens within its own borders, according to leading experts.

The re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu, a hard-righ nationalist, as prime minister sets the scene for a new phase in an historic project to end the "demographic threat" posed by Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Jewish majority, they say.

On Saturday, experts at a London conference explored the challenges facing the 1.8 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, a group that comprises 20 percent of the Israeli population yet faces widespread discrimination.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, panellist Jonathan Cook, a prominent writer on Palestine, said the controversial 2018 Nation State Law has essentially heightened a "comprehensive apartheid" that reflects the demographic fear of Palestinian citizens of Israel among the country's leaders.

Palestinian citizens had long been regarded as a "Trojan horse" by Israeli politicians, he added.

The Nazareth-based author told the conference: "Stating that the law turns Palestinians into second-class citizens or risks turning it into an apartheid state can easily become a trap.

"It suggests that Israel was a normal Western-style liberal democracy before the law. But the law changes very little: Israel was established as an apartheid state."

Middle East Monitor organised the London event, which brought together prominent academics and writers from across the world who all agreed on the characterisation of Israel as an apartheid state.

Attention has turned to Palestinian citizens of Israel since the Nation-State Law declaring Israel to be the "historical homeland of the Jewish people" was passed last summer, and since Netanyahu won a fifth term on pledges to annex additional parts of the occupied West Bank.

Lawyer Suhad Bishara, a Palestinian human rights expert, told delegates: "The Nation-State Law has no one state vision. There will be annexations, and we can see that from what's happening on the ground."

Referring to the efforts by Israel's Zionist left to conceal mistreatment of the Palestinians behind liberal democratic language, Cook said: "The law may have done us a favour: it makes it clearer what kind of state Israel is."

Speakers outlined a broad range of areas - social, economic, legal and geographic - in which apartheid policies operate to discriminate against Israeli Palestinian citizens, many of whom were declared "present absentees" by Israel under a 1950 law to enable it to appropriate their land and property.

New stage in 'settler-colonial' process

Comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa, whose government corralled the indigenous majority into self-governing "bantustans", Professor Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University said the Nation-State Law opens a new stage in the Israeli "settler-colonial" process, which he called one of "deepening apartheid".

"Apartheid, of course, is illegal, it is a war crime, it is a crime against humanity."

Mapping out the process of "Judaisation" by which the Israeli state has taken control of Palestinian ancestral lands, he said the Nation-State Law enshrines this process in a legal framework, and likened the hierarchy of citizenship that now exists in the country to that of apartheid South Africa.

Mazen Masri of City University in London explored the legal strategies that now exist in Israeli law to discriminate against Palestinian citizens.

He said: "Discrimination already exists in a range of legal strategies that are meant to discriminate without actually officially sanctioning discrimination.

"The main concern of the Nation-State Law is not really the ethnoreligious and inherently exclusivist principles and also the entrenchment of Israel's colonial nature and policy, the main problem is that this act demonstrates that Israel is closer to apartheid than democracy."

An Israeli Palestinian politician, Dr Yousef Jabareen, told the conference that he had sat in the Knesset and had to listen to other politicians making racist arguments in which the Palestinians were depicted as both a dangerous "fifth column" but also as inferior.

"The basis of democracy is equal rights and equal citizenship and for the Palestinians these have been violated for over 70 years," he said. "The Nation-State Law restates this: it opens the door for further policies and tools of oppression."

by Gavin O’Toole

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/nation-state-law-opens-stage-settler-colonial-process-190427214518436.html