Ayoon Wa Azan (Israeli law is a lie)

I wrote many times that Israel is a military state engaged in ethnic cleansing, and a settler-colonial apartheid state. Recently, I read these same descriptive terms being used in a piece written by Nima Shirazi of New York, the de facto capital of Jewish people. Over the years, I documented many Israeli assaults against the Palestinians in their land, which is the territory that lies between the River and the Sea, particularly in the West Bank. But I also recently found out that the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who is one of the most noble, equitable and daring people in shedding light on the truth, has been documenting these assaults with a sense of accuracy that is not possible for an Arab journalist like me, as I reside far away from daily Palestinian suffering. The two articles coincided with the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein declaring that the Holy Mosque, which he calls the Temple Mount, is part of the area of the State of Israel and therefore Israeli law applies to it, including the antiquities law and the planning and construction law. The Israeli government is even dividing time in the Holy Mosque equally between the Palestinians and the Jews, or between right and wrong. Israel is an invented state, and Israeli law is a lie. Therefore, there is no basis upon which it can be applied in Israel itself, let alone the Holy Mosque, which includes Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, where no Jewish antiquities whatsoever exist. While I accept a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historical Palestine, that is, on the West Bank and Gaza, this does not invalidate the fact that Israel has no right to exist on Palestinian land. Furthermore, my acceptance of Israel’s existence as an Arab citizen is subsequent to and contingent upon the establishment of the Palestinian state. Nima Shirazi is an expert on U.S. policies in the Middle East. His articles are published by many websites. His article that I referred to, attacks Israeli racism that finds outlets in the op-ed sections of American newspapers that are supposedly liberal, such as the Washington Post. One example of this is Ruth Marcus, who wrote about the “flood” of African refugees, and the threat this poses to a majority-Jewish state in Israel. Marcus talks about garbage on the streets of a neighborhood in Tel Aviv, with peddlers hawking batteries and blue jeans, and nearly every one of them is African. Shirazi quotes the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and lead to the eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The political commentator also quotes Knesset member Miri Regev, a racist Likudnik like Netanyahu, as saying that the Africans are a cancer in Israel’s body. But it is Regev who is a cancer in the body of Palestine. How many times have I said that the survivors of the atrocities of Nazism in Israel are practicing what they had once fled from? I do not know, but Shirazi hits the nail on the head when it comes to Israeli racism, by quoting Hitler in a recorded and published interview from 1935 with an American paper. Hitler said that the Reich Citizenship Law and Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor were “not anti-Jewish, but pro-German”, adding that “the rights of Germans are thereby to be protected against destructive Jewish influences.” Yet this is exactly what the Israeli right wing is doing, to protect Jewish blood from being contaminated by Africans, as they say. Nevertheless, I stress to my Arab readers that there exists a broad opposition in Israel to this kind of racism, and that the majority of world Jewry is centrist and liberal. Amira Hass has supported the Palestinians to such an extent that she sometimes resided in Gaza. Hass complained in an article published in Haaretz that anti-Semitism targeting Palestinians goes unreported. She cited statistics, mostly from liberal Israeli sources, which say that 154 racist assaults were recorded in the first six months of 2012, including 45 targeting one Palestinian village alone. She also said that some observers fear that last year’s record high of 411 racist attacks could be broken this year – compared to 312 attacks in 2010 and 168 in 2009. Of course, the details about Israeli racism against African immigrants, and the assaults against the Palestinians in their villages and on their land, do not reach the Western media. And even if it reaches the latter, the goal would be to justify it or find pretexts for it, while denying the true nature of this racism, i.e. as being neo-Nazism in the state of Holocaust survivors. Despite this, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate to be, visited Israel where he praised the latter’s “culture” and made insinuations about the Palestinians. But by doing so, this Mormon bishop effectively declared that he is a partner in the racism of the Israeli far right, and a paid and a complicit instigator who accepts for American foreign policy to continue to be controlled by a foreign entity. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.