Students Against Israeli Apartheid at Carleton was formed in response to Palestine’s civil society call for the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) of Israel until it complied with international law by: ending its occupation and colonization of Arab lands, dismantling the wall, freeing Palestinian and Arab political prisoners; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees as stipulated in UN General Assembly resolution 194.
According to the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, a state is guilty of apartheid if it institutionalizes discrimination so as to create and maintain the domination of one racial group over another. This includes the deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause its physical destruction, legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields, and measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups.
Laws governing Israeli proper in regards to nationality, citizenship, and land ownership cause the delimitation of elementary human rights extended to Palestinians. The historic abuses suffered by the indigenous peoples of the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Gaza, and East Jerusalem are manifestations of this.
These laws have been instrumental tools in the oppression and dispossession of lands of more than 750 000 Palestinians who were forcibly displaced in the 1948 Nakba (the forced mass exodus and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the territory that is now modern day Israel), as well as the minority who managed to remain within Israeli proper.
Even so, these Palestinian-Israeli citizens are discriminated against by 43 laws. For example, the National Planning and Building Law (1965) provides for the expansion of Jewish settlements by re-classifying a large number of Arab villages as “non-residential”. These “unrecognized villages” do not receive basic municipal services such as water and electricity and are continuously threatened with demolition orders.
Israel’s crimes are a unique concoction of apartheid, military occupation, and colonization.
Khader Anan’s hunger strike, which commenced the day after his arrest from his West Bank home in mid-December 2011, serves as a symbolic manifestation of the inherent injustices of Israel’s illegitimate trials and administrative detentions.
Anan addressed the Palestinian people saying, “I starve myself for you to remain. I die for you to live. Stay with the revolution.”
A Palestinian Authority (PA) report released in February 2012 revealed that approximately 40% of Palestinian men living in the occupied territories have been detained by Israel at least once in their lives.
Recent reports also document the escalation of arrests of Palestinian children, particularly boys between the ages of 12 to 15 years old, in Hebron by the Golani Unit of the Israeli military. This does not even include the countless number of Palestinian children being detained and interrogated in deplorable conditions in Israel’s Al Jalame jail. Their crime? For the most part throwing stones at soldiers or settlers.
Meanwhile. the expansion of Israeli settlements and the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands continues. In early February 2012, the Israeli Occupation Authority (IOA) served notices for the confiscation of 68 dunums of Palestinian land in Jaba’a village to the west of Bethlehem. Since 1948 at least 420 Palestinian villages have vanished.
The rationality of Israeli apartheid laws is a rehashing of the “security threat” argument. Mainstream leaders in Israel often refer to the Palestinian population as a demographic time bomb; implying that the proportion of Palestinians serves as a direct threat to Israeli proper as an exclusively Jewish state.
As SAIA and cities across the world prepare for Israeli Apartheid Week (an annual international series of educational events on Israel as an apartheid state and the BDS movement), efforts have been made by the Israeli Public Diplomacy Ministry to send 100 Israelis abroad. These Israelis will represent and defend the state of Israel on dozens of college campuses- during Israel Apartheid Week- by emphasizing Israel’s “alleged” promotion of “peace”. But as Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism notes, “Israel does not have a public relations problem; it has a policy problem. You can’t sell occupation in a postcolonial age.”
“Occupation, prolonged in perpetuity, would mean, as President Barack Obama has put it, that “the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled.”
Disturbing challenges have been made by selective facets of Carleton’s community against SAIA’s call for the administration to divest from four companies- BAE Systems, Tesco Supermarkets, Northrop Grumman, Motorola- complicit in the illegal military occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Firstly some suggest that this is a divisive issue that the student body should not take a stance on. But what should the student body take a stance on if not human rights?
A second argument is frequently projected:that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is exactly that, an Israeli-Palestinian issue. This argument is absurd and divisive in and of itself. Apartheid is a crime against humanity.
A third argument, has been the labelling of SAIA’s campaign to divest as anti-Semitic in nature.
Advocating for the rights of the Palestinian people does not entail challenging the right of the state of Israel to exist. It does, however, challenge Israel’s right to further entrench its territorial sovereignty via the perpetual and continual oppression and subjugation of the indigenous peoples of Palestine. Criticizing the actions of the state of Israel should not be conflated with anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, many Jewish people in Israel and across the world are standing up to Israel’s war crimes.
As cities across the world organize their own IAW events, we will not water-down our analysis of the state of Israel. In accordance with the international convention, we will call it what it is: an apartheid state.
SOURCES:
http://zazafl.wordpress.com/category/cultural-boycott-of-apartheid-israel-bds/
http://blog.endtheoccupation.org/2010/01/howard-zinn-on-palestine-advance-of.html
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/22/palestinian-children-detained-jail-israel
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/israeli-military-escalating-arrests-in-hebron-of-boys-aged-12-15-years-old-at-least-10-children-arrested-last-week.html
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s7goOqEtyVhGRIN0FADyzcMcQ%2fYmpXC42PfKjX5yVbYHO3tPFJL%2fFXuLmIAY0w1OScV42FwXgXsbVNnQMph2Nlt4oTgHGgnpNFivXSHP5Fabc%3d
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s7iJY7Zrrh82uiRL4%2f3q%2bOICSrxOyODIPEw9evPsUyPKDgCySVrsfrpuxVsBTQpQu1LW3JCbQyTtktT3RWmTIFRTMTo1mhkspWMBU9X2D7fP8%3d
http://www.bdsmovement.net/2009/not-an-analogy-israel-and-the-crime-of-apartheid-362#.T0HZkq7DqP1
http://www.divestmentproject.org/apartheid_laws.shtml
http://www.tehrantimes.com/component/content/article/95550
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3664532,00.html
http://www.smh.com.au/world/hunger-striker-shines-light-on-israeli-detention-policy-20120219-1th7t.html
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=258409
http://abirkopty.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/khaderadnan/
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=258409
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