Israel Apartheid state, state apart
This article was published in The Prisma Multicultural newspaper in December 2024 and can be read in full with images here:
https://theprisma.co.uk/2024/12/23/israel-apartheid-state-state-apart/
75 years after the Nakba that expelled Palestinians from their homes, a new Nakba is happening. Western governments blindly censor Palestinian voices. Israel exports its police and military techniques to the ‘civilized world’ but Soth Africa recognizes another apartheid happening on the shores of the Mediterranean.
The Jews who survived the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and before that the Russian pogroms finally achieved a state of their own, but promptly expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands with the silent connivance of the West. The Nakba or Catastrophe descended on the Palestinians and despite many UN resolutions there has been no return, in fact a new Nakba is happening within Gaza. Denial and a refusal to look in the mirror of history is everywhere. The Israeli State - unlike many of its people - cannot see in today's Palestinians a reflection of their own antecedents herded into ghettos and murdered in concentration camps, nor the comparison with Apartheid South Africa.
And in Europe and the US, government denial continues to give the Israeli State unlimited military and economic aid with no serious attempts to demand justice for the Palestinians. France bans Palestinian flags, Germany represses pro-Palestinian demonstrations and in the US, news reports are sanitized by removing any mention of the Palestinian people. ethnically cleansed of anything that might portray Palestinians in a favourable light or denounced as anti-semitism. But the government-approved mirror is cracking as huge numbers of people stand up for natural justice for the Palestinians.
Palestinians are Semitic people too, and the 45,000 killed by the Israeli army are the latest in a long history of repression, that goes back to the time of Napoleon and the mass slaughter by the French occupiers in 1910, which are documented in an Al-Jazeera film and TV series.
For The Prisma, I spoke to Elsa Sertorio and Shahd Wadi, members of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Portugal. They talked about these issues, the way that Gaza has become an opportunity for testing weapons that are sold by Israeli defence companies. And they made clear that a movement which seeks to boycott activities connected to the government of Israel cannot be compared in any way to the Nazi boycotts of Jewish shops in 1938-39, which Israeli apologists like to do.