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Lieberman: Vocalizing Israel's Apartheid Reality
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, which slaps the "apartheid" label on Israel, comes out this week. Before the book hit the stands though, members of his own party rushed to distance themselves from his allegations. While the label makes supporters of Israel uncomfortable, there is ample evidence that Israel practices institutionalized discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens. Israel, in fact, goes further than South Africa. While whites in South Africa sought to control non-whites, Israel has since its establishment pursued various means of getting rid of its non-Jewish population altogether.
The addition of Avigdor Lieberman's party to Israel's ruling coalition ù and the appointment of Lieberman himself as Minister in charge of "Strategic Threats to Israel" ù has also occasioned some discomfort among Israel's most earnest supporters. But Lieberman's ascent to deputy Prime Minister should give pause to those who so vigorously chided Carter for using the term "apartheid" to describe Israeli policies.
We are told that Lieberman is unhelpful; that he is the wrong partner for the current Prime Minister; that he is unlikely to facilitate peace with the Palestinians; that he is unrestrained and irresponsible ù and even (according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz) that he is a strategic threat himself.
This consensus is not a reaction to Lieberman's insalubrious background ù though former nightclub bouncers rarely rise to national office in any country ù but rather to the fact that he is willing to dispense with diplomatic niceties and to express Israel's ambitions in their crudest and most unapologetic form.
Lieberman wants an Israel free of the land's indigenous population.
His party's declared aim is to eject Israel's Palestinian minority ù now approaching a quarter of the population ù and to annex the parts of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem with heavy Jewish settler populations.
The irony here, of course, is that Lieberman was born not in Israel but in a remote province of the former Soviet Union. He moved to Israel as an adult.
Because he is Jewish, he was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's law of return.
But it was evidently not enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved (not to mention those expelled during the creation of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.
More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6040.shtml
We are told that Lieberman is unhelpful; that he is the wrong partner for the current Prime Minister; that he is unlikely to facilitate peace with the Palestinians; that he is unrestrained and irresponsible ù and even (according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz) that he is a strategic threat himself.
This consensus is not a reaction to Lieberman's insalubrious background ù though former nightclub bouncers rarely rise to national office in any country ù but rather to the fact that he is willing to dispense with diplomatic niceties and to express Israel's ambitions in their crudest and most unapologetic form.
Lieberman wants an Israel free of the land's indigenous population.
His party's declared aim is to eject Israel's Palestinian minority ù now approaching a quarter of the population ù and to annex the parts of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem with heavy Jewish settler populations.
The irony here, of course, is that Lieberman was born not in Israel but in a remote province of the former Soviet Union. He moved to Israel as an adult.
Because he is Jewish, he was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's law of return.
But it was evidently not enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved (not to mention those expelled during the creation of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.
More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6040.shtml
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