Is Israel A Racist State?

A subject much discussed these days is: is Israel a racist state? Israel and the U.S. walked out of the U.N.'s 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban because there had been criticism of Israel, and Israel has already refused to attend a follow-up conference in Geneva April 2009.
In Durban, Israel's policies had been described as "apartheid," a situation well-documented subsequently by President Jimmy Carter in his 2006 best-selling book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

Israel claims to be both a "democracy" and a "Jewish state," but the problem is that when the U.N. carved Israel out of Palestine, the land was already populated by Arabs who had lived there 1300 years. A writer, whose letter to the editor was published in The Wall Street Journal 12/10/07, stated that although he had been taught in Hebrew School that Jews returned to an empty land, he later discovered the truth. Early Jewish leaders had ethnically cleansed out the Arab population through terrorism, massacres, and mass expulsion, as documented in Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's important 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. After six months in 1948 there were 800,000 Palestinian Arab refugees. However, large numbers of Arabs remain and are referred to as the "demographic problem." Arabs in Israel are not granted the same rights as Jewish citizens. After 60 years Israel still has no constitution because of the impossibility of reconciling "democracy" with "Jewish state" given the "demographic problem."

Although Arabs have agreed to a just peace, as in the Arab Peace Plan, Israel refuses to end its illegal occupation and colonization. Meanwhile Jewish "settlers" keep grabbing Palestinian Arab land, expanding "settlements" connected by Jews-only roads, and attacking Arabs, their homes, and crops. Even murder of Arabs leads to scant punishment, as documented in the book Lords of the Land, written by Israeli scholars, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar. On the other hand, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din reported that West Bank Palestinian Arabs receive almost automatic conviction, being convicted 99.7% of the time. (AP 1/7/08)

This Palestinian Holocaust-In-Slow-Motion can be visualized as collective macro-torture with a mammoth vise implacably closing in on a population which can be murdered at will, reminiscent of the Pit and the Pendulum.

One might say: so what? What does this matter to Americans? Yet even those who do not subscribe to the "I'm my brother's keeper" philosophy might consider that our support of Israel-right-or-wrong has meant that in the Arab/Muslim world, America is identified with Israel.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, says his hatred of us is due to our bias in favor of Israel (see The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 147). The same thing was said by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center attack and vowed to return (see James Bamford's A Pretext for War). Being considered Israel's Siamese twin, it's crucial that we work to rectify Israel's racist apartheid policies by pushing for a just Israeli/Palestinian peace.