Rana Nazzal, an organizer of the Israeli Apartheid Week at Carleton University in Ottawa, beamed: “Although IAW in Ottawa is always held on campuses in the city, this year we had a particularly large student presence. We saw a lot of new and young faces. Several dozen students have signed up to be new members this past week alone.”
Her enthusiasm is not shared widely. The Israeli Apartheid Week is controversial in the West. Given the dark history of anti-Semitism in Christian countries that victimized countless innocent Jews, some people see IAW as a manifestation of the same hostile behavior.
But supporters believe that IAW is a nonviolent means to oppose oppression, injustice and apartheid and to promote human rights, dignity, justice and freedom.
Apartheid in Israel is different from the one in South Africa which was based on denying the majority blacks a political role, housing in white areas and seats on buses where they might be in contact with whites and general exclusion from meaningful participation in the country's governance.
Under Israeli apartheid more than 30 laws decree that Jews and non-Jews are to be treated differently and accorded conflicting rights. Since 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been under Israeli occupation, with brutal control of all aspects of the lives of Arabs. Some 500,000 armed Jewish settlers have taken over the land of Palestinians, with government subsidy and protection. The unarmed non-Jews enjoy no rights and suffer harassment from both settlers and Israeli forces.
Within Israel, the non-Jews (Arabs) can vote, participate in political activity and access the judiciary system. But they are denied rights that Jews enjoy and face restrictions that do not apply to Jews. In education, jobs, building permits and in dealings with all levels of government, they confront hurdles and bias. Non-Jewish areas are run-down and deteriorating. The same picture is seen in education and employment for non-Jews. They do win some seats in the Knesset, but they have no power to change the government's discriminatory policies toward them.
This is not new. On the creation of Israel, Jewish militias expelled 75 percent of the indigenous non-Jews (Arabs) from their homes. These people have languished in refugee camps for generations. They sometimes face mistreatment in Arab countries where they sought shelter because the Arab countries see them as a burden imposed on them by Israel.
For decades the Israelis argued that the Arabs fled at the bidding of Arab states that attacked Israel, promising the non-Jews that they would be able to return after Israel had been defeated. Now research by Israeli and Jewish scholars, who gained access to previously closed archives, has established that the non-Jews fled because of attacks, atrocities and threats by Jewish militant thugs and that the Arab states did not urge the non-Jews to leave. In fact, they did not enter the war until some eight months after the expulsions.
The non-Jews were not allowed to return home when the hostilities ended. Nor were they offered compensation for the seizure of their property and their forced expulsion. But Jews from any part of the world can enter Israel, claim citizenship and enjoy government subsidies. These Israeli policies violate international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as United Nations resolutions. So the non-Jews, who constitute 20 percent of the country's population, enjoy Israeli citizenship but with sharply curtailed rights.
The situation is much worse in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel conquered in 1967. The people there enjoy no rights and routinely endure mass arrests, assaults, curfews, long detentions without trial, checkpoints, severe restrictions on their movement and livelihood, the demolition of their homes and the seizure of their lands and property.
Their situation continues to worsen. While they enjoy the overwhelming support of the people of the world, as seen in United Nations votes, many Western governments, principally the United States, provide Israel with massive economic and military aid to enable it to continue its oppression.
In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil organizations called on the world to impose a policy of boycott, divesting and sanctions on Israel to prod it to abide by fundamental precepts of international law and human rights. The call is supported by the Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, Jews for Peace in the United States and by other groups. IAW started in Toronto in 2005 and has spread to at least 55 cities worldwide. Now IAW is getting support from Aboriginal and black groups who have also been victims of blatant racism, bigotry, killings and the theft of their lands. Other Canadians are also getting disillusioned with Israeli oppression and its massive use of force to terrorize Arabs and control their lands.
It is turning out to be a conflict between the people of the world, who want an end to Israeli oppression and occupation and who favor a just peace in the Middle East, and some Western governments which believe that military force and deceitful propaganda will triumph over those who believe, as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did, that justice will eventually prevail over tyranny and brutal oppression.
— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.
