ISRAEL: A THEOCRATIC RACIST STATE

The Israeli "democracy" that the Fundamentalist/Christian Zionists so devotedly support is a theocratic-racist state. It is a Jewish/Zionist state devoted exclusively to the culture, interests, heritage and religion of the Jewish people. Immigration is based on being Jewish. Any Jew can claim citizenship while Palestinians who lived there for decades and were expelled in an ethnic cleansing and to this day are denied the right to return to their homeland. Why does out tax money go to support this.

Haim Cohen, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel stated: "The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel" (quoted in Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel NY, 1960, P.156)

Marriages and other aspects of civil laws are decided by religious courts who do not recognize marriage between Jews and Palestinians. The Israeli government pays the salary of rabbis and the employee's of municipal rabbinates and religious councils. In 2004 3,000 Rabbi's and employee's of municipal rabbinates and religious councils almost went on strike over back pay issues with the government.

Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will not be allowed to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut in half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel.

Under the emergency regulation from the British mandate which is still in force-- the Press Ordinance of 1933 -- the government can close newspapers at will and without reason.

. In Israel Citizenship and nationality are two different things. Citizenship (ezrahut) may be held by Arabs or Jews. Nationality (le'um), bestows much greater rights than citizenship, is for Jews alone. In 1972 the Supreme Court that non-Jews cannot qualify for nationality rights in the state of Israel because there is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people.

All articles in Israel dealing with security issues must be submitted to a military censor. You cannot appeal his decision. Security issues in Israel cover vast areas of public policy.

Some time ago it was found that the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was setting up illegal roadblocks in Arab areas, (staffed by police) where Arab drivers are stopped and required to pay fines for not having TV licenses. They are threatened with having their cars impounded or not having their identity papers returned. They have collected some $5 million dollars.

Arab pupils make up a third of the total school population in Israel but Arab schools receive just seven per cent of the Israeli education ministry's budget. Arab municipalities which also contribute to school budgets receive a much lower allocation.

The Human Rights Watch Report in 2001 identified systematic discrimination in education resources that disadvantages Palestinian children. This discrimination includes class sizes are much bigger; there are fewer textbooks and many of them are inadequate; buildings are in far worse condition; there is a widespread lack of kindergartens, vocational programs and remedial classes. The standard of special education for disabled children is particularly harshly criticized in the report.

Who teaches Palestinian children is controlled by the Israeli security apparatus. "Political" people, those who teach about Palestinian history, are not allowed in the schools. There is a department that investigates "political activity" in the schools. "The Shin Bet not only determined and intervened in the appointment of principals and teachers, but even decided who the custodians and janitors that clean the bathrooms in the Arab schools would be." Shin Bet official in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

May 2005, Haaretz Nachman Tal a former deputy director of the Shin Bet, said state discrimination was rife. "I recently checked and found that out of the 13,000 permanent employees in the Israel Electric Corporation, only six are Arabs."

May 2005 the governor of the Bank of Israel, David Klein, admitts that there was not a single Arab among his staff of 800. In the bank's 50-year history they only employed two Arabs who oversaw the bank's operation in the occupied Palestinian territories. They were dismissed in 1994 when the territories were handed over to the Palestinian Authority.

The "national priority areas", which give extra benefits to residents and businesses, are almost completely for the Jews -- even though the Central Bureau of Statistics showed 70 per cent of the poorest areas in Israel are Arab. Currently 492 Jewish communities have priority. There are four small Arab villages on the list.

The Nazareth Human Rights Association said in 2002 in its report "Silencing Dissent" that the security services assaulted all the Arab Knesset members in that parliament, a few of them several times, at peaceful demonstrations. All but but one of the Arab legislators had to be hospitalized.

Not far from the memorial to the Jewish children lost in the holocaust is a former Arab village. It is a parking lot.

- The Israeli parliament rejected a proposed bill that would ban any party trying to incite the expulsion of Palestinians or Arab Israelis from the assembly.

Recent polls have shown that 20 to 30% of the Israelis favor some sort of transfer of the original inhabitants of the land.

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Chris Hedges, who was on the NY Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism has been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years and has covered wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Palestine and the Balkans wrote of an experience in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in his 2002 book, "War is a Force that gives us Meaning":

On a recent trip to the region, I visited the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As the searing afternoon heat and swirling eddies of dust enveloped the camp, I sought cover, slumping under the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes. I was momentarily defeated by the grit that covered my face and hair, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage.

Barefoot boys, clutching ragged soccer balls and kites made out of scraps of paper, squatted a few feet away under scrub trees. Men, in flowing white or gray galabias-homespun robes-smoked cigarettes outside their doorways. They fingered prayer beads and spoke in hushed tones as they boiled tea or coffee on sooty coals in small iron braziers in the shade of the eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs outlined on their flanks, were tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

It was still. The camp waited, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air a disembodied voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the Israeli side of the camp's perimeter fence.

"Come on, dogs," the voice boomed in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stood up and walked outside the hut. The invective spewed out in a bitter torrent. "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" ''Your mother's cunt!"

The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement abutting it. They lobbed rocks towards a jeep, mounted with a loudspeaker and protected by bulletproof armor plates and metal grating, that sat parked on the top of a hill known as Gani Tal. The soldier inside the jeep ridiculed and derided them. Three ambulances-which had pulled up in anticipation of what was to come-lined the road below the dunes..

There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gun-fire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-I6 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.

I had seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down in EI Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Chris Hedges, "War is a Force that gives us Meaning"

The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers.

Kevin MacDonald Understanding Jewish Influence

Israel's latest land grab is part of an old strategy: The latest legal maneuvers by the Israeli government to confiscate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem have rightly caused outrage, even among senior Israeli officials.