The Jim Crow Holy Land

Israel operates two systems: One in the occupied territories (22% of occupied Palestine) where the Palestinians have no rights and then a system of apartheid where the Palestinians have minimal privileges (since they are not rights because they can be taken away by the Zionist state) in Israel "proper" or Palestine48.

Underneath this entire system is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy no different than that of White racism, White supremacists that prevailed in the Jim Crow South. An ideology that holds that one people are inferior to another and therefore must suffer discrimination, separation, injustices and humiliations.

How ironic that the very same Jewish people who worked so hard to different apartheid here in American would then cheer on and support an apartheid state elsewhere. Zionist Jews need to engage in serious self-reflection. If they are true humanists then they would oppose Israel:

many American Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel, especially those who consider themselves "liberal," have confronted bad news emanating from that country in recent years. To preserve the "fantasy, " many reject, discredit or refuse to deal with depictions of an Israel whose policies contradict their own cherished political values.

Social scientists describe as "cognitive dissonance" the condition that results from discrepancies between the image and the reality of an admired political figure. When that beloved figure is accused of immoral personal behavior or political corruption, the immediate tendency of his admirers is not to withdraw their support, but to fall back on what communication scholars refer to as "image-maintaining mechanisms." The admirer questions the reliability of the news medium or the journalists who reported that story. He casts doubt on the credibility of the report's source, or may even avoid reading or listening to any information suggesting that the idol is less than perfect.

There are limits to such exercises in reality avoidance as when, for example, the crimes of the leader become so obvious that they lead to his resignation. Such developments, of course, can be very traumatic to the true believer. Some supporters of the Communist Party in the West, for example, suffered mental breakdowns or committed suicide after the extent of Stalin's horrors became obvious in the early 1950s.

Israel has had the potential to produce serious cognitive dissonance for its supporters in this country. Members of the American Jewish community have been in the forefront of the struggle for civil and human rights, separation of church and state and for free immigration to the United States. They would have been the first to protest any attempt to impose Christianity as a state religion in America, to pass a "law of return" limiting inunigration to white Christians, or to force citizens to carry identity cards indicating their religion or ethnic origin. But those same American Jews do not question their support for a state which applies these and other discriminatory policies in its treatment of its Christian and Muslim Arab citizens.

Similarly, many of the same American Jews who led the fight against US intervention in Vietnam, and supported an unconditional withdrawal of US forces, ignore or defend the long and bloody Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the mistreatment of the Palestinian population there.

But for most American Jews their support for Israel is always made to be an exception. At heart they cannot help but be tribal in their support of a Jewish militant state, of believing in Jewish exceptionalism and in the "Chosen People" myth and using unmitigated force to protect it. In this case Israel trumps any humanitarian values.

Here is that Jim Crow Holy Land (this may now become a regular feature):

Occupied Hebron 2009

settler qh9Mf 19672

Jim Crow American South

1963 RafoL 19672