On Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!”, celebrated novelist and Pulitzer-Prize winner Alice Walker points out that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories under Israeli control face conditions much worse than those suffered by African-Americans in the Old South under Jim Crow.
For more on Israeli checkpoints on the West Bank and the circumscribed lives of Occupied Palestinians, see the documentary “Hard Crossings.”
I’m curious about how the conditions faced by the Palestinians compares to the persecution of the Rohingya in Burma, India’s untouchables, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Kurds, and all the other oppressed groups.
The difference is that America enables Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians. It would stop immediately if America embargoed Israel in the way that we finally embargoed Apartheid South Africa. If we simply announced that American policy is to help Israel become a country of equal rights, the oppression would soon end.
I had some AA students in my science class ask me if “I was an American” when I told them my grandparents had come from Damascus.
I responded by teaching them to recite the Pledge without the extraneous commas.
Jim Crow seemed to be another comparable system of discrimination, as does former South African apartheid, to the situation of Palestinians being administered by Israel.
It should be noted that even within Israel’s own Jewish community, there exists stratas of society in which one may encounter a “glass ceiling” based upon his/her ethnic origin. Askenazi Jews are typically those who reach the highest levels of the Israeli business, military, and civilian government positions, whereas Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews encounter historical discrimination and conflict at the hands of the Israeli elite.
It was said by some that the sexual assault conviction and harsh sentence of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was due to his heritage as Mizrahi.
There are only four American-born Jews that have ever been elected to the Israeli Knesset – one being the late and notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Alce Walker also beleives Israel sold be replaced with a palestinian state. What does she really know… really?’
I don’t think the the Back experience including attempts to launch rockets into white neighborhoods. I don’t recall Backs wrapping suicide belts around their bodies and blowing up civilians on buses, in cafes, discos or holiday celebrations
Alice Walker does not realize that the Palestinian leadership does not accept a Jewish state, it only wants to replace it with a Palestinian state.
For such a good writer, she is showing a greta deal of ignorance comparing the Black experience under Jim Crow to the Palestinians experience. Next she will be accusing Israel of being genocidal.
But blacks had the basic right to retaliate against the terrorism inflicted on them. Abandoned by the US government in the Republican sellout of 1876, they were crushed by armed whites, though not without some of them using violence to defend their new liberties.
So are you saying that if the Palestinians simply surrendered their stolen land and accepted their status as an inferior race, they would get treated NO WORSE than blacks under Jim Crow? But American blacks hoped that one day the rest of the US would rescue them, while YOU intend for the Palestinians to remain disenfranchised forever since you don’t recognize the right of other Arabs to help them.
Please, please show the guts to answer this, then, Helen. Were the people of South Africa wrong to use violence to successfully blackmail the (Israel-backed) apartheid regime to surrender to Nelson Mandela?
If I were a black person under Jim Crow I would have resorted to armed revolution rather than wait 90 years for worthless white liberals (probably like you) to temporarily restore civil rights – only to abandon them again to the march of Reaganism and its more extreme sequels. We haven’t seen the end of civil war in this country.