[Peace-discuss] Israeli apartheid

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It's worthwhile for us to be aware of the nature of the principal 
client state of the US and its role in our ME war policy.  Israel has 
been termed a "stationary US aircraft carrier" and our "local cop on the 
beat" (in the words of the Nixon administration). Since its defeat of 
Nasser in 1967, it has been by far the largest recipient of US foreign 
and military aid, because all US administrations have regarded it as a 
defense against what the State Department calls "domestic radicalism" 
-- the foolish idea, occasionally entertained by some people in the 
Middle East, that the resources (primarily energy resources) of the land 
should be used for the benefit of the inhabitants and not in the first 
place for the purposes of international corporations and US global 
strategy.  But Israel is a society in serious difficulty, with an 
unviable economy that depends upon military industry and vast American 
subventions; a poverty rate greater than that of any other 
industrialized country; and internal race relations similar to -- and in 
some way worse than -- those of apartheid South Africa (and at least as 
complex: e.g., prejudice by dominant social groups within Israel against 
Mizrahim [eastern Jews] may be worse than that against Palestinian 
citizens).  Since Israel uniquely in the world is by law not the state 
of its inhabitants but rather of one racial group, whatever state they 
happen to live in, members of that racial group are not permitted to 
marry non-members -- ostensibly for religious reasons, but a majority of 
Jews in Israel are not religious. The article below, from the Israeli 
paper Ha'aretz, sets out some of the difficulties of this policy. --CGE]

	Last update - 02:53 30/07/2007 			
	The burial of civil marriage
	By Shulamit Aloni

Israeli citizens are divided by law into 12 religious groups. Each 
person is born into his own group: The Jew whose mother is Jewish is 
subject to the tyranny of the rabbis, the Muslim to that of the kadis, 
and the Druze have their own religious leaders, as do the Christians, 
the Armenians and all the others. And they cannot marry one another, 
since Israel has no civil marriage. This entire arrangement of no civil 
marriage, in a country that pretends to be democratic, came into the 
world only in order to preserve the purity of the Jewish genius.

It's true, according to religious sources, that at the time when our 
nation lived on its land, when it became assimilated, it was 
assimilated, and this was not questioned, and anyone who invalidated 
another was actually accusing him of his own defect. But that was when 
there was wisdom and the leadership understood that a minority is 
assimilated into a majority - into its language, into its culture.

On the other hand, here we have to satisfy the inclinations of the 
religious parties. Therefore, in 1970, then prime minister Golda Meir 
and justice minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira anchored in law an 
amendment stipulating that although the right of return would also be 
granted to the son and grandson of a Jew and to his/her spouse 
(apparently for demographic reasons), a "Jew" according to their 
definition was "someone who was born to a Jewish mother, or who 
converted and is not a member of another religion."
	
In Israel there are over 300,000 men and women whose mothers are not 
Jewish and who are not willing to be "reborn," with a new name, by means 
of a conversion process that forces them to accept cult laws that are 
foreign to them, to send their children to ultra-Orthodox institutions 
and to live under rabbinical supervision.

Now the justice minister has come along and, together with the chief 
rabbi, has decided to establish a new, separate group of gentiles, who 
are allowed to marry one another as long as they don't marry a Jewish 
man or woman, God forbid. That is the salvation they are being offered.

That is how the purity of Judaism, which is preserved under the watchful 
eye of the religious establishment and the justice minister, is 
preventing some of the citizens of this country and their children from 
assimilating among the citizens of the state who have Jewish mothers. 
It's true that they'll attend the same educational institutions, will 
study Hebrew and Bible and history - but they will not be allowed to 
marry "kosher" Jews, because we are the Chosen People, holy seed.

In effect the proposal of the justice minister, who believes it is 
liberal, was meant to give a donkey's burial to the agreement reached on 
the issue of "rishum hazugiyut" (registration of people living as 
couples) as a way of overcoming the failure to provide the right to 
marry in a civil marriage. This process enables people who love each 
other and who are not members of the same religion or group, as well as 
secular people, to start a family whose rights will be recognized by the 
government and the public. Now the minister and his friend the rabbi are 
establishing a separate group of religion-less people, and this disgrace 
is directed first and foremost at immigrants from the former Soviet 
Union; it's no wonder that people are beginning to organize to oppose 
it. And, in fact, the time has come for the citizens, the press and all 
the media to wake up and do something to save democracy and to prevent 
racism, which must be eliminated from the world.

I was astonished to read that some people see the establishment of a 
"sect of secular people," whose members are permitted only to one 
another and not to anyone from the outside, as a first step to civil 
marriage for all: That is not the case. Here they have buried civil 
marriage as well as the idea of registering couples. Apparently this 
proposal suits a society of messianists, who are longing to return to 
the days of Yehoshua bin Nun, when it comes to the occupation of the 
land, and a return to the times of the Temple and the sacrifices. All 
these people will probably get what they want. After all, it was their 
rabbis who ruled that one should not assimilate among the other nations: 
"... then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant 
with them, nor show mercy unto them" (alternatively: "nor allow them to 
dwell among you") (Deuteronomy 7:2).

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