LONDON – A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organisers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.

University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.

Since they were first launched in 2005, the events have become some of “the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar,” according to its organisers.

Its aim, they state on their Web site, is to “contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”

Though many of the details about those events were not being promoted on the Apartheid Week Web site, it did list several events being offered by Israelis.

Among them is Shir Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Centre in Jerusalem, who is scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam entitled “Could the Economic Policies of Israel be Considered a Form of Apartheid?”

In addition, Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak is screening his 2006 documentary “Bil’in Habibti,” about Israel Defence Forces violence, at Boston-area universities.

Jeff Halper, the Israel-based professor of anthropology who is co-founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was scheduled to speak on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS” at Glasgow University.

The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is “atrocious,” said David Katz, a member of Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has long fought the comparison between that country’s racial segregation and Israel’s ethnic divisions.

“They are free to do as they please, but it’s atrocious,” he said of the participating Israelis. “I think they don’t understand the analogy they are making… which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid.”

“It’s like calling things ‘holocaust’ which are not the Holocaust or terming something ‘genocide’ which is not genocide,” said Katz.

As part of efforts to counter the Apartheid Week events, one Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not an apartheid state.

“The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions,” Pogrund has said. “Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better.”

In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.

“If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also… attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.

“The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line,” he said.

Take a closer look at the arguments behind the slick movie-making and hip marketing; and it soon becomes evident that the reality falls far short of the wild claims and sloganeering; both in regard to ‘Palestine’ and to the wider treatment of Israel’s large Arab population. The shrieking, emotionally-charged claims made by this hard-left alliance simply do not stack up.

In the appalling apartheid régime of South Africa, blacks were completely isolated from white society and had no say whatsoever in political affairs. Israel, on the other hand, is the only true, pluralist democracy in the Middle East – all Arabs have the right to vote, as well as people of any other race or creed-no-one is disenfranchised. Indeed, Israeli Arabs have a strong presence both in the Knesset and throughout Israel’s political establishment.

The impression is often given that Gaza and the West Bank are kept in a permanent economic stranglehold by the Israelis, with abject poverty widespread – again, a lie and a libel. ‘Palestine’ is among the world’s largest recipients of International aid – no-one goes hungry. Take a look at the pictures below and ask yourself whether these people look as if they’re struggling to survive:

Groaning with goodies: Gaza bakery

No barefoot kids here..

The fruits of Jihad: abundant supplies of fruit and vegetables in Gaza market

The left also love to cite the security fence as evidence of their ‘apartheid’. Yet if it was built in order to exclude Arabs from access to Israel, how come they cross in their thousands daily via the many checkpoints, to work and conduct business?

The fact is that, despite the left’s claims that it constitutes a form of annexation, the fence was constructed for one thing and one thing only – security. And it has been spectacularly successful in that regard, reducing dramatically the number of Islamic terrorist suicide attacks against innocent Israelis.

Under UN Security Council Resolution 242, Israel is entitled to have defensible borders. She needs them. She is under constant threat of suicide bombers, random rocket and gun attacks – and even knife attacks, as the security video from the Qalandiya checkpoint north of Jerusalem last October, amply illustrates:

In the Alice in Wonderland world of the international left, the fact that Israel is the most anti-racist country in the Middle East is conveniently glossed over (incitement to racial hatred is a serious criminal offence in Israeli law).

In fact, the real apardheid in the region is to be found in Muslim countries – the treatment of women and non-Muslims in some of Israel’s neighbouring states would put Pretoria’s 1950 Group Areas Act completely to shame.

[Source: Haaretz]

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