Israeli actions tantamount to apartheid, funded by UC investments

As University of California students and taxpayers in the United
States, we are supporting Israel’s actions through UC
investments and international aid. But many of us do not know what
we are supporting.

According to a recent Agence France-Press report, several
journalists were beaten by Israeli soldiers ““ one even had
his camera broken and film confiscated ““ when they tried to
report on how the soldiers stormed Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque
and fired tear gas canisters in response to youths throwing
stones.

This incident is not unique, nor is it a recent development.
Many other journalists have had similar experiences. So what does
Israel want to hide?

Israel’s supporters talk about security as if there were
no history of an Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip since 1967. This history includes an Israeli state
founded in 1948 on the backs of nearly 800,000 Palestinian
refugees, who make up the largest and longest-standing refugee
population in the world.

There is a system of apartheid that discriminates against
Palestinian Arabs in favor of Israeli Jews, both in the occupied
territories and within the borders of Israel (Israel, by the way,
currently consists of 78 percent of historic Palestine, while the
West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem account for only 22
percent).

This discrimination is seen in much higher poverty and
unemployment rates for Palestinian Arabs. Blatantly racist Israeli
laws include the recently passed law that says West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens may not become residents in
Israel. Likewise, the “right of return” law allows Jews
from anywhere in the world to immigrate and become citizens in
Israel, while Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes
do not have the same right.

Israel’s supporters also talk about Israel’s
security as if Palestinian security is irrelevant. The number of
Palestinian dead is more than three times the number of Israeli
dead since September 2000. In addition, Israeli soldiers dictate
every move of the civilian Palestinian population with military
checkpoints, city-wide curfews, tanks that roll through Palestinian
areas, bombs that fall in the middle of city blocks, military
incursions often lasting until the early morning hours, home
demolitions, uprootings of agricultural fields, and the erection of
a wall that confiscated huge tracts of Palestinian land in the West
Bank.

Of course, suicide bombings are immoral, but the terrorism of
the Israeli government is also wrong, and done on a much larger
scale. Suicide bombings should be criticized as an immoral tactic
of Palestinian resistance to occupation and apartheid. But such
acts should not become the center of the dialogue as if they occur
in a bubble ““ as if there hasn’t been a decades-long
occupation.

The UC system uses our money to invest in companies that do
business in Israel, such as General Dynamics, producer of the F-16
Falcons used by Israel against Palestinians; Lockheed Martin,
producer of Israel’s F-16 fighter planes; and the IBM
corporation.

The U.S. government gives more foreign aid to Israel than to any
other country in the world ““ more than three times what it
gives to all of sub-Saharan Africa. The amount is enough to
subsidize the college educations of millions of students in the
United States.

There is now a movement gaining steam calling for U.S.
universities, including all UC campuses, to divest from Israel,
similar to the movement to divest from apartheid South Africa in
the 1980s.

There are clear similarities between South African and Israeli
apartheids. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a South African anti-apartheid
activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, agrees,
saying, “I am a black South African, and if I were to change
the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank could describe events in South Africa.” The
Archbishop supports divesting from Israel.

The divestment movement, just getting started at UCLA, supports
justice, peace and equality for all the people of historic
Palestine, which includes Israel and the occupied territories. Tutu
put it well when he said, “If apartheid ended, so can this
occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will
have to be just as determined.”

We must divest from Israel and end U.S. support for Israeli
apartheid.

Smith is a UC Berkeley alumna in history and a member of
Students for Justice in Palestine.