Apartheid

286
broadcasting stations, are also destroyed by the Israelis with heavy military means. 714 The
latter three levels of violations of the freedom of expression and of the right to free access to
information – basic human rights according to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, to which both Israel and the USA are signatories – are the easiest and cheapest
for the oppressor. Journalists and writers are unarmed, non-combatant civilians. At least a
quarter of the Israeli weapons and ammunition, in contrast, comes entirely free of charge from
the US federal state budget.
If the events defining the Second Intifada had taken place in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia
or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq instead, then the soldiers would certainly have been referred to in
the western media as what they really are (an occupying army) and the Palestinian protesters
would probably have been referred to in the same media as ‘pro-democracy demonstrators’,
which is also a more accurate and informative description. Subsequently and consequently,
NATO bombs might very well have been dropped on Jewish targets in Tel Aviv as if it were
Baghdad or Belgrade. 715
In a sense, we are now back where we started; we have gone full circle through the
definition of apartheid. Apartheid thought has proven to be essentially and intimately
connected with apartheid violence (Section II.1). Since life in general is usually seen by
members of the elite ethnicity as a perpetual zero-sum struggle for survival (ideology), and
since they know they have military superiority, they would rather steal and fight than share
and negotiate. The nine oppressive structures of apartheid form a system, which has remained
remarkably constant throughout the 2,300 years of superficially disconnected history that we
have been investigating. This system is based on violence, a consequence of the initial
invasion, whether it is only de facto – as in the case of Alexander’s conquest of Egypt by
superseding the Persian occupiers or the UN-granted establishment of the state of Israel in
714 Campagna: Picking Up the Pieces, 2002. Israeli government ‘inquiries’ into the violence against journalists
perpetrated by Israeli soldiers during the Second Intifada left all soldiers blameless, except one verbal warning
and one suspended jail sentence, both for attacks on Jewish journalists, one American and one Israeli. The
inquiries into the deaths of at least seven Palestinian journalists, one British and one Italian journalist, all killed
by Israeli troops, found no one guilty, as was the case with scores of other shootings of journalists. In fact, the
victimized journalists were being implicitly blamed for getting themselves in harm’s way by the Israeli
authorities, a typical response or excuse offered by the enemies of the freedom of expression worldwide, either
ignorant or hostile towards the nature of news reporting. (This is in principle no different from blaming a
murder-rape on the woman for wearing a short skirt.) Non-lethal crimes against Palestinian journalists, including
over a hundred near-lethal attacks, mainly shootings, were not even considered in any of the Israeli inquiries. See
Aboudi: Israelis Fire at Reporters to Intimidate –Watchdog, 2002; Bathish, N. et al. 2004; Dadge (ed.) 2002,
2003, 2004.
715 Which, of course, would not be a good solution, either. See further Solomon: Media Spin Remains in Sync
with Israeli Occupation, 2000; Fisk: When Journalists Forget that Murder Is Murder, 2001. In its daily news
show, Tagesschau, the German public broadcaster, ARD, for example on October 22, 2000, also referred to the
Israeli occupying forces as ‘Sicherheitskräfte’ rather than as ‘Besatzungstruppen’ or something else equivalent to
their actual status. On the pro-Israeli spin in the German-speaking world, fed by guilt feelings over judeophobic
traditions and Nazi crimes against the Jews (as well as insufficient facing of inconvenient historical facts by
generations of post-war Germans, convenient scape-goating of a few Nazi leaders by means of the Nuremberg
trials, and even rewards for useful ex-Nazis, such as the rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, by the Cold War
powers, especially by the USA), see Köndgen: Die “Neuen Historiker”: Israel Revidiert sein Selbstverständnis,
2001: 147ff. See also Schechter: Perception vs. Reality In The Middle East “Press War”, no date. Binyamin
Netanyahu, on the other hand, rather implausibly states that Israel has not yet lobbied and propagandized at all in
Europe, as can, alleges Netanyahu, be seen in occasional (and, in reality, extremely diplomatic and careful)
criticism of Israel by European governments and by the EU: ‘We are to blame for much of it because we did not
do enough explaining in Europe. The Arabs have kept up an anti-Israeli propaganda campaign there while we did
nothing of the kind’. Interview by Pumpyansky, July 2002. In November 2003, the publication of an EUcommissioned
poll revealed that 59 per cent of EU citizens believed that Israel is a threat to world peace – more
than any other country scored (the USA came second in the poll of most dangerous countries with 53 per cent).
In one of many unconstructive official responses from Israeli officialdom, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs
and Jerusalem, Natan Sharansky, dismissed both the poll and the EU as ‘anti-Semitic’. See Pomeroy, R.: Israel
Outraged at ‘Peace Threat’ EU Poll, 2003; Zweynert: Israel’s Sharansky Blames “Anti-Semitism” for Poll, 2003.