Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.
Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.
Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.
So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:
While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.
One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?
ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.
And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.
And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.
But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.
And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.
And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
...
JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.
ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.
But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.
But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.
JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?
ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.
And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.
Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.
Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.
So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:
While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.
One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?
ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.
And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.
And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.
But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.
And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.
And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
...
JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.
ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.
But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.
But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.
JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?
ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.
And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.
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