The Israeli apartheid regime finds sympathy from the global public opinion thanks to a series of myths it has created in order to whitewash all its crimes and violations of international law.
First one: No, Israel is not the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Israel has always been an ethnocratic and colonial regime, antinomic to a democracy.We break it down for you.
Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes in 1948, and had all their properties confiscated and controlled by the newly established Jewish State of Israel and given to jewish people.
To this very day, Palestinian refugees are forbidden to return to their homeland while on the contrary any jewish person around the world can come and acquire an automatic Israeli citizenship in no time.
Palestinians who survived the Nakba, who hold Israeli citizenship and live here cannot reclaim their confiscated properties and land either.
The Israeli regime has put in place discriminatory racist land and housing policies. While Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship constitute around 25% of the population, they have been confined to 3% of the territory, ghettoized.
Israeli military rule was imposed on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship between 1948 and 1966. Palestinians lived under martial law with imposed curfews and ghettos in cities like Lidda or Haifa. Massacres continued taking place like the one in Kafr Qasim in 1956.
The same military regime was then applied to the West Bank and Gaza after the occupation in 1967, and still in place.
There are 65 laws that directly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The Admissions Committees law legalized private “Admission Committees” operating in settlements established on “state land” confiscated in 1948. The law gives them almost full power to accept or reject residency applications.
It is mostly used in the Naqab (Negev) and the Galilee to enforce segregation.
The family reunification law, bans Palestinians with Israeli citizenship or residency from extending their legal status to spouses from the West Bank or Gaza, and denies couples to live together in an area of their choosing.
Meanwhile, Jewish foreign spouses of Israeli jews are granted Israeli citizenship automatically, while non-Jewish spouses can obtain citizenship after five years.
The “Nakba law” allows the Israeli Finance Minister to question state funding to institutions that criticize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state or refuse to commemorate Israel’s Independence Day, notably the commemoration of the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948) .
Israel controls all aspects of life – birth, movements, marriage, house permits – of 5 Million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who do not have the right to vote or to hold accountable all those controlling most aspects of their life.
Israeli Constitutional law states that: “only the jewish people have the right to self-determination in the state of Israel”.
The Israeli Supreme Court, often seen internationally as a guarantee of democracy and checks and balances, enforces Jewish supremacy.
The Court has upheld all the racist laws mentioned in the previous slides, and more. It has greenlighted the expulsion of entire Palestinian communities in the West Bank, such as Khan al-Ahmar or the communities of Masafer Yatta, greenlighted multiple cases of land confiscation or the blockade on Gaza.
Since 2002, the Israeli regime has killed 21 journalists and arrested 130 journalists in 2022 only.