Uma série de cartoons muito interessantes sobre a guerra no Libano e na Palestina pode ser encontrada aqui :
Desculpem o longo texto em Inglês, mas penso que é uma análise interessante ao Estado de Israel
“By Bruce Dixon,
The Black Commentator,
19 August 2006
Imagine,
if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh
class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their
ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed
forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and
accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security,
educational and related benefits denied all others.
Second class
citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the
benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity
documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police
at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the
country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not
recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested
without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally
apologized for, commonly occurs.
Citizens of the eleventh class,
really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class
or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden
in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own.
The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions
weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints
manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel
a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a
farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating
searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return.
Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with
protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government
funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and
pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted
generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry
weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former
inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory
by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.(…) [Continua…]
Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and
held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is
equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means
including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives
of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal
assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others
times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping
apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these
citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study
or work abroad are denied re-entry.
The apartheid state in
question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli
Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin.
The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but
limited rights under the law including token representation in the
Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are
Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in
Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something
different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk
nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass
deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of
whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of
the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public
knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land,
without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.
The
difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media
bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities
subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per
year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from
news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for.
The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli
occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might
find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast
media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or
its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions
of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military
occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of
every administration since Harry Truman’s Israel is “a democracy”,
whatever that word has come to mean.
Though news stories in the
US talk about autonomous “Palestinian areas” allegedly controlled by
Palestinian authorities, often referring to Gaza and the West Bank by
name, actual maps displaying the geographic boundaries of the so-called
Palestinian controlled areas are rarely seen by American viewers, let
alone maps comparing the size of Palestinian areas year to year, or
showing the steady encroachment upon Arab land and water resources year
to year by Israeli settlements, military outposts, Israeli-only roads,
free fire zones and Israel’s wall. The massive and militarized
apartheid wall, as the rest of the world calls it, is termed a
“separation barrier” or a “separation fence” in the US media, an
understandable precaution against hordes of terroristic former owners
of the land who lurk just outside.
Still, when you Google the
terms Israel + apartheid, you get 5.5 million hits. A lot of somebodies
somewhere are making the connection without the help of CNN, ABC or Fox
News.The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking.
Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors
with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military
establishment in the region. As Noam Chomsky observed back in 2004:
“Not
discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel’s
nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as
“dangerous in the extreme” by the former head of the US Strategic
Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat
they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response.
The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military
analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and
technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from
the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but
because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high
tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced
jet bombers, F16I’s, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to
Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used
to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 …
“The old South Africa
bombed, strafed and invaded all its neighbors with some regularity,
crippling their commerce and extracting horrific death tolls from
refugee camps and other civilian targets. The last time Israel invaded
and occupied Lebanon, it left 30,000 corpses.
White South
Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling
over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country’s
black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans.
Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the
fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and
Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their
supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and
hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass
deportations and ethnic cleansing.
White South Africans
constructed for themselves a bogus scriptural narrative in which the
God of Abraham promised them somebody else’s land, and brought it into
modern history with the embellishment that they were holding the line
for the free world against godless communism and the black menace. How
similar is Israel’s line that European Jews are promised the land of
Muslim and Christian Arabs, and that they now hold the line for the
free world against radical Islam and those ungrateful brown people?
We
at Black Commentator have to believe that if the American people knew
the truth about what their tax dollars pay for in Israel and what is
left of Palestine, there would be a deep and widespread revulsion,
similar to that occasioned by US support for apartheid in South Africa.
But there are important differences between that time and this one.
Though unspeakably odious, racist South African was only marginally
important to US interests. By contrast, the maintenance of Israel’s
apartheid regime, essentially a white hi-tech and military outpost in
the middle of all those brown people sitting atop a large share of the
world’s proven oil reserves is absolutely central to US foreign policy
for the foreseeable future. The US is Israel’s banker, its arms depot,
and its principal diplomatic sponsor. The US is far more complicit in
the crimes of the Israeli state than it ever was in South Africa.
Racism
and apartheid being what they are, and our historical experience in
America being what it is, African Americans have a crucial role to
play. African Americans have seldom supported US imperial adventures
overseas as readily as whites. Our American experience inclines us to a
skeptical appraisal of our government’s means and motives at home and
abroad. Even though we live as much within the media bubble as white
America, where images of the broken and mangled families, the
incinerated homes and bombed hospitals are hard to come by, our
skepticism leads us to sympathize with those who live at the sharp end
of US foreign policy far more often than do our white neighbors.
Our
first duty is to tell the truth to each other. We must combat among
ourselves the bogus historical narratives which permit indifference to
US policy in the Middle East in general, and support of Israeli
apartheid in particular. The churchgoers among us urgently, publicly
and repeatedly must confront and debunk the nonsense which holds that
“wars and rumors of wars” are something predestined to happen in the
biblical holy land for what they are – bad scripture and fake history.
We need to interrupt, correct and school everyone who talks to us about
a “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land, as though some raggedy fool
with a suicide belt, or a few hundred fighters with small arms are or
ever have been equivalent to the devastation wrought by the established
gulags, checkpoints, airborne firepower, economic strangulation, house
demolitions and nuclear armed might of the Israeli state. The two sides
do not have access to anything like equal means of inflicting violence,
and so cannot be equally culpable or equally responsible for stopping
that violence.
We need to catch up with the rest of the
civilized world, and talk about what we can do to emphatically withdraw
our support from the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral and
illegal occupation regime. The Presbyterian church, for example, has in
the past considered selective divestiture from Israel and from US
companies who profit from the occupation, as have the Anglicans. Both
might do so again. What can our churches, our unions, our local elected
officials, our young people do? What will we do?
Apartheid in
South Africa eventually bit the dust mostly because the inhabitants of
that country, black, brown and white resisted it, putting their bodies
and lives on the line. Their resistance was aided and abetted
materially, financially, politically and spiritually by people of good
will the world over. Someday the sun will rise on a post-apartheid
Jerusalem, one that belongs to all the people who live there of
whatever origin. This is bound to happen because Palestinians as well
as substantial numbers of Israeli Jews do and will continue to resist
the regime. They will do what they can. What will we do?”
Copiado de http://lebanonheartblogs.blogspot.com