This Duck Is an Apartheid Duck
►http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/22/this-duck-is-an-apartheid-duck.html
Richard Goldstone and others who argue against the Apartheid designation try to separate Israel from the West Bank. But anyone who has traveled through Israel and the West Bank knows that the green line exists on paper only. In every other sense, between the river and the sea, there is one state, there is one regime, and that is the Israeli regime. The policies of perpetual occupation, soon entering its 45th year, effectively result in the Israeli regime’s total domination of the territory, its borders, its resources, the use of force within them and the continued colonization of that territory.
Across the entirety of the territory ruled by the Israelis there are 12 million people. Half of these people are Palestinian and 1.7 million of them are relegated to second-class citizenship through a system of direct and indirect discrimination. Another 4.3 million living in the West Bank and Gaza have no right to vote for the ruling regime at all. Further, the Israeli government refuses the human rights of approximately 4.6 million Palestinian refugees—many in refugee camps just across the border—to return to their lands.
And why is that? Why doesn’t Israel grant voting rights to all the Palestinians it rules? Why does Israel systematically prevent Palestinian refugees from exercising their human right to return?
Former Israeli prime ministers agree on the answer. Ehud Olmert explained that voting rights for Palestinians would mean that “the State of Israel is finished.” Ehud Barak said, “The simple truth is, if there is one state, it would have to be either binational or undemocratic.”