This is the 4 part of a 5 part series from The Real News Network – Class Struggle in Palestine – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5).

And, again, this was all marketed as building the state, building the economy, creating jobs. But what they’re actually doing is creating these extraterritorial zones where Israeli and international companies can come in, get cheap workers. There’s no protections for workers’ rights. There’s no environmental protection. Israel is already using the West Bank as basically a toxic dump site and moving its dirty industries there. This is only going to get worse if the World Bank and IMF-type schemes continue. And these industrial zones, they hand them over to private companies, who then have the right to set up private armies, and nobody can come in without their permission, no Palestinian officials can come in. So in essence you’re going to have private corporations on Palestinian land who have more sovereignty than the Palestinian Authority. And they don’t have to pay taxes. They get, you know, export/tariff-free access to world markets. And this totally undercuts and destroys indigenous Palestinian businesses. This is what’s happening now.

This is an aspect of the Palestinian situation that I have not heard about before. As in this country, a rising average wealth is touted as a sign of universal progress, when the average is skewed by all the gains going to a few people at the top.

Many times the rich have a better understanding of the rich in other cultures than the poor do in understanding the poor in other cultures. Of course the rich have a vested interest in maintaining this disparity, so it should come as no surprise.

The first three segments in this series were covered in my previous post Awakened by the Palestinian Intifada – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5).

The Real News Network has a 5 part series of which 3 parts are available in this post.  The introduction to the series is excerpted below.

On Reality Asserts Itself, Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada, says that Palestinians need to know that even in a country with formal legal equality, the reality can mean mass incarceration, economic inequality and racism

There are three sections to this blog post of mine.

Awakened by the Palestinian Intifada – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5)

My father is from a village called Battir, which is in the West Bank. And, interestingly, both villages have been in the news recently, Lifta because it’s one of the very few villages that was depopulated in 1948 that remains largely intact, and there are people from Lifta who are fighting to preserve the village, and ultimately to return to it. And Lifta is now the target of an Israeli plan to build luxury housing, presumably for the Jewish population. And so, recently there was a court order that stayed this, although for how long we don’t know.

And Battir has been in the news because it has been recognized by UNESCO as a site of particular importance in terms of its ecosystem and the terraced irrigation that dates back to Roman times. And it actually won an award from UNESCO a couple of years ago. And so even the Israeli organization to protect nature has petitioned the high court against a plan to build the apartheid wall through Battir. So it lies right on the so-called Green Line between the West Bank and the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948.

If you have been raised to believe that the land now occupied by Israel was a desert before the Jews came to Israel and “made the desert bloom”, how do tou reconcile this with the description of Battir. Even Lifta didn’t seem to be a desert then needed to be made to bloom before Israel depopulated it.

Palestinians Can Learn from the African-American Struggle – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5)

… 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–and I write about this–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, you know, 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 know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

This examination of shared values is the very thing that troubles me so much about the current state of the State of Israel. I just cannot say that I share the values of the government and perhaps a majority of the citizens of Israel. Ethically, what is being done to the Palestinians is just not something I can condone. (Certainly this does not imply that I condone everything that the Palestinians and other Arab/Muslim states do. I do not condone everything that the USA does.)

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist as a Jewish State? – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5)

I had already thought about the example of South Africa and it’s sudden turn-around in giving up the idea that apartheid was absolutely necessary. Seeing this interview is not what put this idea into my head.

It took a Civil War to get the people of the American Confederacy to give up their idea of this, too.

The idea that “Just because you have treated people so badly that you fear they will kill you if they ever get power” cannot be allowed to be used as an excuse to continue that treatment. If your fear is that strong, then you ought to get out and leave the people alone that you have been mistreating. Well, of course, that presupposes that some other country will have you after what you have done.