We’ve posted a couple of articles on Palestinian civil society today, and just wanted to give you some recent news about the health of Israeli civil society. First, much if not most of the Zionist ethos is bound up in the phrase “Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.” And since we’ve always heard that Zionism is an anti-democratic, fascist institution (which build an anti-democratic and fascist state), we’re having some trouble with Israeli jurisprudence that proves the exact opposite:
The Tel Aviv District Court issued on Monday a groundbreaking ruling stating that the Absentee Property Law could not be applied to West Bank lands abandoned by Palestinians during the 1967 Six Day War. The ruling joins General Attorney Menachem Mazuz’s February 2005 ruling which rescinded a government decision to apply the law to property in East Jerusalem which is owned by Palestinians who live elsewhere in the West Bank. Monday’s ruling, handed by judge Boaz Okun, holds that the state could not declare Palestinian land which was abandoned following the 1967 war as “land under Israel’s effective sovereignty.”
We’re not fans of this ruling, but there it is anyway. Where’s that fascist state we were promised? And then from the JPost article about Barghouti there was this:
However, he denied charges that Barghouti received special privileges because of his leading position in Fatah, and said that the interview he gave on Sunday to Al-Jazeera from his prison cell was not something the government could deny him. “The High Court has forbidden the government to stop Barghouti from giving interviews,” Ezra said, adding that until now he has not wanted to give them. The one he gave to Al-Jazeera was the first since his arrest in 2002. Ezra also said the government was receptive to requests regarding prisoners if they didn’t endanger Israel’s security. “He wants his wife to visit him, she wants to meet him… This doesn’t hurt the security of the state. Why not allow it?” he said.
Clearly, when international activists choose to march against the biggest human rights violator in the Middle East, their targeting of Israel is based purely on a level-headed assessment of the facts. And not on anything even close to fashionable and institutional anti-Semitism.
