Roughly half of Israel’s 5 million Jews are Jewish refugees from Arab countries or their descendants, and they received no humanitarian aid from the United Nations. To this day, the Arab states have refused to pay any compensation to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to abandon their property before fleeing their homelands. Israel has consequently maintained that any agreement to compensate the Palestinian refugees must also include Arab compensation for Jewish refugees.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/jewref.html
"When the western campus left holds its annual "Israeli Apartheid Week", presumably it's in philosophical support of the notion that you don't need to run an "apartheid" system if you just get rid of everyone who's not like you."
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I had never heard of Israeli Apartheid Week. After I posted the thread, I listened to an interview with an Iraeli who described the annual "hatefest." (my word, not his). This is from his website.
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Every March, extremists converge on campuses across the country. For a week or two, they strive to sow divisions, encourage prejudice, and incite hostility.
They come as part of "Israeli Apartheid Week," a series of lectures, exhibits and events that single out Israel for fierce attack. Students are told the Jewish state is, by nature, a racist, colonial and oppressive state. They are told Israel should be boycotted, and even destroyed. They are told this by ideologues who distort facts about the country while ignoring genuine oppression in the Middle East and across the world.
One need look no further than the event's title to understand its malignant nature. The canard that Israel is an apartheid state is an assault on the country's very legitimacy. South Africa's racist, apartheid regime was rightfully dismantled, and this campaign seeks absurdly to cast Israel — the Middle East's most progressive state and only liberal democracy — as being guilty of similar policies and equally deserving to be dismantled.
SOURCE
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In the interview he countered the ridiculous assertion with the following facts, which also can be found on the website:
There is a basic fact about Israel that can't be denied by any honest observer, whether pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-both, or altogether indifferent.
As philosophy professor Bernard Harrison notes, "Israel is in fact, for better or worse, almost a textbook example of a multicultural society."
And that truth by itself exposes claims about supposed "Israeli Apartheid" as laughable and — it's hard to think of a diplomatic way to put it — a big lie.
Israeli citizens are white, black and everything in between; they include Arabs and Jews; Muslims, Christians, agnostics and atheists; they are Kurdish, Ethiopian, Russian, Polish, Iraqi, Yemenite and more. And every Israeli citizen can vote, participate in political life, and share beaches, bars and park benches.
Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Arab. Not only do they vote in Israeli elections, but they also serve in the country's legislature (or Knesset), government, courts and army.
Arab Knesset members include those who represent mainstream Zionism parties, such as Kadima's Majalli Whbee and Likud's Ayoob Kara. But harsh critics of the state are also represented. Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, for example, was once an advisor to the late-Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.
Muslim-Arab Raleb Majadele and Druze-Arab Salah Tarif were both former Knesset members for the mainstream Labor party, and both have served as ministers in the Israeli government. (As feminst activist and self-described Muslim refusnik Irshad Manji once rhetorically asked in an Op-Ed criticizing the Apartheid canard, "Would Arabs even be eligible for election if they squirmed under the thumb of apartheid?")
Christian-Arab Salim Joubran is an Israeli judge with a permanent position on the country's Supreme Court. Before Joubran's appointment, Muslim-Arab Abdel Rahman Zuabi had served as a Supreme Court Justice.
And Arabs, such as Yusef Mishlav, have served at the highest levels of Israel's army.