When good neighbours become good friends

Welcome to Israel - land of freedom and peace.

Jerusalem Post reporting a Kadima 9 seat lead over Labour.

Olmert: Israel entering a new chapter:
"We will move to set final borders, a Jewish state with a Jewish majority."

Meaning the ghetto wall that Sharon started building into Palestine will be unilaterally declared the official international border of Israel - possibly the worst kept secret in modern international relations.

I recall it was Hendrick Verwoerd who was asked by a foreign journalist to explain Apartheid. He said, with a jolly grin, that it was just a matter of "Good neighbourliness." Could you imagine the Apartheid South Africans grabbing all the best land, building a wall around an Afrikaanerstadt, expelling most of the people who lived there because they weren't white because the over-riding objective of the state is to advance and progress the interests of one race against another by way of keeping their race (mostly colonial immigrants) in a permanent majority, and then getting the UN to accept this "two-states" solution? Well it's happening right now in Israel and the NZ govt. does absolutely nothing.

Not a good parallel? From the Wikipedia entry on Verwoerd:
His aim was to create a South African state where whites would be the demographic majority, in order to ensure that white South Africans were not politically and culturally swamped by a black African majority. In order to achieve this ten black homelands or Bantustans, were created. Blacks were given the vote in these homelands instead of in 'white' South Africa. Verwoerd argued that these were the original areas of descent for the black South African population. The homeland policy effectively made blacks the citizens of different countries. Mass population transfers occurred when blacks were forcibly moved into these homeland areas.

Israel has a subjected, incapacitated, manipulated, impoverished, infiltrated quasi-state (the Palestinian territories) that they can use for cheap labour - commuting them in and out of Israel like a tap a la the Bantustans plan. And what are the disparities?

From the World Bank. Rankings and value of average income by "economy":
GNI per capita 2004
40th Israel US$17,380
134th West Bank and Gaza US$1,120 a
a. 2004 data not available; ranking is approximate.


It's so fucked up it is approximate. So Israel can import labour from a country where people have only about 1/15th of the average Israeli income. A country forced to co-operate with it's aggressor, a country where they cannot import or export anything except through Israel. A virtual slave state.

No boycotts, no embargoes, no protestations - nothing. Why? It's not just American pressure. It's deeper than that. Maybe because the Crown has similarly built it's state on a premise even worse than that - one that has all the elements of systematic land confiscation, but no option for self-government for the original inhabitants as promised in the founding document of the country (that they don't really recognise). Confiscation is confiscation. Occupation is occupation. Shame on "our" government. You see why they can't condemn the Israeli State's land confiscations having done the same thing to their own people last year.

Search "land+confiscation" on Google and it's all Israel and New Zealand. I remember the horror of picking up a magazine in the Takapuna Grammar School library and finding the Bantustans as independent countries. This was c.1987/88 - it was a propaganda magazine issued by the Apartheid regime. There was also a South African airlines poster in one of the Geography classrooms. Racist pieces of filth. Is it any wonder I never had much respect for that institution?