TJP

Apartheid and Occupation Lead to Violence

Byron A. Ellis – February 09, 2009

The most effective way to combat extremism is to establish international procedural and distribute justice. Levanthal noted that procedural justice is the fairness of the decision-making processes. Procedural justice involves adherence to several rules of fairness: consistency, bias suppression, accuracy, representation, correctability, and ethicality. Distributive justice, on the other hand, relates to the impact local and international political controls have on the welfare of nations, groups and individuals.

The label terrorism is a misnomer and should be discarded, since its meaning or interpretation is different for each party. For instance, Israel and their allies label rocket attacks by Israeli opponents as terrorism. On the other hand, Palestinians and their allies label Israel’s incursion and acquisition of Arab land as terrorism.

Therefore, the term terrorism, as well as freedom fighter, is in the eyes of the beholder. Hence, the label of terrorist is not helpful for achieving amicable and peaceful outcomes.

In order to achieve some level of stable relationship between discordant nations, groups and individuals, there must be an understanding of the real or perceived discord or grievances between the opposing factions. And, that is why communication between opposing factions genuinely interested in peace is so important.

In the absence of genuine communication, grievances cannot be addressed. Of course, some nations and groups benefit from adversarial relationships. Many nations’ funding is contingent on violence; likewise, funding and recruitment many fringe groups are also contingent on level of violence they can produce. However, these nations and group can be identified and isolated by the international community.

Hence, when we hear pundits and nations proclaim that they will not communicate with adversaries; we ought to conclude that they are not interested in achieving a peaceful resolution of problems and challenges.

Hamas has signaled that they are willing to talk. However, Israel has said that they are not willing to talk. Surely, if peace is achieved in the Middle East the United States will not need to provide $3 billion dollars of military aid to Israel. Thus, peace may be a disincentive to Israel.

Palestinians, like the African National Congress under apartheid South Africa, have genuine grievances under apartheid Israel; it is unlikely that peace can be achieved if those grievances are not directly addressed. Indeed, the grievances are difficult to solve, particularly when the parties adhere to extreme positions.

The imperfect American model of interaction with minorities might be a workable model for Israel. American lawmakers avoided potentially adverse racial outcomes by making necessary adjustments, albeit slow and insufficient, to mitigate minority grievances. They understood that a vibrant economy could not coexist with a highly dissatisfied minority citizenry.

Of course, Israel is not in the same situation, since their economy is funded to the tune of $3 billion dollars a year by the US government. They can continue to engage in violence without economic concerns. In the case of South African apartheid international economic pressure was a crucial contributor in the dismantling of African apartheid; it is time to dismantle Middle East apartheid.

Thus, the US funding of apartheid Israel’s military has been used to oppress and kill Palestinians. Such use of US taxpayers’ money is contrary to the often-articulated US model of fairness and democracy.

The Israeli model of dealing with the Palestinians is similar in all respects to the apartheid model that the Afrikaners practiced in South Africa.

Therefore, it is hypocritical and shameful for the Obama administration to continue supporting the last apartheid regime with unwilling taxpayers money.

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