British academics did the right thing

By Khalid Amayreh

"......The sheer injustice of this occupation has escalated rapidly of late, with the construction of a gigantic concrete wall in the West Bank, which has effectively reduced Palestinian population centers to de-facto detention camps.

As expected, the shipyard dogs of Zionism, from California to Tel Aviv, including the heads of organized Jewish communities in Britain, have been protesting wildly the UCU decision, describing it as unfair and hasty. Some of the more irate Zionists have shamelessly called the decision 'unethical', 'unconscionable' and 'immoral' as if there is anything moral about the Nazi-like treatment meted out to these helpless Palestinians for wanting to be free from the shackles of Jewish racism......

The truth of the matter is that supporters of apartheid in Israel have no more right to lecture British academics on the morality of boycotting the Jewish state than does a famous courtesan in lecturing critics on the virtues of chastity or an irredeemable thief preaching honesty. I say this because no other state under the sun embodies brutal racism and apartheid and murder and oppression against a constantly hounded and tormented people more than Israel does.

Today, Israel looks very much like Germany prior the Second World War when Jews and non-Jews alike were experiencing the poisoned, macabre atmosphere of virulent racism fostered and promoted by the Third Reich. This week, the Shin Bet, Israel's chief domestic intelligence agency, made it very clear that even legal and fully lawful activities questioning Israel's apartheid policies and institutionalized racism (e.g. that Israel is a Jewish state, not a state of all its citizens) would be strongly suppressed. In other words, non-Jewish citizens in Israel proper (let alone in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem) have no right even to use whatever legal loopholes there are to demand equality as citizens. Needless to say, this is fascism, pure, brash and simple.....

And at the top of all of this, the Israeli army has been arresting thousands of political and community leaders throughout the West Bank, including Palestinian cabinet officials, lawmakers, mayors, doctors, teachers, college professors, business leaders, students, intellectuals, journalists, religious leaders who make up the crème de la crème of the Palestinian society.This Gestapo-like madness is obviously aimed at throwing the Palestinian community off-balance and depriving the Palestinian people of competent leaders who would stand in the face of Israel's efforts to liquidate the enduring Palestinian cause.....

In the preceding years of the Second World War, the world committed a fatal mistake when it gave Nazi Germany the benefit of the doubt on the ground that maybe, just maybe, Hitler and cohorts might revert to their senses. Now, the world can't and shouldn't allow itself to make the same fateful blunder again. If Israel is not stopped now, there is no doubt that it will follow the same, the very same, footsteps of the Nazis. The writing is on the wall, even literally, as in Hebron. "