70 percent of the West Bank and 80 percent of East Jerusalem. While restricting Palestinian development, Israel builds housing for its people in the occupied territories.
Kawther Salam: Israel is a Racist State Elias Davidsson: Memorandum on institutionalized racial discrimination by and in the State of Israel
Zionism rejects the idea of a modern secular state, based on equality of all citizens. Zionism predicates a state where Jews have privileged rights. Thus, according to Israeli law, a person born in London, who has never visited Israel, does not speak Hebrew and professes atheism, is granted automatic Israeli citizenship, if he can produce proof from a rabbi that his mother was considered a Jew, while indigenous Palestinian inhabitants who were born to Christian or Muslim parents are at best tolerated but never considered as full fledged partners in Israeli society. Racial discrimination, as defined in international law, is thus not only reflected in Israeli laws and policies, but is grounded in the very nature of Israel as a Jewish state, in public perception and in the Zionist credo.
Rabee' Sahyoun: Why Zionism Is Racism (Also here.) Kathleen and Bill Christison: Zionism as a Racist Ideology
When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian homes, business, olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians. But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of Zionist Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."
Human Rights Watch, 2004-10-18: Israel destroys Palestinian homes as punishment
The group, based in New York, says 16,000 people have been made homeless in southern Gaza over the past four years, regardless of whether their homes posed a genuine military threat. ... [Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said:] "Part of the rationale here seems to be to punish civilians for the conduct of militants. The people whose homes are destroyed are, for the most part, just ordinary civilians."... Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency [said] ... "Most of what we have seen here ... over the past two weeks is in gross violation of international humanitarian law ..."
Could the real reason for Ariel Sharon's desire Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza as hostages, to be allowed water and electricity (which Israel controls) for just an hour a day and thereby to be reduced to even more abject misery and desperation, if any Palestinian should continue to oppose Israel's continued attempt to destroy Palestinian society? Page 139 of 218