The Australian’s Apartheid Cloud
May 7, 2012 13:05 by Simon PloskerAs for Khatib’s charge of apartheid, his own bio on his own extremist writings says that he is a Ph.D student in Anthropology at the University of Haifa and a teacher at Western Galilee College in northern Israel. In addition, Khatib himself challenged the Citizenship Law in the Israeli High Court, as is the right of all Israeli citizens irrespective of ethnicity.
Are these indicators of Israeli “apartheid”?
Ha’aretz explains the current situation:
The Citizenship Law is temporary legislation that only allows reunification in Israel of Palestinians with an Israeli spouse if it involves a Palestinian husband who is at least 36 years of age or if it involves a Palestinian wife who is at least 26.
The decision to refuse to allow couples to live together in Israel was initially taken by the government in May 2002. The Knesset affirmed the policy the following year and has since extended its initial expiration date twice. The extensions came despite petitions filed in the High Court of Justice challenging the provision.
Israel generally grants citizenship to spouses of Israelis in a gradual process. In the spirit of this process, a similar process was established for the naturalization of spouses of permanent residents, though the process is a little longer. A 2002 temporary order excluded Palestinian spouses from these processes and barred them from becoming Israeli citizens.
The Australian paints these restrictions as grounded in racism rather than security concerns. Even without such security issues (the Citizenship Law was passed during a period of sustained Palestinian terrorism), every sovereign state has the right to impose its own immigration and citizenship regulations.
Which is all the more hypocritical considering that Australia exercises stringent restrictions on immigration and citizenship. Indeed, there is nowhere in the world that exercises open and unfettered immigration policies.
More evidence of Lyons’ lazy journalism appears in this charge:
Israel does not allow Palestinians living in Jerusalem to vote in national elections, and if they leave Jerusalem for three years they lose their residency.
This statement is simply false. Palestinians living in Jerusalem have the right to become Israeli citizens and therefore to vote in national elections (they already have the right to vote in municipal elections). Most have chosen not to exercise this right. Israel does not prevent them from doing so.
John Lyons’ story is a shoddy, one-sided and inaccurate piece of journalism. Changing the original and offensive headline is not enough. Send your considered comments to The Australian – letters@theaustralian.com.au
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Image: CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/pareeerica.
Allen Suss
5:07 pm
May 07, 2012
Strange, that Israel is signalled out as an apartheid state, when in fact many Africans are crossing the Egyptian border to reach Israel. Hardly an Aparthaid State.
Australia has deported spouses, and even children, from Australian shores, because they don’t fit the immigration laws, and nobody in Australia suggests that the government is racist, or following a policy of apartheid.
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Trickster
6:00 pm
May 07, 2012
Allen Suss is right. In light of all this, it’s no wonder that Lyons’s and his “newspaper” a disgusting quasi-antisemitic propaganda site with utmost malicious intent against Jews…
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Charles
7:39 pm
May 07, 2012
Has anyone asked about immigrating to an Arab or a Muslim country ? Not that any sane person would want to because their inhabitants are attempting to escape.
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dbdent
10:06 pm
May 07, 2012
If this is a sign of things to come then the Jews of Australia are in real trouble
Mind you the Aussies probably practice apartheid better than most – pot calling the kettle black –oops ! am I allowed to use that word?
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Allen
2:27 pm
May 08, 2012
OK, I am prepared to take note of dbdent, can I have some real examples of apartheid as practiced in Australia. Or is this just a wild statement to make you feel better.
It’s easy to throw untrue statements, hoping there may be an element of truth. You have just proven that.
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Allen Suss
1:22 am
May 08, 2012
Just to let people know, The Australian newspaper is not anti Israel nor anti Semitic, in fact the very opposite, a great supporter of Israel. But the article was a very poorly written, and perhaps should have been better edited.
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Brent Pudsey
1:49 pm
May 08, 2012
Well written peice which answers critics of Israel in a concise and clear manner. There is always an issue about spouses immigrating to a new country and becoming citizens. This has been a source of contention in Canada as well.
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Ed Frias
5:35 am
May 09, 2012
Arabs CANNOT make peace with Israel. Without Israel to blame for all the death, poverty, destruction, misery and oppression across Islam, who will the Islamic people blame?
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Ed Frias
5:38 am
May 09, 2012
Israel already has 1.5 million Arab citizens. They can vote, hold jobs and run for public office. The laws are not Koran-based, but Muslims are free to pray and worship as they wish.
Israel will not let in millions of Palestinians, because they know what would happen next. If you think the killings are bad now, wait till the Arabs don’t have to cross a border, or get through a checkpoint to find a Jew to murder. Wait till they live right among the Jews and they can kill a Jew just by walking across the street and shoving a knife in his gut. Does the word “Kibbutz Metzer” mean anything to you? Google Kibbutz Metzer 2002
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michael Burd
3:03 pm
May 10, 2012
”See last paragraph ………….
EU piggies won’t go to market
by: Greg Sheridan, ”Foreign Editor ”
From: The Australian
May 10, 2012 12:00AM
THE European project is dead, or dying. It needs to be reborn as a new project, of friendly independent countries, before the damage it is doing extends throughout the entire globe.
The central vision of an integrated European Union cannot work. It was one of the great wrong turns of history, and no one in any other region anywhere in the world wants to emulate it. It is struggling to avoid its destined fate in the dustbin of history.
The death throes are ugly and dangerous. The EU is exacerbating Europe’s economic crisis. It does this on several levels.
The first and most important is the tendency it promotes for national governments and their legislatures to lose the sense of responsibility for their own actions and their own fates. It gives national governments an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for the economic consequences of their actions. This is always a temptation in democratic politics. Now democracy itself is suffering reputational damage as a result of the European paralysis.
In France we saw the triumph of a presidential candidate who wants to cut the retirement age from 62 to 60 for some workers. The new president, Francois Hollande, wants to increase the size of the state. He wants to shrink the budget deficit, but mainly by increasing taxes. Yet the state already accounts for a staggering 56 per cent of French gross domestic product.
According to a study by the European Central Bank, cited by the opposition’s Joe Hockey in his recent important speech on the entitlements crisis throughout Western democracies, 19 EU countries have unfunded pension liabilities for their existing citizens of E30 trillion ($38.7 trillion). France alone has unfunded liabilities of E6.7 trillion.
But France is a beacon of economic success compared with Greece. The Greek election shot neo-Nazis into parliament. The two main parties, centre left and centre right, were between them reduced to a minority, with extremes of Left and Right flourishing. What the extremes have in common is a determination to avoid reality. They are rejecting austerity, and that sounds right. Who wants austerity? But in the European context, austerity also just means paying your bills.
Margaret Thatcher was right. The finances of a nation are ultimately the same as the finances of a family. Debt can sometimes be a good strategy, but eventually you cannot spend more than you earn. Britain is now in recession because it is trying to take control of debt. In Spain, unemployment is 24 per cent and rising. In The Netherlands, the government has just fallen because a right-wing party hates the euro.
Europe’s failure to deal with debt, entitlements and massive, unregulated Muslim immigration from north Africa is breaking the European social contract apart.
In the recent French presidential election, Marine Le Pen of the far-Right National Front won a plurality of working-class voters in the first round.
A crisis this big has many contributing causes and many diverse attributes. But one institutional key to the whole European mess has been the ability of national governments to avoid responsibility. The Greeks believe they should never pay because the EU will always pay. No one can control immigration because internal European borders have been removed and EU bureaucracies and courts prevent national governments from functioning effectively in this area.
The EU is always the bailout clause for any government.
But this means that, far from elevating democracy to a supra national level, Europe has drained democracy of its meaning, and therefore of its central function — making electorates take responsibility for policies and their outcomes.
The collapse of European democracy points up the overwhelming superiority of the Westminister electoral and political system. This is because the Westminster system is designed to deliver legislative authority to the executive government. Westminster system nations have been notably reluctant to give up national sovereignty and national currencies. Few choose their main house of parliament through proportional representation.
The EU acts not only to drain democratic responsibility from national governments, but to prevent flexible economic response. Notably, the euro countries cannot devalue their currencies, but they also have difficulty controlling social welfare, reforming industrial relations and controlling their borders, all of which are elements of policy necessary to deal with an economic crisis.
Most European nations use proportional representation, which almost guarantees minority governments. It is an irony of the present situation that the two greatest exemplars of Westminster democracy, Britain and Australia, have minority governments. But this is an anomaly for both countries, and both are more poorly governed because of their minority governments.
The best-run nation in the West today is Canada. Its government moved from minority to majority status by campaigning against a carbon tax.
Australia has introduced some of the pathology of minority government through the expansion of the Senate, which is tied constitutionally to the size of the House of Representatives. This was disguised in the Hawke/Keating years because the Liberals passed Labor’s economic reforms and the Australian Democrats passed its social agenda. Even under John Howard the Australian Democrats let key reforms, such as the GST and industrial relations reform, go through. But in the Greens we now have a very European-style irresponsibility lodged in the heart of our system. Whichever road we travel, we shouldn’t emulate any aspect of European governance.
• Many readers were surprised, as I was, to read a headline in The Weekend Australian: Living under the cloud of Israel’s cruel apartheid. The headline did an injustice to the story, which only used the word apartheid in reporting the comments of one person who was interviewed. The editor of this august journal has confirmed to me that the headline was a mistake, the sort that creeps into newspapers where staff are always battling the pressure of deadlines. The Australian believes, and certainly I personally believe, the word apartheid has no application to Israel, which is a democracy in good standing, which extends basic rights to all its citizens, whatever their race or creed. Too often the misuse of such a word is designed to demonise Israel, wholly unjustly. In this case, it was just a mistake.
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michael Burd
3:17 pm
May 10, 2012
Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian is generally fair and balanced when reporting the Israel/ Palestinian, Arab, Muslim conflict however their new Jerusalem based correspondent John Lyons is more suited at Fairfax’s al’ age [ NYtImes, Guardian's Australian Arabist Branch down under ]
Lyons likes only to present to his editors only bad news stories about the Jews, he would very rarely submit a good news story about Israelis and likes to portray Israel as the bad guys .
I hear all the Israel based foreign correspondents meet in some bar in Jerusalem and make a pact who can demonize Israel the most . Funny how they all feel safe in Israel unlikely if they were to vilify Say Syrians, Iranians Lebanese or Palestinians on a daily basis they would feel safe living there in those countries…
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Rita Ahnefeld
7:27 pm
Oct 29, 2012
Michael, you are very right.
Rather, the EU Commission is a dictatorship under Barroso and Van Rompuy.
Meanwhile, Barroso is also old Maoist yet.
Many regards from Germany
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Mr. Light-Bright
10:39 pm
May 15, 2012
I know many Jewish families are strict about interracial-marriage but it never truly is a a life/death scenario (like it is in many Islamic cultures relating to the women).
I hope Israel stays predominantly Jewish… does that make me a racist : ( ? maybe I am a self-hating Canadian (we Canadians racially mix A LOT)… I understand the needs of a unique identity (take Egyptian Coptic for instance).
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Ma un articolo imparziale, ce lo possiamo aspettare dal NYT? « Bugie dalle gambe lunghe
7:19 pm
May 24, 2012
[...] a vivere con lui in Israele: la stessa accusa l’ha avanzata, solo poche settimane fa, The Australian , quando ha tentato di dipingere Israele come stato di apartheid, sulla base delle sue leggi [...]
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Not All Op-Eds Are Equal in the New York Times | The Conservative Papers
2:08 am
May 25, 2012
[...] and does not have the same rights as her husband to live with him in Israel: We’ve heard the same charge only a few weeks ago in The Australian, which attempted to portray Israel as an apartheid state [...]
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Not All Op-Eds Are Equal in the New York Times « Iran Aware
3:03 pm
May 25, 2012
[...] Related content: The Australian’s Apartheid Cloud [...]
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