The B’tselem website has posted a video (with a transcript) of Hagai El-Ad’s recent speech to the United Nations’ Security C0uncil. You may recall from an earlier post that Mr. El-Ad is the current president of B’Tselem: The Israeli
Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
This speech offers a clearer description of the systematic racism embedded at the heart of Israeli society than anything you will ever hear or read from a typical American news source.
Mr. El-Ad should know. He is an Israeli, an Israeli with a conscience who understands that all people, including Palestinians, are created in the Image of God.
Thus, Mr. El-Ad has the courage to call out the racism and the apartheid system that make Israel what it is today — one of the most extensive abusers of human rights in the world.
The paragraph below is an excerpt from El-Ad’s speech. I encourage you to check out the entire speech when you can.
“Consider these historical analogies: Voter suppression was a cornerstone of the American South under Jim Crow laws, but we [Israel] have gone and done one better, delivering no less than voter obliteration. As the occupied Palestinians remain non-citizens, not only can they not vote, but they have absolutely no representation in the Israeli institutions that govern their lives. Or take a look at the discriminatory planning mechanisms and the separate legal systems in the occupied territories. They are reminiscent of South Africa’s grand apartheid. Granted, neither analogy is a perfect fit, but history does not offer precision: rather it offers a moral compass. And that compass points towards rejecting Israel’s oppression of Palestinians with the same unwavering conviction with which humanity’s conscience rejected these other grand injustices.”
