Jim Crow and the Palestinians

By Angela Davis

Counterpunch October 8, 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/08/jim-crow-and-the-palestinians/

The controversy generated by Newt Gingrich's outrageous
statement last year that Palestinians are "an invented
people" should have led to greater caution in the
formulation of politicians' public statements on Israel
and Palestine. However, this seems not to have been the
case: Mitt Romney recently offered the judgment that
"Palestinians have no interest in peace" as if he were
making an uncontested factual observation.

This was the moral equivalent of saying that African
Americans were never interested in ending Jim Crow or
that black South Africans did not want to see Apartheid
dismantled.

It is revealing that Romney proposed this
characterization of Palestinians' political stance in
the same speech (at a fund-raiser among the ultra-
wealthy in Florida) in which he insisted that 47
percent of the people in this country believe that they
are entitled to government assistance and do not want
to "take personal responsibility and care for their
lives."

The convergence of backward positions regarding
governmental guarantees of universal availability of
food, health care, housing, and other necessities and
retrograde policies on settler colonialism practiced by
Israel might be expected. But the Democratic Party
scarcely fares better when it comes to Israel and
Palestine.

At its recent national convention, the party leadership
chose to disregard voting preferences of delegates by
passing a two-thirds voice vote - despite the fact that
the convention's oral response clearly indicated
otherwise - asserting that Jerusalem is the capital of
Israel. Such flagrantly undemocratic behavior summons
up such past moments in convention history as the
conduct toward Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party in 1964.

In my home state of California, elected officials have
gone so far as to encourage the violation of First
Amendment rights in order to control opposition to
Israel. Largely in response to University of California
students' support of the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions campaign against Israel, state legislators
recently passed an Assembly Bill (HR 35) that, while
unbinding, calls upon campus authorities to restrict
student activism that is critical of Israel.

Such desperate measures implicitly proclaim that
curbing criticism of Israel is more important than
safeguarding constitutional rights. Perhaps those who
support these measures fear the increasingly widespread
use of the "apartheid" label to describe Israel,
employed not only by students but also by such
prominent figures as President Jimmy Carter and
Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

If they fear the emergence of a new anti-apartheid
movement, this time directed against Israel, they may
very well be correct. The BDS movement is rapidly
gaining support: this past spring, the Eighth Annual
Israeli Apartheid Week was observed on campuses in
South Africa and throughout Europe, North America and
the Arab World.

Shortly after the passage of California Assembly Bill
HR 35, the University of California Student Association
passed a strong resolution that not only opposed HR 35
but recognized "the legitimacy of boycotts and
divestment as important social movement tools" and
encouraged "all institutions of higher learning to
cleanse their investment portfolios of unethical
investment in companies implicated in or profiting from
violations of international human rights law, without
making special exemptions for any country."

We here in the U.S. should be especially conscious of
the similarities between historical Jim Crow practices
and contemporary regimes of segregation in Occupied
Palestine. If we have learned the most important lesson
promulgated by Dr. Martin Luther King - that justice is
always indivisible - it should be clear that a mass
movement in solidarity with Palestinian freedom is long
overdue. _______________

Angela Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita,
University of California Santa Cruz and a member of the
jury for the 2012 Russell Tribunal on Palestine. She is
author of many books including "The Meaning of Freedom"
and New Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass's
"Narrative of a Life of a Slave," both published in the
Open Media Series by City Lights Books,
www.citylights.com

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