On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

The most recent research has noted how uniform Israeli legal, economic, and cultural policies have become on both sides of the Green Line. The de facto and more invisible apartheid has been replaced by racist legislation in the Knesset and open policies of discrimination. It may be a different version of apartheid, but the Israel of 2014 is a state that segregates, separates, and discriminates openly on the basis of ethnicity (which in American parlance would be race), religion, and nationality. Since the reference to apartheid has become common in the corridors of power as well as among activists, one can see why the inventive group of activists in Canada who initiated Israel Apartheid Week on their own university campus inspired so many others in the world to follow suit. The phenomenon has become so widespread (now also in Israel and Palestine) because it resonates with what people knew is happening on the ground due to the growth of the ISM (the international solidarity movement). It has provided an alternative source of information to the distorted reports of the mainstream media in the West, in particular grabbing public attention in the United States when Rachel Corrie, a young activist in the ISM, was brutally killed by the Israeli army.