Israel's Herzliya conference..author states racisim thriving there

[tlcandie]

NOTE: I changed title so that it wouldn't be flame-oriented..I hope this is okay..

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2280.shtml

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Speaking at the third annual Herzliya conference, Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his audience: "It is not the Palestinians who pose a demographic threat, since one day they will benefit from self-determination, but the Israeli-Arab population. The most important thing is maintaining the Jewish majority in the country and improving the economy to encourage more Jews from the Diaspora to immigrate." If the Palestinians in Israel "reach 35 to 40 percent of the Israeli population, Israel will become a state with two nationalities," he said. Palestinians currently represent more than 20 percent of the total population in Israel.
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The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), an Israeli civil rights organisation, protested Netanyahu's remarks. ACRI Director, Rachel Benziman, sent a letter to the minister, in which she strongly protested his reference to a fifth of Israel's citizens as no more than a "demographic problem". ACRI demanded that Palestinian citizens in Israel be recognized as human beings that are entitled to all the rights due to any citizen of the state. "Comments, like those made by the minister today, fan the flames of hatred, racism, and discrimination" that are the daily reality for Palestinians in Israel, and "undermine the basic trust that underpins a democratic society", ACRI said. In the same statement ACRI stated that it could not "overstate the importance of the moral and legal duty of the government to respect all its citizens, to ensure their equal treatment, and to block any attempts to compromise any individual's status."

Earlier this year the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed its concerns about the "continuing difference in treatment between Jews and non-Jews, in particular Arab and Bedouin communities, with regard to their enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights" and reiterated its concern that the "excessive emphasis upon the State as a 'Jewish State' encourages discrimination and accords a second-class status to its non-Jewish citizens" (1998 concluding observations, para. 10).
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At the first annual Herzliya conference in 2000, Israeli scholars, academics, demographers and security officials proposed a number of racist solutions to the so-called "demographic threat", including controlling the Arab birth rate, deportation, and other measures to reduce the number of Palestinians living in Israel.
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ARJAN EL FASSED, EI FOUNDER, JOURNALIST

Arjan El Fassed is co-founder of Electronic Intifada and a human rights policy advisor of an international development organisation. The past few years he worked at several human rights organisations in the occupied Palestinian Territories. Between 1996-1998, he was a researcher at the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research & Studies (CPRS) and contributed research to the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights in Ramallah. Between 1999-2001, El Fassed was a staff member of the Dutch development organisation ICCO. El Fassed is a co-founder of the Palestine Right of Return Coalition and wrote extensively on international law and human rights, Palestinian politics, and the role of the European Union. El Fassed has written in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Boston Globe, The Independent, European Voice, Toronto Star, Jordan Times, Peace Review, Daily Star and the major Dutch newspapers. He is the author of "Institutional Design and Prospects for Palestinian Democratic Transition" (CPRS, 1999). El Fassed is based in the Netherlands.


Articles by Arjan El Fassed on this site:
http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi?keyword=Arjan%20El%20Fassed&fields=art_field1


More about ElectronicIraq and/or Electronicintifada's founders and bios can be found here:

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2242.shtml#arjan