by Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International Director-General
London, May 24 - An increasing number of international organizations have concluded that Israel's unequal treatment of Palestinians under its jurisdiction qualifies as the same race-based system of oppression that characterized South Africa for so many decades and led that country to ostracism from the community of civilized nations. So far that conclusion has had limited impact in the policy realm of nations and international governing bodies, for various reasons. In the meantime, human rights advocates have not rested, nor have they relied on their proven avenues to further expose the profound reality of Apartheid under the Israeli regime. New evidence comes to light each day to bolster the Apartheid characterization, including deep-seated aspects of Israeli culture that facilitate, condone, or even support such race-based discrimination, among them an ancient insistence that meat products and dairy products remain segregated in the Jewish kitchen and diet.
While ancient Jewish leaders already distinguished between mere consumption of meat and dairy together - with varying interpretations of what flesh from which creatures qualifies as "meat" - and the cooking together of those foods, or eating such foods already cooked together, in modern practice Jewish culture, which underlies much of Israeli culture and the racist Zionist ideology, strict separation obtains between not only meat and dairy foodstuffs, but between the dishes and implements used with those respective types of foodstuffs. Such insistence translates all too easily in human affairs to racist segregation and discrimination against those who, by accident of birth, differ from the hegemonic culture.
The kitchen is hardly the only realm in which the underlying culture that spawned Zionism endorses segregation: Jewish agricultural law mandates separation between differing species of cultivated crops, whether vegetables from one another or grain from grapes vines. It even bars grafting one kind of tree with another! Such racial purity sensibilities cannot help but become absorbed into the culture at large in the form of race-based segregation.
Others have noted the racist insistence Jews have on refusing to intermarry, and the characterization of converts as unfit to marry the priestly caste. Going all the way back to the Bible, Jews in general have refused to marry the converts from specific other peoples, indicating a profoundly racist attitude toward the other that has not changed in these thousands of years - yet defenders of Zionism still pretend their system does not discriminate, as if full voting rights, access to medical care, political participation, and other markers of complete democratic and civic equality for non-Jews in Israel can mask the reality of non-Jews suffering this discrimination.
And do not even get us started on what happens to grain products and homes in advance of Passover, and what that means for ethnic cleansing.