SHLAIM, Avi. Jewish Israeli Professor Avi Shlaim (Oxford University) slams Israeli “rogue state” & "apartheid"

Jewish Israeli Professor Avi Shlaim, is Professor of International Relations at prestigious Oxford University, UK ,and the author of “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World” and of “Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace” (for biographical details of this eminent Jewish scholar see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Shlaim ).

In a recent article entitled “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe” published in the UK Guardian (7 January 2009) , Professor Avi Shlaim reviewed Israeli conduct over 6 decades: “The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians … This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so. “. [1].

[1]. Avi Shlaim, ““How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”, Guardian, 7 January 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine .

Avi Shlaim (emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University and the author of “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World”) (2018): “As Ahmad Tibi, the Palestinian member of the Knesset, has often remarked, Israel is a democracy for the Jews, but a Jewish state for the Arabs. Israel within its original borders is still a democracy in the narrow sense that its Palestinian citizens have the right to vote. Greater Israel, Israel plus its colonies on the West Bank, is emphatically not a democracy; it is an ethnocracy, a political system in which one ethnic group rules over another. There is another name for this state of affairs – apartheid. Any doubt on this score was finally removed by the recent law which declares Israel to be “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. As a “basic law”, this becomes part of the country’s constitution. It asserts that the Jewish people have an exclusive right to national self-determination in the state of Israel. This law stands in complete contradiction to the 1948 declaration of independence, which recognises the full equality of all the state’s citizens “without distinction of religion, race, or sex”. Arabic was demoted to a “special language”, from being an official language alongside Hebrew” (Avi Shlaim, “Palestinians still live under apartheid in Israel, 25 years after the Oslo accord”, The Guardian, 13 September 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/palestinians-still-face-apartheid-israel-25-years-after-oslo-accord ).