Palestine prison

Taken from an April 10 audio column at prisonradio.org.  Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pa.

It is one of the ironies of history that the descendants of the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, subjected to the bitter hatreds and repression of the Nazis, have established an entire sea of the oppressed and impoverished on their periphery: the open-air prison ghettoes of Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank.

There, in full view of the world, is the latest apartheid state, where Arabs are excluded from certain roads; where their very land is carved up from beneath them and placed behind barbed wire, cyclone fences and concrete walls.

Welcome to the Israeli occupation, blessed by the U.S. government as its imperial outpost, where the lives of Palestinians are broken into thousands of pieces daily, where everything from olive trees to water sources — everything but the sun itself — is locked up, barred, caged from the people of Palestine.

And so, those who were subjected to the bitter hatreds and repression of Christian Europe, for centuries, are now subjecting another people to bitter hatreds and repression on behalf of Europe and America because of Western lust for Middle Eastern oil.

The gift of one empire (the British), and now the tool of another empire (the U.S.), Israel has become the rabid attack dog of the West — ready, willing, armed and able to strike any target its master so commands, especially Arab targets.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians suffer every tragedy an oppressed people can suffer — dislocation, occupation, imprisonment of its militants, subversion of its political leaders, seizure of its lands and the embitterment of its spirits by the apartheid regime of Israel.

Apartheid?  Yes.  For the only tangible difference between the racist repression of the South Africans and the Palestinians is that the Nationalist government exploited African labor; the Zionists neither want nor need Palestinian labor — they want only their lands. And in that sense, it may be even worse for there, in Israeli apartheid, Arab Palestinians are truly expendable.

And if you read comments in the Israeli press or listen to Israeli politicians, you find the naked racism and hatreds expressed against Arabs that, 60+ years ago, were expressed against German Jews and 60+ years before that, expressed against Indian tribes and newly freed Africans in America.

Israel is today apartheid country. We need to acknowledge this in order to mobilize against it.

Down with apartheid, anywhere in the world!