The simplest response to the “apartheid” charge is the one Americans once used to counter Soviet propaganda: Just look at the direction of the population flow. It turns out Arabs and Muslims are voting with their feet in favor of the “apartheid state."
Evelyn Gordon, Why Do Arabs and Muslims Keep Trying to Move to the “Apartheid State”?
Ramzi Abu Hadid, a Jordan-based Palestinian journalist, writes about Israel, The "Apartheid State" That Minorities Keep Struggling To Get Into:
Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the "Apartheid State"? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East? In Egypt, Syria, and Iran, for example, government officials put journalists in jail, but Israel is the only country in the region where one small journalist nobody has ever heard of can put a government official in jail.True, when Hadid writes about:
In the past few decades, many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the "Apartheid State" than they do among their Muslim "brothers".
Has Ashrawi ever asked herself how come dozens of Christians and Muslims from neighboring Arab countries and Africa try to infiltrate the border into Israel every day, or how come so many of her fellow Christians want to live in the "Apartheid State"?
Is Ashrawi aware of the fact that while Christians are being persecuted and slaughtered in the Arab world and Africa, the Jewish state remains the safest place for them to live? Is she aware that the Christian population in Israel is on the rise while in the Arab and Islamic world it is dwindling -- and even faster in places such as Nigeria, Egypt and the Sudan where Muslims are slaughtering Christians?
the thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life?--he does not give details.
But Evelyn Gordon does.
Referring to Ramzi Abu Hadid's article, Gordon also addresses the question Why Do Arabs and Muslims Keep Trying to Move to the “Apartheid State”?:
Abu Hadid doesn’t provide hard numbers, but the data amply prove his claims. During the first 11 months of last year alone, for instance, 13,851 illegal migrants entered Israel from Sinai; the biggest contingents were Muslim refugees from Sudan and Eritrea. And the risk of being shot by Egyptian guards is just one of the dangers they braved to reach “the apartheid state”: Migrants also face horrific abuse from the Sinai Bedouin who smuggle them over the border.The standard rebuttal to the Arab claim that Israel is an Apartheid state is to simply give the numerous examples proving the huge degree to which Muslim have integrated into Israeli society--as per the videos here (in Arabic), here (by Daniel Prager) and here (by Elder of Ziyon).
As for Palestinians, those who “try to infiltrate into Israel every morning” are only part of the story. To that, add the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have moved to Jerusalem in recent years rather than remain on the Palestinian side of Israel’s West Bank security barrier. Then add the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought and obtained Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli Arabs.
Altogether, some 350,000 Palestinians have acquired citizenship through “family reunification” since Israel’s founding in 1948, according to veteran journalist Nadav Shragai. But the numbers surged following the 1993 Oslo Accord – i.e., precisely when Palestinian statehood for the first time looked like a real possibility: In 1994-2002, fully 137,000 Palestinians acquired Israeli citizenship through marriage. The numbers have since dropped drastically, but that isn’t because Palestinian demand has fallen: It’s because in 2003, Israel enacted new restrictions on family reunification in response to the second intifada.
Now it turns out that the clearest testimony to the fact that Israel is not an Apartheid state is furnished by the Muslims who make very clear that they prefer to live in Israel.
Maybe it has something to do with the massive Apartheid that is prevalent throughout the Muslim world.
Technorati Tag: Israel and Apartheid.
If you read Huffington Post or its ilk they will tell you the reason is that the Jews have rendered the Arab world uninhabitable and there's no place left for the Arabs to live.
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