James Veverka: Is Israel truly an inclusive country?

To The Daily Sun,

Sheila Kufert claimed, "Unlike the states run by Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is safe for tourists". The states run by Hamas and Hezbollah are constantly subjected to Israel's violent and immoral military. Nobody is safe with Israel's warmongers ready to pounce on a whim. If Israel is safe for tourists, there wouldn't be an 82% drop in tourism over the last 16 months. People know better. Sixty-thousand businesses have failed and around 100 destination hotels have shut down. The southern port of Eilat is bankrupt. Israel's credit rating has been downgraded more than once, the projected gross national product has been halved, and the projected inflation rate has been doubled. The world has a very dark view of an apartheid state masquerading as a modern civilized country. It is an Ethnostate. Ms. Kufert wants readers to believe Israel is an inclusive Western democracy. It's a racist state with a two-tiered justice system. One for Jews and one for "others". One of Israel’s "Basic Laws" passed in 2018 stipulates that the right to self-determination in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories “is unique to the Jewish people” and encourages racial segregation and discrimination against Palestinians in housing by directing the state to promote the “development of Jewish settlement as a national value." This "nation-state" law follows in the footsteps of segregation, Jim Crow laws, the Indian Removal Act, and the Nuremberg Race Laws by declaring that self-determination in Israel and the occupied territories is only for Jewish people. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has written correctly, Jewish Supremacy is a subtype of White Supremacy and has been at the heart of the whole Zionist settler-colonial, ethnic cleansing, project from the beginning. All you have to do is look up "First World Zionist Congress 1897" and "Theodore Herzl". "Irgun" and "Stern Gang", too.

James Veverka

Laconia