Thank you for presenting a sensible, moderate reply.

You cannot kick out all people whom you do not want to vote, refuse to let them return and then call your system a democracy. A democracy is system in which ALL persons within a community make decisions together, not just those who were left after the rest were forced out, whether through violence or more "passive" racist government policies.

As a Jew, I could not disagree with Steve Hunegs more.

Israel is a democracy for Jews, having created a separate and unequal set of laws and access to resources for Jews and Palestinians. I do not understand, Steve, with a system like this how Israel can continue to claim it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Democracy for whom?

Until Jews across the board are willing to honestly and openly address the human rights abuses and oppressions that Israel commits against Palestinians, we will not be able to heal our trauma and move forward in peace and justice. This is not anti-Jewish, it is pro human rights and justice.

For Minnesota to continue to feed Israel's system of oppression through financial support, we are all culpable.
I, and many others like me, as a Jew and person of Minnesota say enough is enough and Never Again for anyone.

And, as was seen with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) used to changed apartheid South African policy in a moral and non-violent way, Jews in both the diaspora and Israel alike, supported and participated in the tactic as just that - a moral and non-violent means to pressure unjust policy to change.

What should we treat Israel differently?

Having just returned from another trip to Cuba, for me the connected ironies embedded in Hunegs’ unevidenced article calling Israel the only true democracy in the middle east, would be laughable if not tragic in so many ways. Don’t put Israel on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, Honegs pleads. And, truly, I agree that the list as it stands is not accurate. But Israel truly qualifies as a terrorist state, while Cuba, on the list, does not.
Israel, the U.S.’s “stalwart ally” says Hunegs, is one of only 2 countries that vote yearly with the U.S. (Palau is usually the other) in the U.N. General Assembly to preserve the unjust 50-year blockade of Cuba. However, while we apply sanctions to Cuba, putting them on a list of “terrorist states”, and Hunegs rejects divestment and sanctions for Israel, the U.S. applies laybrinthine and cruel sanctions against Cuba.
Israel does not. Israeli tourists flock to Cuba. Israel does great business with Cuba. Our “stalwart ally” might understand that Cuba is NOT a terrorist state. The Haitians certainly do. With hundreds of Cuban doctors already in Haiti when the earthquake struck, with many more brought in after the quake, as well as many Haitian doctors who received their education in Cuba, the U.S. lie of Cuba as a terrorist state, and the U.S. as a savior (here come the U.S. military to stand between the Haitians and the food and water they need), is screamingly clear.
Israel, our “stalwart ally,” knows where good business is, as in fiberoptics with Cuba—business which the U.S. should have been in the middle of. It is hard for me not to recall that after the U.S. killed 600,000 Cambodians in relentless bombings— the U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs on Cambodia than in all of World War Two, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—opening the way to Pol Pot’s regime which killed about 2 million more, the U.S. blockaded Cambodia after the Vietnamese invaded, removing the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Even purely humanitarian groups like Oxfam were considered as violating U.S. sanctions. They went in anyway. This is how the U.S. applies blockade. What sense? The actions of a truly democratic nation?
What does all this have to do with Israel/Palestine? Everything, for me. I see patterns. I learn from history, regardless of who is doing the killing. I know that I cannot trust the U.S. to apply fairly and justly sanctions against governments that violate international law or support genocide, and that war crimes go unpunished. While Cuba fulfills the real international law, that of wholehearted assistance and solidarity with Haiti, and Israel violates international law by their barbarous occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while the U.S. fails in Haiti as they failed in New Orleans, and stays in the business of sponsoring coups (Honduras, Haiti…), the U.S. loses their credibility as the arbiter and namer of democractic states and terrorist states. Anyone who studies up a bit, or remembers as it happened and happens, knows that Cuban terrorism came from rightwing Cubans in Miami and elsewhere in the U.S. and was directed against Cuba – as in blowing up a Cuban airplane and a Cuban department store, and many other acts resulting in the loss of life directly and through the blockading of medical equipment, etc. Read up on the Cuban Five, 5 Cuban nationals imprisoned in the U.S. for 11 years so far for finding information about rightwing terrorist activity in the U.S. against Cuba and sharing it with U.S. authorities. It should make you sick.
As the U.S. State Department calling Cuba a “terrorist state” does not make it so, Hunegs and other Zionists calling Israel a “true democracy” does not make it so. The murderous intent and realities of the Israeli occupation stand. The topsy turvy designation of Cuba as a terrorist state and Israel as a true democracy needs to be investigated by anyone who claims the power to name, and to punish or support punishment.
Keep doing business with Cuba, Israel. Keep sending tourists there (I know you need to get away from it all, away from proximity to your occupation of Palestine.) I know that your solidarity with the U.S. is based on receiving mountains of military aid, but actually supporting the absurd U.S. blockade against Cuba is something you are perhaps too business-minded to do.
The Israeli occupation undoes the “democratic” nature of the Israeli system. Sanctions and divestment are in order. Words, names—terrorist, democracy, should be related to the facts on the ground.

Anya Achtenberg

I so respect the writer of the original article (Sylvia Schwarz) and the commentators of the current article for standing up for justice and not seeing this problem as an anti-semitic issue.

More and more Americans are realizing that Israel is not the innocent, democratic victim that it claims to be. The rest of the world realized this decades ago.

no more lies by mainstream media please - the cat is out of the bag!

Steve Hunegs, I refer you to Henry Siegman's recent Nation article "Imposing Middle East Peace." http://www.thenatio n.com/doc/ 20100125/ siegman Siegman, a prominent scholar and former director of the American Jewish Congress, says it best: "Israel has crossed the threshold from 'the only democracy in the Middle East' to the only apartheid regime in the Western world." Siegman further refers to former prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, both who warned of Israel becoming an apartheid state. Hunegs, while you are lauding Israel as "the only true democracy," the "facts on the ground," Israel's relentless drive in ethnically cleansing the indigenous people -- the Muslim and Christian Palestinians -- from their homeland tell the true story. As Siegman states, Netanyahu seems to have "succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project." But Steve, that is what the Afrikaaners of South Africa also thought. And you know what happened to that apartheid state.

add my name to the growing list of jews who DO NOT agree with steve hunegs position. i am very grateful to sylvia schwarz for her well argued, cogent analysis. ms. schwarz not only lays out the situation on the ground with incontrovertible facts (which hunegs does not even attempt to dispute, choosing instead to resort to name-calling and propaganda), she offers a way forward. boycott, divestment & sanctions (bds) has a proven track record and is non-violent. no wonder hunegs is left with no recourse but to dismiss the tactic out of hand. my guess is that hunegs and his zionist compatriots are running sacred. when jews speak out against israel, zionists lose the ability to dismiss all criticism as anti-semitism. when israel and its apologists can no longer dismiss their critics out-of-hand, they have to deal with the facts being presented. when we argue the facts, the zionists can't win. i imagine mr. hunegs knows that. we all owe a debt to sylvia schwarz for her steadfast commitment to factual analysis. thank you sylvia!

Flo,
I think you need to stop using the "as a Jew..." line around the internet to gain yourself credibility on the issue. It is an manipulative and obnoxious.

I think this was an incredibly well written and sensible reply.

If you truly believe that divesting from Israel is the right answer, then you should probably stop handing out "I love Hamas" pamphlets at your events. They are a terrorist organization and radicalizing your movement is most definitely not going to gain you any respect from the rational community at large.

Thank you Steve for the reply. Groups will continue working to build a relationship with a country that has strived for peace over the years, only to be attack from all boarders and from within.

Friends don't let friends drive drunk. In particular, they don't buy them alcohol.

Friends don't let friends oppress others and commit war crimes. In particular, they don't provide the weapons and other material support.

Despite the fact that the U.S. was a democracy, Americans campaigned against Jim Crow laws--and overcame that institutionalized injustice. "Separate but equal" was not democratically arrived at (blacks were prevented from voting according to their numbers) and it was never equal. Americans who led the campaigns for justice were true Americans.

Despite the fact that Israel has democratic structures, it prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from full participation through a variety of laws and institutions. For example, tens of thousands of "present absentees" (over 200,000 today) were prevented from returning to the homes they had been driven from after the 1948 war, although they may have gone no further than a mile or two from home--then the homes were declared "abandoned" and confiscated by the state of Israel. This has been true even in cases where the Israeli high court itself has ruled that the owners must be allowed to return--the army simply defied the court. Resources like land and water are unfairly distributed between Jews and Arabs.

That doesn't even include the 750,000 or so who were driven clear out of the new state of Israel and refused permission to return, despite the fact that Israel's entry to the United Nations was conditioned on Israel allowing refugees to return.

In the West Bank, Israeli rule is not democratic at all--Israel rules by military decrees. The separation barrier seizes large parts of the most productive land, and Palestinians are prevented from building homes in most of the rest by refusal to grant them building permits.

Currently, Israel demonstrates its awareness of how powerful nonviolent action can be by arresting and attacking nonviolent leaders in Ni'lin, Bil'in, and other centers of vigorous but peaceful resistance.

Israel continues a blockade of Gaza that is cruel and in violation of international law. Its 2009 invasion, with its destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian lives, was out of all proportion to Gazan rocket attacks (which I also denounce as unjust attacks on civilians).

My comments are the result of academic study, of living in Jerusalem for two years (1974-76), and of participation with peace teams in Gaza and the West Bank in 2005 and 2007. Those teams were joined by Israeli Jews who recognized the injustices their government and settler groups were perpetrating against native Palestinians. Those Jews, nonviolent activist Palestinians, and western supporters will one day be recognized as true friends of Jews everywhere who prevented the state of Israel from driving into a tragic dead end.

The JCRC may speak of "two states side by side," but all Israeli governments have supported "facts on the ground" to make a Palestinian state impossible--and the current Israeli government has no intention of providing the territory necessary for such a state. The obvious result of current policies is a single state. Demographics will soon give it an Arab majority--unless Palestinians are transferred by force (ethnic cleansing).

Minnesota should not be providing the resources for this tragedy. Our divestment would be in the best interest of Israel as well as Palestine.