At yesterday’s debate, The U.N. Should Admit Palestine as a Full Member State, presented by Intelligence Square U.S., a single word was thrown about with as much explosive power as a hand grenade: Apartheid.
Debater Mustafa Barghouthi, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a movement that campaigns for political reforms, said that if the Palestinians surrendered to injustice, the world will witness “the consolidation of a system of apartheid, where Palestinians are discriminated against. And Israel would become the worst apartheid system in the 21st century, something that nobody could be proud about.”
Such language, of course, harkens back to former Jimmy Carter’s controversial New York Times best-seller Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, published back in 2006. At the time, Carter argued a number of key points, as detailed in the wiki page on the subject, including:
*For 39 years, Israel has occupied Palestinian land, and has confiscated and colonized hundreds of choice sites.
*Often excluded from their former homes, land, and places of worship, protesting Palestinians have been severely dominated and oppressed. There is forced segregation between Israeli settlers and Palestine’s citizens, with a complex pass system required for Arabs to traverse Israel’s multiple checkpoints.
Watch the debate and check out the apartheid comments at time code 19:19:58:
The U.N. Should Admit Palestine as a Full Member State from Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on FORA.tv
