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March 16th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
This week marks Israeli Apartheid Week, where students and people of conscience join together in a global protest against racism and discrimination. Across the UK, student communities are holding film screenings, webinars, and rallies, bringing attention to the racist system of Israeli rule Palestinians continue to live under.
Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has enacted laws, policies, and practices which have established an apartheid regime which affects every single Palestinian. Simply put, Palestinians like me are discriminated against just because we are Palestinian.
Across the occupied Palestinian territory Israel enforces a system which assigns superior rights to Jewish people. To give just a few examples: Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank are subject to an unfair military judicial system with 98% conviction rates, while Israeli settlers living on stolen Palestinian land are tried under Israeli civilian law.
In Israel itself, citizenship and nationality are distinct. Rights are assigned on the basis of nationality. Those defined as Jewish nationals are assigned the full menu of human rights, while Arab-Palestinian citizens are discriminated against in every aspect of their life, from housing and land ownership to access to public services.
This means that Palestinian citizens cannot even chose where to live. Admissions committees are active in hundreds of Israeli towns and filter out Arab-Palestinian applicants, often barring us completely.
In the Negev/Naqab, in the South of Israel, 40 Palestinian towns are ‘unrecognized’, meaning their Bedouin residents, citizens of the Israeli state, are viewed as ‘squatters’ on their own land. They receive no state infrastructure, like water, electricity, and other social services.
Palestinians living in exile, forced to flee Israel’s ethnic cleansing during the Nakba and their descendants, who number almost 8 million people, can’t return to their land; while Jews from around the world have the freedom to migrate to Israel as citizens.
Recently, one of Israel’s most respected human rights NGOs joined a multitude of civil society organizations, including a plethora of Palestinian organizations and scholars, in naming this reality as a system of apartheid. They rightly said that systematic racial discrimination acts as an organizing principle upholding the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians.
While a growing number of organizations have caught up with us Palestinians in recognizing apartheid, Israel has continued to intensify its racist control and domination of Palestinian lives; from accelerating the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territory, to continuing to cripple Gaza under a 15-year land, air, and sea blockade.
But we know racist discrimination isn’t limited to us Palestinians. Around the world we see racism, xenophobia, and discrimination grow, often enabled by the Israeli state’s global allies.
The knee on the necks of racialized people, from Ferguson to Khirbet Humsa, from Delhi to Jerusalem, continues to suffocate oppressed communities.
The growth of the far-right across the world is terrifying. Israel is built on the same racist and ethnonationalist ideology they share. These ideological affinities have become especially visible since the rise of far-right governments in Israel.
But racist violence is not natural or everlasting. The systems we suffer under can be defeated. Last year, millions took to the streets around the world to protest systematic racism and inequality. By coming together to demand justice, we have shaken our oppressors to the core.
Israeli Apartheid Week is just one mechanism to turn that shake into an earthquake that rebuilds our society from the ground up; and creates the place we deserve to live, in which everyone is afforded their basic rights and needs.
So that’s why I’m taking part. Because all of us deserve better. Because I know Israeli apartheid can, and will, be dismantled.
Israel can only maintain its system of oppression over the Palestinian people thanks to international complicity. For example, UK universities invest nearly over £450m in companies complicit in Israel’s oppressive apartheid regime. Universities around the UK invest in enterprises active in Israel’s illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land, or firms supplying Israel with weapons and military technology.
This is why we must take aim at the institutions that uphold racist systems of rule – like our universities – so we can have a material impact on those who profit from oppression and move a step closer to ending Israel’s impunity.
In the UK, despite the pandemic, students are taking action on dozens of campuses, with 20+ public events taking place throughout the week. Societies are hosting inspiring speakers from Palestine and beyond to educate their peers and mobilize for action.
Together we are unstoppable. Join your local IAW Event: https://bit.ly/UKIAWEvents
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