Francois Fillon: French conservative candidate's home raided

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The Paris home of France's conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon has been raided by investigators, French media report.

The search was part of an investigation into an allegedly fake job given to his wife. He denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Fillon has vowed to continue his presidential campaign, despite growing pressure for him to step down.

He was once seen as the favourite to win the election but his poll ratings have dropped since the scandal emerged.

The allegations circling around the Fillon family focus mainly on his Welsh-born wife Penelope, who is also reported to be facing an investigation.

The Le Canard Enchaine newspaper alleges she was paid €831,400 (£710,000; $900,000) over several years for working as a parliamentary assistant for Mr Fillon and his successor, but had no parliamentary pass - raising questions over whether she did the work she was paid for.

The raid on Thursday morning happened as the candidate visited winegrowers in southern France. His parliamentary office had already been searched last month.

Many on the right will see the operation as another sign of how the scandal has totally eclipsed Mr Fillon's ability to run a campaign, the BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris reports.

For the first time since the affair broke out a month ago, there is open dissension in the ranks about his candidacy, our correspondent adds.

Senior Republicans have gathered support for ex-Prime Minister Alain Juppe, 71, who was defeated by Mr Fillon in the primaries.

On Thursday evening, thousands of supporters turned out to his rally in the town of Nimes. "You have a fighter before you," Mr Fillon told a cheering crowd. "I have no intention of giving in."

On Wednesday, Mr Fillon said he had been summoned to appear before a judge over the case.

He complained he was the victim of a "political assassination", and vowed to continue his run for president - despite previously pledging to stand down if his case was placed under formal investigation.

Following his announcement, several key allies resigned, including his foreign affairs spokesman and deputy campaign director.

Mr Fillon will appear in court on 15 March, just two days before the deadline for candidates to submit their final applications.

The first round of the election takes place on 23 April, followed by a run-off on 7 May.

What Putin Is Up To

And why he may have overplayed his hand

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By STROBE TALBOTT AND JESSICA BRANDT

Each year on December 20, the Russian intelligence community pays homage to its enduring guardianship of the Motherland. It was on this date in 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, that Vladimir Lenin established the Cheka, an acronym for “Emergency Commission.” Over the ensuing decades, the commission’s nomenclature and organization chart mutated: It became the OGPU from 1923 to 1934, the NKVD until the early 1950s, and then the KGB for nearly 40 years. After the collapse of the USSR, the sprawling institution was split into separate foreign and domestic agencies. Operatives of both are still called chekists, and they share Lenin’s original purpose: countering Russia’s enemies at home and abroad.

President Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer for 15 years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the director of domestic intelligence in the late 1990s during his meteoric rise to power. He regularly throws a gala at the Kremlin on December 20 to extol the “sacred mission” of the state security services, recall their past heroes, and highlight their latest exploits. For the last 22 years, Chekist’s Day has been an official holiday in Russia.

Last December, Putin must have been in particularly ebullient sprits. Over the course of 2016, he oversaw the boldest, most consequential covert operation against Russia’s principal ideological and geopolitical foe for much of the last century, breaching the firewall of American democracy and influencing a high-stakes presidential election. Putin seemed to have made a big bet and come away with a trifecta: He could congratulate himself for settling old scores with a traditional foe, relish the prospect of a Russia-friendly counterpart in the White House, and let the ripple effect of the U.S. election further confound and further unsettle the democracies in a wobbly Europe.  

Meanwhile, the reverberations of the Russian attack have the U.S. government in an uproar. The disruption has triggered bitter public tensions between the White House and the agencies it supervises, fueled a partisan debate in Congress, and opened a schism within the Republican party, most recently over potential perjury by the nation’s top justice official. 

Ever since Lenin dispatched the first Soviet undercover agent across the Atlantic in 1921, Kremlin leaders have sought, with some success, to undermine the United States. In the late 1940s, Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police, masterminded the pilfering of America’s nuclear secrets. There were also sub rosasorties into American domestic politics. In 1968, the Kremlin deemed Richard Nixon “profoundly anti-Soviet,” and sought to frustrate his White House aspirations by extending financial assistance to his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, who rejected the offer. The Soviets were particularly active in the 1976 presidential election, fabricating an FBI report designed to damage Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Cold War hawk, during his bid for the Democratic nomination, then recruiting a mole inside the Democratic Party to report on Jimmy Carter’s winning campaign. Once Carter was in the White House, the KGB attempted to smear his hardline National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as a traitor and anti-Semite. In 1982, Yuri Andropov—the chairman of the KGB, who would soon ascend to leadership of the Kremlin—directed a multi-pronged campaign to thwart the re-election two years later of Ronald Reagan, who famously called the USSR “the evil empire.” Ironically, Andropov wanted his successor to be Mikhail Gorbachev, who, later in that decade, would forge a transformative partnership with Reagan.

But most of these efforts failed, and all of them pale next to Russia’s attempts to hack both major U.S. political parties, and subsequent leak of a trove of documents in an effort to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, U.S. intelligence agencies released a public report describing the Russian operation as a Putin-ordered influence campaign intended “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” Putin’s government, the intelligence community concluded, “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Putin saw Clinton as a serial regime-changer, eager to foment yet another “color revolution” in Russia like those in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, three former Soviet republics. He made no secret of this conviction. On December 5, 2011, Clinton publicly questioned the openness of parliament elections in Russia. In response, Putin accused Clinton of “set[ting] the tone for certain actors inside [Russia]. She gave the signal,” he said at televised crisis meeting with his subordinates. “They heard this signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, started actively doing their work,” he said. He was referring to the tens of thousands of Russian citizens who protested peacefully against his sudden announcement in September of that year that he would return to the presidency after serving as prime minister for four years.

Clinton’s support for the demonstrations hardly constituted a threat to Putin’s return to the Kremlin. But it seems he saw it that way. This conspiracy theory was typical of a worldview forged during his years at the KGB working chiefly in counterespionage—less a spy, and more spy-catcher, a profession that not only generates paranoia but also, to a degree, demands it. Aside from his anyone-but-Clinton mindset, Putin had additional reasons to boost her opponent: Candidate Trump’s admiration for Putin; his declared preference for nationalism over globalism; his apparent intention to revert to a world order based on great-power spheres of influence; his skepticism toward the European Union (he has urged members to follow Britain to the exit); and his denigration of NATO as “obsolete.”

Those last sentiments have been especially unsettling. Nothing would please Putin more than for the 45th president of the United States to weaken the political 

West’s two bedrock institutions—or, better yet, to allow them to be dismantled, altogether. During Trump’s campaign and transition, Putin must have been delighted to hear him repudiate the values and strategy of Atlanticism that guided his 12 predecessors—six Democrats and six Republicans—stretching back 70 years to Harry Truman. The dissolution of the political West would be delicious payback for what, in Putin’s eyes, was a Western plot to tear the Soviet state asunder.  

This theme in Putin’s narrative of grievance against North America and Western Europe is a bizarre case of cognitive dissonance: His rise would have been impossible if not for the patronage and promotions of Boris Yeltsin, who, in 1991 and 1992, was the principal instigator of the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.   

Yet Putin has managed to rewrite history for much of Russia’s citizenry and for himself, in order to justify a revanchist foreign policy. Therefore, he had every reason to cast his own vote in the U.S. election and, on November 8, celebrate the result. U.S. intercepts of Russian communications indicate that top officials in Moscow did not wait until Chekist’s day to pop the champagne bottles when they heard the final returns. They toasted Trump’s victory—and their own.

The vast damage to American interests wrought by Putin is likely to deepen for years to come. It is bad for Trump, since the ongoing revelations of a foreign adversary’s contamination of an American election undermines the outcome’s validity. This would be the case however Trump handled the matter, but he has exacerbated the qualms and controversy. His fury over leaks from U.S. intelligence agencies and investigative stories by the mainstream American media created the impression that he is shooting the messengers in order to divert attention from the core message that Russia successfully attacked America’s democracy, tarnished its reputation worldwide, and cast a pall over its president’s legitimacy. Trump has seemed more outraged at his own government than Putin’s, rousing public anger from two former CIA directors. During the campaign, Mike Morrell, former acting director of the CIA under Obama, called Trump Russia’s “unwitting agent.” Michael Hayden, who led the agency under George W. Bush, chimed in, scorning Trump as Moscow’s “useful fool.”

There is perhaps no more vivid instance of the president’s odd, insouciant posture toward Russia than the Michael Flynn episode. Before Trump’s inauguration, Flynn, his pick for national security adviser, indicated to Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador in Washington, that the White House might ease or lift the sanctions President Obama imposed on Russia for its alleged interference with the U.S. election. What Trump knew of those conversations remains unclear. But when he fired Flynn for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the conversation with Kislyak, Trump said, “I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn’t doing it.”

While Trump’s team seems to have sent a welcome signal to Moscow, the president himself declared a vendetta against his own agencies. The White House put out the word that a billionaire financier and political ally of Trump’s, Stephen Feinberg, would conduct a broad review of the U.S. intelligence community. The episode seemed like punishment of the agencies for gathering information on contacts between the president’s campaign aides and Russian agents over the last year and for leaking them. In February, when details of an ongoing FBI probe into that embarrassing and potentially criminal matter appeared in the press, Trump’s White House leaned on the bureau to discredit them. The FBI refused.

Meanwhile, longstanding allies and friends of the United States are appalled by his constant effort to change the subject whenever the Russian mega-hack comes up. While the president’s national-security team has sought to reassure America’s allies around the world, many leaders, especially in Europe, are concerned that he remains in thrall to Putin who, in some cases, continues to meddle in their own elections. For example, he is deploying an array of clandestine, propagandistic, and financial assets to tip the scales in favor of France’s Marine Le Pen, who has sworn to remove the country from the European Union if she becomes president this year, while working against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the most stalwart and powerful champion of the Western-led liberal world order, who is under political stress herself. 

The Russians make no secret of their intent, nor did Putin just sit back and watch these benefits to Russia accumulate. He continued to prod, provoke, and jeer. Two weeks ago, his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put Putin’s goal in stark, smug terms: The world is on the brink of a “post-West” order, he said. The unmistakable implication is that the locus of global power will move eastward, reinforcing the Kremlin’s ability to design and enforce an order that suits its national and nationalistic interests.

Given how Russia has manifested those interests—perpetuating the carnage of Syria’s civil war, annexing Crimea and virtually occupying the Donbass region of Ukraine, keeping ethnic conflicts simmering in the Caucasus, attempting to overthrow a pro-Western government in Montenegro, engaging in constant military incursions, cyberattacks, provocations, and bullying in the Baltics—we have a clear idea of what sort of “order” Putin has in mind.

But therein lies some consolation. Over the centuries, Russia has shown a predilection to overplay its hand. Precisely because of Putin’s flagrant forays beyond Russia’s borders, he has awakened its neighbors to the threat—and, as a consequence, underscored the need for NATO and an equally vigilant, clear-eyed, and reliable U.S. administration.

Trump's EPA budget proposal targets climate, lead cleanup programs

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By Timothy Gardner and Valerie Volcovici 

The White House is proposing to slash a quarter of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's budget, targeting climate-change programs and those designed to prevent air and water pollution like lead contamination, a source with direct knowledge of the proposal said on Thursday.

President Donald Trump has long signaled his intention to reverse former Democratic President Barack Obama's climate-change initiatives. But the Republican president has vowed his planned overhaul of green regulation would not jeopardize America's water and air quality.

The 23-page 2018 budget proposal, which aims to slice the environmental regulator's overall budget by 25 percent to $6.1 billion and staffing by 20 percent to 12,400 as part of a broader effort to fund increased military spending, would cut deeply into programs like climate protection, environmental justice and enforcement.

Politico and other news outlets reported the staff and overall budget cuts earlier, but the source disclosed new details on the impact the cuts would have on programs and grants to states.

Environmentalists slammed the proposed cuts, which must be approved by the Republican-led Congress.

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the budget proposal or its counter proposal. The White House said it had no comment.

Under the proposal, which was sent to the EPA this week, grants to states for lead cleanup would be cut 30 percent to $9.8 million, according to the source, who read the document to Reuters.

Grants to help Native American tribes combat pollution would be cut 30 percent to $45.8 million. An EPA climate protection program on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases like methane that contribute to global warming would be cut 70 percent to $29 million.

The proposal would cut funding for the brownfields industrial site cleanup program by 42 percent to $14.7 million. It would also reduce funding for enforcing pollution laws by 11 percent to $153 million.

The budget did not cut state revolving funds for programs, that Congress tapped last year to provide aid to Flint, Michigan, for its lead pollution crisis.

All staff at a research program, called Global Change Research, as well as 37 other programs would be cut under the plan.

CONGRESSIONAL HURDLES

Some of the cuts are unlikely to pass the Republican-led Congress as they are popular with both Democrats and Republicans. Congress would be unlikely to approve a proposal to cut all staff in a diesel emissions program, for example.

Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA, told U.S. mayors on Thursday he would make a priority of cleanups of industrial and hazardous waste sites and improving water infrastructure, even as the White House proposed severe proposed cuts to those programs.

"In this budget discussion that is ongoing with Congress that is just starting, there are some concerns about some of these grant programs that EPA has been a part of historically," Pruitt said.

"I want you to know that with the White House and also with Congress, I am communicating a message that the brownfields program, the Superfund program and the water infrastructure grants and state revolving funds are essential to protect," he said.

Greenpeace spokesman Travis Nichols said: "As a candidate, Trump made a big deal out of EPA's failure in Flint, but now he's cutting 30 percent out of lead cleanup in his proposed budget. This is an example of his empty promises to do right by the American people."

Officers of the Environmental Council of the States, composed of local regulators, raised concerns to the White House and EPA about the budget process, which they said lacked input by directly affected states.

ECOS officers will meet with the environment team of the Office and Management and Budget, a White House office, on Friday and have slated a teleconference with Pruitt in March.

ECOS head Alexandra Dapolito Dunn said states had been hopeful after Pruitt's confirmation hearing that they would get resources to do their work. "Now they are feeling very vulnerable,” she said.

US Senate calls on British spy Christopher Steele to give evidence on explosive Trump-Russia dossier

Exclusive: Republicans and Democrats in Congress keen to facilitate discreet meetings in the UK or on neutral territory, as pressure grows on President

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By Kim Sengupta

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who prepared the explosive Trump report, has been approached about testifying before the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the new President’s alleged links with Russia, The Independent can reveal.

Mr Steele’s friends say it is currently unlikely he would be willing to travel to the US. But it is understood Democrats – as well as some Republicans – in Congress are prepared to facilitate discreet initial meetings in the UK or on other neutral territory.

John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent an intermediary to London in November last year to collect Mr Steele’s dossier, which was subsequently passed personally by the Senator to FBI director James Comey.

And Mr Steele had, while carrying out his Trump inquiry, himself liaised for regular periods with the bureau.

Mr Trump has personally attacked Mr Steele, declaring the report on the Kremlin connection by the former MI6 officer as a fabricated work, put together by a “failed spy”.

In reality, Mr Steele was, and continues to be, held in high regard by British security and intelligence services as well as the American security officials who worked with him in the past.

It emerged this week that the FBI had, at one stage, proposed to pay him to continue his investigation into Mr Trump and his associates.

But that deal fell through and Mr Steele ultimately continued to work without pay because he was so worried by what he was discovering.

Mr Steele has not yet responded to requests to meet with Senate officials – described as informal at this stage – for testimony, which have come over the last fortnight. But friends say he may be willing to speak about his investigation to senators and US officials if certain security conditions are met.

The development comes amid fresh revelations of the Trump administration’s interaction with the Russians. It has emerged that Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, was in contact with Moscow’s ambassador to the US during the election campaign.

Mr Trump’s national security adviser, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after details of similar communications surfaced last month.

It has also emerged that in the last days of Barack Obama’s presidency, officials were so worried that the incoming Trump administration would try to suppress or destroy incriminating material that they passed on information to the intelligence agencies and senior figures in Congress.

There is now similar concern that the Trump White House is trying to sabotage the Russia investigations. Democrats have asked for an inquiry into attempts by White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to get the FBI to dismiss media reports about members of Mr Trump’s coterie contacting Russian officials.

The drive to contact Mr Steele and others, according to those familiar with the issue, is to try and ensure that as much information as possible is gathered by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The committee is carrying out its own investigation, separate from one being conducted by the FBI, on the Russian links and attempts by the Kremlin to interfere in the American political process. There will, however, be mutual sharing of relevant material.

The Washington Post this week reported the plan by the FBI to pay Mr Steele, who was one of MI6’s foremost Russia specialists, to continue his inquiries.

The Independent understands that the offer came after the discovery of a campaign of cyber hacking on state electoral systems in September, which led to a public charge against Moscow by the Obama administration.

Mr Steele became involved in the Trump investigation through the Washington-based firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by Republican opponents of Mr Trump in September 2015.

In June 2016, Mr Steele joined up with the team. In July, Mr Trump won the Republican nomination and the Democrats became new employers of Mr Steele and Fusion GPS. With that contract due to come to an end with the election, the FBI stepped in with its offer of funding.

Mr Steele has been regularly supplying information to the FBI. In June last year, for instance, he produced a memo which went to the bureau stating that Mr Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine.

Four days later Mr Trump stated that he would recognise Moscow’s annexation of Crimea: officials involved in his campaign having already asked the Republican party’s election platform to remove a pledge for military assistance to the Ukrainian government against separatist rebels in the east of the country. 

Mr Steele claimed the Trump campaign was taking this path because it was aware that the Russians were hacking Democratic Party emails. The same day that Mr Trump spoke about Crimea, he called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

However, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him.

He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The MI6 officer’s passing of information to the FBI ceased in December last year.

Jim Crow is alive and well in Israel

Long before Israel erected separate communities, the United States perfected the art of the artificial divide.

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by

Stanley L Cohen

For years, Israel has sold, and we in the United States have bought, the cheap peel-away sticker that it is the "lone democracy" in the Middle East.

It has a nice, assuring ring to it, sort of like "opportunity" or "peace", whatever these chants may, in practice, mean. But, like beauty, it remains very much in the eye of the beholder, and like reality, sooner or later the truth surfaces, no matter how well its fiction is packaged.

We in the US are damn good at packaging ourselves, and our charade of equality and justice is second to none. We sell stuff; lots of it. Much of it false. Very much like a willing stepchild, Israel has learned from us that if you say something long enough with vigour, power and money to back it, it begins to take on a surreal life of its own, no matter how much reality puts the lie to its embroidery. Indeed, we are quite accomplished at obfuscation. We know it all too well. We've hidden behind the fog of it for so long that, even today, those who remind us that the earth is, in fact, not flat, remain heretics to be scorned. Have we found the weapons of mass destruction yet?

Long before Israel erected separate communities divided by will of law to segregate its Jewish citizens from its almost two million Palestinian Arab ones, the US perfected the art of artificial divide.

With the accuracy of delusion, from coast to coast, could be heard the refrain that race-based segregation was lawful as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal.

For decades, the legal fiction of "separate but equal" was the mantra that state and local governments, throughout the US, held out to justify the artificial, indeed lawful, separation of tens of millions of Americans on the basis of race and nothing more.

Whether in services, facilities, public accommodations, transportation, medical care, employment, voting booths or in schools, black and white were segregated under the cheap shibboleth that artificial isolation of the races insured equality, as long as the conditions of their separation were legally equal.

These laws came to be known simply as Jim Crow.

Enter Jim Crow

Indeed, the idea that race or religious separation was not only preferable, but helpful to one another's ability to chart their own separate but equal course, became a perverse intellectual exercise which fundamentally did nothing more than exalt the supremacy of one race at the expense of another.

Putting aside, for the moment, the reality that facilities and services offered to African Americans were almost always of lower quality than those available to their counterpart white Americans, eventually the US Supreme Court had had enough. It held that separate could never be equal, even where there was a match in opportunity and facilities.

As noted in the seminal 1954 case of Brown v Board of Education, a school-based challenge to the notion of equal segregation, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

In words that eventually took hold first in education, then elsewhere throughout the US, the unanimous court noted:

"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society ... It is the very foundation of good citizenship ... Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms ...

"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system."

These words were penned but six years after Israel was granted statehood by the United Nations. Nevertheless, some 62 years later, Brown's command remains a linchpin of any meaningful democratic ideal and, yet, evermore elusive in Israel, which takes pride in the falsehood of the same supremacist claptrap rejected long ago.

Separate schools

In Israel, Palestinian schoolchildren account for about 25 percent, or about 480,000 pupils, of the state's total student population. Palestinian and Jewish students, from elementary to high school, learn in separate institutions. 

As noted in Brown v. Board of Education, institutionalised discrimination in the education system impedes the ability of students to develop the skills and awareness to participate on an equal footing, as individuals, in a free society.

In Israel, this is no accident. It is very much the result of a conscious effort to build a permanent educational, social and political advantage of Jews over their Palestinian counterparts.

In 1969, the state passed a law that gave statutory recognition to cultural and educational institutions and defined their aims as the development and fulfilment of Zionist goals in order to promote Jewish culture and education. 

In that light, in Israel, Palestinian children receive an education that is inferior in nearly every respect when compared with that for Jewish children.

Palestinian schools receive far less state funding than Jewish ones - three times less, according to official state data from 2004. In Jerusalem, it is half the funding.

This underfunding is reflected in many areas; including relatively large class sizes and poor infrastructure and facilities. Many communities have no kindergartens for three and four-year-olds. Some schools lack libraries, counsellors, and recreation facilities. Their students get fewer enrichment and remedial programmes and special education services than do Jewish children.

Palestinian students are also underrepresented in Israel's universities and higher education institutions. 

Recent studies indicate that only 10 percent of Palestinian citizens were attending undergraduate programmes, and 7.3 percent and 4 percent were pursuing masters' and doctoral degrees respectively. 

Palestinian academics account for just about 1.2 percent of all tenured and tenure track positions in Israel's universities.

Like a full range of public spending policies that privilege the Jewish majority, government support for student tuition fees, subsidised housing and employment opportunities is available only for those who serve in the Israeli army which, as a practical matter, excludes Palestinians.

No less pernicious, for Palestinian citizens of Israel, is their inability to live and work where they choose.

Community segregation

In 1952, the Israeli state authorised the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency to function as quasi-governmental entities in order to further advance the goals of the Zionist vision, to the detriment of minorities including those with Israeli citizenship. 

Under the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, the land of 349 Palestinian towns and villages, approximately 1,212 square kilometres, was transferred to the state to be used preferentially for the Jewish majority.

In 1953, the Knesset bestowed governmental authorities on the Jewish National Fund to purchase land exclusively for Jewish use. The state granted financial advantages, including tax relief, to facilitate such purchases.

Today, 12.5 percent of Israeli land is owned by the Fund, which bans the sale or lease of it to non-Jews under the admitted premise that it's a "danger" for non-Jews to own land in Israel.

In 1960, the state passed a law stipulating that ownership of "Israeli lands", namely the 93 percent of land under the control of the state and the Fund, cannot be transferred in any manner.

In practice, this means that in some 700 agricultural and community towns throughout Israel, housing applicants are screened by Jewish boards with the ultimate power to accept or reject applications to settle in these locales.

These boards, which include representatives from the World Zionist Organization and the Fund, consider a range of criteria such as "suitability to the community's social life" and the town's "social and cultural fabric".

The admission process all but guarantees that almost all Israeli towns and villages will remain Jewish enclaves, and are but a tease to those Palestinian citizens who desire to live in equality in fully integrated communities.

Is it any wonder then, that today, in Jim Crow Israel, few Palestinian citizens have been found to be suitable for these communities?

By virtue of state control over the racial makeup of municipalities throughout Israel, most Palestinian citizens are limited to residence and employment in the acutely overcrowded Palestinian towns and villages. 

In fact, since 1948, the State of Israel has established hundreds of additional Jewish communities, without permitting the construction of any new Palestinian municipality whatsoever. Indeed, of Israel's total area, just 2.5 percent comes under Palestinian municipal jurisdiction.

Of Israel's 40 towns with the highest unemployment rates, 36 are Palestinian and the average employed Palestinian citizens of Israel makes just 58.6 percent of what a Jewish Israeli makes. About 53 percent of the impoverished families in Israel are Palestinian.

Inequality from the Israeli Parliament

Over the years, the Knesset has used the veneer of democracy while acting arbitrarily to ensure that demographic and political control remains exclusively in the hands of the state's Jewish citizenry and parliamentarians.

For example, in an effort to maintain a Jewish demographic majority, the Family Unification Law of 2003 prohibits Palestinian citizens of Israel from reuniting with their spouses who live in the West Bank or Gaza. As a result, more than 150,000 children born of these so-called mixed marriages are denied the most elementary rights and privileges attendant to Israeli citizenship.

In a series of other laws, the Knesset has not only imposed a broad range of limitations on freedom of movement, speech and access to the political system for Palestinian citizens, but imposed ideological boundaries on the platforms of political parties to which they may belong.

By design, such laws thwart the ability of Palestinians to impact upon a political process which, daily, dictates every phase of their lives, but yet leaves them essentially powerless to bring about any fundamental change in the system itself. These restrictions necessarily deny Palestinian citizens an equal opportunity to play a meaningful role in the political life of Israel, otherwise available to their Jewish counterparts.

Under its most recent attempt to stifle its Palestinian minority, the Knesset proposed legislation that would enable the suspension of elected representatives of the public not because of criminal wrongdoing on their part, or even because of a breach of settled legislative protocol, but simply because their political agenda is objectionable to the Jewish majority.

Under other legislation, Knesset members may strip Palestinian MKs from their elected seats if they voice opposition to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Indeed, recently a Palestinian MK, Haneen Zoabi, was suspended from parliamentary debates for six months when, on the floor of the Knesset, she called Israeli soldiers "murderers" for their role in the Mavi Marmara incident that took the lives of nine pro-Palestinian activists.

On other occasions, the Knesset has imposed severe restrictions on travel by Palestinian MKs, both domestically and abroad.

Currently, there is a law that bans any political party which challenges the existence of Israel as a "Jewish" state or which advocates equal rights for all of its citizens irrespective of ethnicity. Another law empowers the interior minister to revoke citizenship of people who violate "allegiance" to the state.

An elusive pursuit for justice

That Israel has become a land where laws are enacted to obstruct the free exercise of core political rights of its Palestinian citizens is beyond dispute.

Ultimately, in any truly "democratic" society, citizens are able to seek redress for institutional or private injuries through an independent judicial system wed to no result but equal protection and justice for all, no matter the race, creed or religion of those who seek its protection.

It's hard to imagine a more fundamental or essential arbiter of the rights of all than a judiciary that operates under no obligation but to see that justice be done without consideration of the ethnicity of those who come before it.

Yet, by design, in Israel, the pursuit of justice by Palestinian citizens is an elusive chase indeed; one calculated to perpetuate second-class citizenship very much the way African Americans were long held in the US under the arcane practice of separate but equal.

For example, more than 200 major rulings issued by the Supreme Court of Israel have been translated into English and published on the court's website along with the original Hebrew decisions. Although the majority of these pronouncements are relevant to Palestinian citizens of Israel, none has been translated into Arabic.

In the history of Israel's Supreme Court, there have been but two Palestinian male justices.

Currently, all but one of its 15 members is Jewish. No Palestinian woman has ever served on the Israeli Supreme Court. At the district and magistrates court level, Palestinian judges make up less than 5 percent of those who occupy a judicial position, and even fewer who preside over labour courts.

Historically, the Israeli Supreme Court has sided with majoritarian values in what can only be described as a wholesale abdication of its responsibility to see that justice be done for Palestinian and Jew alike. 

Thus the Supreme Court has upheld the restrictions of the 1950 Law of Return which permits every Jewish person to immigrate to Israel and obtain citizenship, yet denies the same protection to Palestinians, even those who were born in the area that is now the State of Israel.

Likewise, the Court has upheld the legality of the January 2003 family unification ban that bars a Palestinian citizen from raising a family in Israel with a Palestinian spouse from the Occupied Territories. The controversial law was introduced as an amendment to the 1952 Citizenship Law, which determines citizenship for non-Jews.

In 2014, the Court dismissed a petition by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel challenging the continued Judaisation of Palestinian-owned land originally confiscated largely from Palestinian refugees inside Israel. According to Adalah, the court's decision "entrenches racial segregation" and, writes Mondoweiss Editor-at-Large Annie Robbins, "will result in the continued concentration and containment of the Palestinian population in Israel".

These are but a few of the many decisions of the Supreme Court that have adversely affected Palestinian citizens of Israel on the basis of their second-class status and little else.

The definition of the State of Israel as a Jewish one makes inequality and discrimination against its Palestinian citizens a political goal.

The marriage of "Jewish" and "democratic" ensures discrimination against non-Jewish citizens and necessarily impedes the realisation of full equality for all citizens of Israel.

Israel has become better at this "subtle" nuanced sale of an imaginary narrative than we in the US ever dared dream.

What, however, the "Jewish" state has not yet come to grips with, is that eventually myths about equal opportunity and justice for some 20 percent of its population prove specious and that, ultimately, time swallows all such fallacy, whether by operation of law or, tragically, all too often, through violence.