Pure Apartheid

“There is nothing quite like the feeling of sorrowful helplessness that one feels listening to a 35-year-old man who has spent fifteen years working as an illegal day-laborer in Israel in order to save up money to build a little house for his family, only to discover one day upon returning from work that the house had been reduced to a pile of rubble, flattened by an Israeli bulldozer with everything still inside the house. When you ask why this was done–the land, after all, was his–you are told that there was no warning, only a paper given to him the next day by an Israeli soldier stating that he had built the structure without a license. Where in the world, except under Israeli authority, are people required to have a license (which is always denied them) before they can build on their own property? Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is pure apartheid.” (Edward Said)