Letter from Sweden: Migrants, Chemtrails, Somalia

May 23, 2010

from  "Jens"


Money is getting tighter in Sweden too, despite all the nonsense about green shoots... In fact, Sweden will be hit heavily soon, I suspect, since the country is very much depended on its exports, so regardless if the Swedish economy would hold up it would still sink when other countries stop buying its goods. This interdependence, globalization, works wonders, doesn't it...soon we all will be equally poor!

Also, there are no new jobs. Here in my hometown, more and more people are laid off, I can notice this in my own small circle of family and friends; less and less people are in full-time employment. It is insane and totally untenable.

  At the same time they are flooding the country with immigrants, which deliberately are collected in suburban ghettos with no prospects for themselves, setting up the situation for future tensions and conflicts. Not many people abroad realize the number of immigrants Sweden has accepted in the last 30 years or so. It is one of the highest percentages in Europe, I guess that some 15% of the population are of foreign decent, largely Muslim, again to set up the future conflict with the Islamic world.

I am not saying this from a prejudice point of view. We are all used like pawns in this game and I even sympathize with the Muslims to some extent, since they are unfairly getting the short end of the stick in the geopolitical strategies of the elites.

On chem trails, I noticed that after the so called ash cloud incident (which by the way was totally invisible here in northern Sweden, although Iceland is not that far away. In fact the skies was clearer than it has been for ages due to the absence of chem trails when the air traffic was grounded), we had an unusually stable and pleasant spring weather since the chem trail spraying took a few weeks to get going up at full speed. There were many days with clear blue skies all day and strong sunlight.

However, the last few days they have been spraying heavily again and instantly the weather got more unstable with quick changes in temperatures, strong winds and the familiar overcast chem trail mush blanket that seems to be the main effect of the sprays they are using now. One day I watched how they turned the skies from clear blue into a totally grey blanket of mush in about 5-6 hours! Also, with the chem trails, the regular physical symptoms of fatigue, muscle aches and sinus problems have returned.

SOMALI PIRATES- A CONVERSATION

Finally, I had a very interesting conversation at work the other day with a young guy who is doing work experience at my workplace. He is from Somaliland in East Africa. I started to ask him a few questions about the situation over there. First we talked about the so-called pirates off the coast, who he said simply were fishermen who had gotten tired of foreign trawlers taking advantage of Somalia's lack of coast guard and totally depleting the fish along the coast, thus leaving the local fishermen destitute and with hungry families.

In addition, there had also been ships doing illegal dumping of toxic waste that had made both fish and people sick. But in Western media, they were just pirates, hellbent on making trouble...a prime example how skewed the media is over here.

Then we got on to 911 and Bin Laden, and to my surprise he was totally aware that it was an inside job and that Bin Laden probably was dead and and had nothing to do with it. He also said that in "Somalia everybody knows this." He was also aware of the influence of bankers, Freemasons, Illuminati on politics and world affairs. How many 20-year-olds here in the West have a clue about any of this? It is embarrassing...

Further, we talked about the mass media, and he said that people in the West are indoctrinated and lived in a bubble of fantasies, while people down in Somalia, due to the hardships they had been through, could not afford to ignore the realities and thus were much more acutely aware of the state of things in the world and who really called the shots.
He mentioned that many Muslims are aware of that the elite wants to destroy all religions and bring in the one world Luciferian worship, they call this the "Dajjal" as far as I can understand. Second, he also mentions that it is not uncommon for Africans to get respiratory problems when they move to Europe and that they feel like they do not get enough air when breathing. It could have something to do with chem trails, maybe chem trails are less common over Africa, after all that continent is so under the boot anyway that the elite might not see it as necessary to spray them into docility.
 
He also mentioned a few interesting facts about Somaliland, which is a breakaway republic consisting of the most Northern part of Somalia. Due to that it is not internationally recognized by UN or other such vile organizations, it can not receive loans and aid from IMF, Worldbank etc.

However, this was a blessing in disguise for them, since they are debt free, also they only have a minimal government, not a bloated and corrupted bureaucracy, since there isn't a big influx of money for it to feed off. He said that they still had managed to rebuild the totally destroyed capital, Hargeisa, since 1991. They used funds from the diaspora and by giving free land to anyone who was willing to build a house on it. Furthermore, they only pay a tax rate of 5 %! And the country still seems to work. It shows that government interference is not needed. Indeed the opposite is true, government is the problem not the solution.

No wonder we never hear about Somaliland on the news! It works too well staying outside the global system. I am not saying that this country is a paradise, but they seem to have gotten a lot more things right than us over here, who are folding under the weight of taxation and bureaucracies.

Cocaine Funds NWO Takeover in S. America

May 30, 2010
Bolivia a Narco State


BY MARCOS IN SAN PAOLO
(FOR HENRYMAKOW.COM)

The Forum of Sao Paulo has the objective of creating the Bolivarian-Marxist revolution in South America, in the image of Fidel's Cuba and Chavez's Venezuela.  Political parties such as the Worker's Party (PT) of Brazil, the drug-trafficking Marxist guerrillas of FARC and other radical organizations are allied in this plan.

Cocaine is financing this political agenda. Chavez almost went to war against Colombia (the last resistance to Marxism in the continent) in order to support the FARC, a violent guerrilla group that wants to overthrow the democratically elected Columbian government. He allows the FARC to use Venezuela's territory to escape from Colombian army. Unfortunately, the FARC is funded by cocaine they sell to Brazil and re-exported to Europe and the United States via Mexico.

Brazil is also extremely active in the support to the FARC, allowing them free range in the Brazilian territory. This month (May 2010), a FARC base was found in the urban confines of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon. Apparently, the Federal Police took the FARC trafickers for common drug lords. Some police officers are afraid of the government reaction if they bust the FARC operations.
NARCO STATE BOLIVIA

This week the situation reached a surrealist tone, when presidential candidate Jose Serra denounced Bolivia for making it easy for cocaine to reach Brazil. Lula and his candidate, Dilma Rousseff (a former Communist terrorist and murderer) attacked Serra in the press and defended Evo Morales, Bolivia's president.

Ironically, the same day, a truck with half a ton of cocaine from Bolivia was intercepted by the police in the state of Mato Grosso. At this moment, Lula was with Morales in Rio wearing coca leaves (left) and joking about the drug trade.

Earlier this month, another truck from Bolivia with 725 kilos (3/4 of a ton) of cocaine hidden under refrigerated meat was intercepted. Let's not forget that Lula is the man who carved a fake deal with Ahmadinejad this month, and has been honored by Illuminati Chatham House and the UN. Lula is a New World Order pawn.
THE COCAINE HIGHWAY

Evo Morales justifies the use of cocaine with the argument of tradition. Bolivian Indians chew coca leaves to fight the effects of altitude. However, they ingest a very tiny amount of the active substance. Only 3% of the cocaine harvest is chewed. 97% is processed as cocaine and is exported. Since Evo took power, the growth of coca has risen by 41% and "exports" to Brazil have increased 200% (source: Veja magazine).

Evo says that colonization has been a genocide, and white civilization is destroying the planet. Only a Communist society can reverse the harm done to the people. This comes from a man who has lost all his indian roots, can't speak the language and is totally acculturated in European civilization. 

Not only the Communists let cocaine flow undisturbed, now they will use money from the tax payers in order to build a road to connect the coca producing regions in Bolivia to the markets in Brazil. While Brazil severely neglects its roads, a government bank (BNDS) will invest US$ 332 million in a road in the middle of nowhere. The road has already been nicknamed the "Transcocaleira" or "Cocaine Highway".
CONCLUSION

How does a political leader betray his basic responsibilities and still get approved by almost 80% of the population? 50,000 Brazilians die violent deaths every year, most of them related to drugs, and still Lula is able to name his successor. Dilma Rousseff, a Marxist terrorist, killed a 19 year-old recruit in front of an army station, by throwing a home-made bomb through the window of a car.

The answer is that the mass media controls information. Communist theoretician Antonio Grasmci showed that the infiltration of the press, universities and government agencies is a much more effective strategy than direct armed conflict. It comes to a point where there is no effective, intelligent opposition, apart from the 1% who read the internet alternative media.
(Left, Crack addicts on Brazil streets)

Add to this diversions such as the Soccer World Cup and the Olympics (both events will take place in Brazil) and the distribution of pocket money in form of government dole, and you have a fail proof recipe for success.

When one talks about Communism, people usually think about the Red Guards taking power with guns. That's why it is difficult for the common folk to understand the zig-zag way Communism now works. See the FARC, for example: they want to become a political party. This is the ideal: after killing thousands, after getting extremely rich with drug money, they know they can buy any election and the respect that comes with it. Communists pretend to respect the market, the stock exchange, fooling the capitalists while at the same time  destroying all the basis which guarantee the very life of capitalism, individual freedoms and initiative. They are masters of deception.

The naive Americans who support Chavez should see behind the curtain and realize that you already have a much more sophisticated and good looking Chavez in DC, in the person of Obama. You will get there, it will only take a little more time.

The height of Israeli intransigence

The height of Israeli intransigence

Jonathan Cook

The National

February 09. 2010

JERUSALEM // Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.

His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan, a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al Aqsa mosque.

Beit Yehonatan, or Jonathan’s House, is distinctive not only for its height – at seven storeys, it is at least three floors taller than its neighbours – but also for the Israeli flag draped from the roof to the street.

The settlement outpost, named for Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence in the US for spying on Israel’s behalf in the 1980s, has been home to eight Jewish families since 2004, when it was built without a licence by an extremist settler organisation known as Ateret Cohanim.

Beit Yehonatan is one of dozens of settler-occupied homes springing up in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, most of them takeovers of Palestinian homes.

Critics say the intent of these “outposts”, together with the large settlements of East Jerusalem built by the state and home to nearly 200,000 Jews, is to foil any peace agreement that might one day offer the Palestinians a meaningful state with Jerusalem as its capital.

But exceptionally for the settlers, who are used to a mix of overt and covert assistance from officials, the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan are at risk of being evicted from their home, two years after an “urgent” enforcement order was issued by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Last week Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, finally agreed “under protest” to seal Beit Yehonatan amid mounting pressure from an array of legal officials. Mr Barkat had been fighting strenuously against implementing the court order, aided by senior members of the parliament, the police, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who opposed his own attorney general’s advice by declaring Beit Yehonatan’s future “a purely municipal matter”.

But the mayor has not simply capitulated. He warned that Beit Yehonatan would be evacuated only on condition that more than 200 demolition orders on Palestinian homes, most of them in Silwan, were carried out at the same time. He argued that he had to avoid any impression that the law was being enforced in a “discriminatory” manner against Jews.

Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said Mr Barkat’s idea of fairness was “ridiculous”.

“In the past 15 years there have been more than a thousand Palestinian homes demolished in East Jerusalem versus absolutely no settler homes,” he said. “In fact, no settlers have ever lost their home in East Jerusalem.”

In making his announcement, Mr Barkat admitted that the 200 demolitions would trigger “a strong possibility for conflict”. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are already seething over decades of planning restrictions that have forced many of them to build or extend homes illegally because it is all but impossible to get permits from the Israeli authorities.

Mr Halper said the municipality had classified 22,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as illegal, even as it also assessed a shortage of 25,000 homes for the city’s 250,000-strong Palestinian population.

The homes targeted for demolition include Palestinian houses around Beit Yehonatan that violate planning restrictions that allow families to build only two floors; despite the restriction, many houses have four storeys and owners pay fines.

In addition, the city council wants to demolish 88 homes in a small area called Bustan that the municipality claims is in danger of flooding.

Zeinab Jaber lives next to Beit Yehonatan in the home she was born in 61 years ago. The building was declared illegal 20 years ago, after it was extended to four storeys to accommodate her growing family. Today she and her six grown-up sons pay monthly fines of more than $1,000 (Dh 3,672) in the hope of warding off destruction.

Her son Amjad, 32, married with two young sons, said he did not dare miss a payment. “It’s simple: if you don’t pay, you’ll end up in prison.”

“What is there for the settlers here?” Mrs Jaber asked. “They are only here because they want to take this place from us. They won’t be happy till we leave.”

On the opposite slope across the valley from Beit Yehonatan, Mohammed Jalajil, 48, said he did not doubt that the municipality would demolish the 200 homes. He, his wife and five children have been crammed into a room in a relative’s apartment since their own house was demolished seven years ago.

Mr Jalajil, 48, said: “It was only months after they took our house from us that I saw the settlers building theirs nearby. My lawyer tells me that, even though my house is gone, I won’t have paid off my fines for another 10 years.”

If Mr Barkat follows through with his threat, the demolitions will prompt a rebuke from the international community. Last month, France and the United States joined the UN in denouncing more than 100 demolitions in East Jerusalem over the past three months.

The mayor’s decision, warned Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, was comparable to the “price tag” policy of the settlers in the West Bank, who have attacked Palestinian villages in retaliation against official attempts to dismantle a few of the settlement outposts dotting Palestinian territory.

“But the difference here is that the price tag is being levied not by the settlers themselves but by the municipality and the government on their behalf,” he said.

Yesterday the municipality was due to issue a seven-day evacuation notice to the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan, but the operation was cancelled at the last minute when police refused to co-operate.

Frictions have been growing in Silwan for several years over the activities of another settler organisation, Elad, which, with official backing, has been building an archaeological park known as the City of David in the midst of the Palestinian neighbourhood. As Palestinians have been pushed out, at least 80 Jewish families have moved into homes nearby.

As Elad entrenches itself in Silwan, Beit Yehonatan has proved more difficult to secure. “Usually the settlers present a façade of legality to what they do,” Mr Halper said. “The problem here is that they built in an overtly illegal manner, without a permit and way over the building height restrictions.”

Mr Barkat’s resistance to evicting Beit Yehonatan’s inhabitants was highlighted last month when he tried to stave off legal pressure by proposing a new planning policy to legalise unlicensed buildings in Silwan. The mayor proposed that the rules limiting homes to two storeys be revised to four.

The reform would have applied to Beit Yehonatan first, sealing its top three storeys but allowing the Jewish families to inhabit the rest of the building.

Although Mr Barkat promised that illegal Palestinian buildings would also be saved, Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights groups, dismissed the mayor’s claim.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian homes would fail to qualify because land registry documents are missing for the area and a range of requirements on car parking, access roads and sewerage connections are “impossible” to meet, Orly Noy, a spokeswoman, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper last month.

She added that Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem lacked 70km of sewage pipes and that not a single new road had been paved in their neighbourhoods since Israel’s occupation in 1967.

A planning map of East Jerusalem drawn up recently by the Jerusalem municipality came to light last month, as Mr Barkat was promising to legalise buildings, showing that more than 300 homes – most of them in Silwan – were facing imminent demolition.

Israel admits it has an image problem

Israel admits it has an image problem

Jonathan Cook

The National

March 16. 2010

NAZARETH, ISRAEL // A new government campaign to train Israelis in how to use propoganda in order to improve their country’s image when they are abroad has been condemned for advancing a right-wing agenda.

The public relations drive, which includes giving travellers tips on how to champion the country’s illegal settlements, is the government’s latest attempt to shore up support abroad following the harsh criticisms of Israel’s attack on Gaza last year made by the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which produced evidence of war crimes.

According to a recent government survey, 91 per cent of Israeli Jews believe foreigners have a strongly negative view of Israel. Nearly as many – 85 per cent – say they would be willing to use holidays or business trips to engage in hasbara, Hebrew for “public advocacy” or “propaganda”.

Critics, however, have accused Yuli Edelstein, who is in charge of the recently created hasbara ministry, of exploiting the campaign to promote not just Israel’s technological and cultural successes but also its hawkish agenda.

The campaign website approved by Mr Edelstein, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and a settler in the West Bank, has repeatedly denied both that the settlements are an obstacle to peace and that a Palestinian state is desirable, backtracking on commitments made by Mr Netanyahu to the US.

The predominance of such views was highlighted this week when Israel announced plans to build 1,600 settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem, creating a diplomatic crisis just as Joe Biden, the US vice-president, was in Israel to shore up support for new peace talks.

Yariv Oppenheimer, the head of Peace Now, Israel’s largest peace group, has written to Mr Netanyahu demanding that he take down the website. “Israel’s positions as presented on this site reflect an extreme right-wing ideology, and are not even in keeping with your own statements … regarding two states for two peoples.”

Others have argued that Israel’s image needs more than good PR. “No amount of hasbara will help if Israel refuses to make peace and uses assassination teams,” said Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom, a peace activist.

Mr Edelstein refers to the millions of potential volunteers as the “Israel Hasbara Forces”, a play on the name of the country’s military, the Israel Defense Forces.

“In light of Israel’s negative image in the world, we realised that Israel had to counter the vast sums of money available to Arab countries for propaganda by taking advantage of our human resources,” Mr Edelstein has said.

The campaign, which includes a series of TV adverts, encourages Israelis to consult a government website for advice on how to win over locals in the countries they visit. Pamphlets are also being handed out at Israel’s international airport.

Training courses will target public figures and community leaders, including politicians, diplomats, businesspeople, tour guides, celebrities, athletes and retired generals.

The TV ads are designed to motivate Israelis to join the PR push by poking fun at the foreign media for misrepresenting Israel. In one, a British reporter assumes the camel is the country’s main means of transport, and in another a Spanish journalist claims barbecues are so popular because Israeli homes have no electricity.

“Fed up with how we’re portrayed abroad?” asks the advert. “You can change the picture.”

But the government’s approach has been lambasted not only by peace groups but also by an editorial in Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s biggest-circulation newspaper. It wondered whether the website and pamphlets were promoting the state of Israel or the Netanyahu government’s policies. “A perusal of the site reveals that many of the opinions we are supposed to learn by rote are not part of any consensus,” it said. “In fact, they mainly reflect the right-wing side of the political spectrum.”

Mr Edelstein said hundreds of thousands of Israelis have visited the website since it launched, with some requesting training.

A number of “myths” are listed which Israeli holidaymakers are expected to explode, including that the settlements are holding up the peace process.

Instead the website says of the settlements: “Their creation does not involve uprooting any Arabs. Most of the Arab towns and villages in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] have biblical names, and are testimony to Jewish roots in this area.” Israelis are advised to deny that a place called “Palestine” ever existed, and told to stress that keeping the West Bank is important to stop a military attack. “Many people say hundreds of Arab tanks on [Israel’s] coastal plain will put an end to the entire Jewish state,” notes the website.

The site also says “it is crucial that Israel retains the Golan Heights”, Syrian territory occupied in the Six Day War, adding that its conquest has “renewed Israel’s connection to Jewish heritage and the ancient history of the Jewish nation”.

Apart from a reference to Rana Raslan, the first Arab woman to win Miss Israel, in 1999, a section on the country’s 1.3 million Arab citizens is devoted largely to the “demographic threat” they pose to Israel’s Jewish majority.

In particular, the site celebrates the rapid drop in Arab birth rates over recent years and the accelerating emigration of Palestinians, observing that, whereas 10,000 left in 2004, the figure had risen to 28,000 four years later. “Some 85 per cent of those who emigrated were of reproductive age,” the site notes.

The hasbara ministry has also announced that it is recruiting volunteer internet bloggers to post pro-Israel comments on websites in what it termed “PR warfare”. They are expected to work in tandem with a team of undercover staff created in the foreign ministry last July whose job is to pose as ordinary surfers and post good news about Israel on websites.

Despite Israeli government concerns, a Gallup poll last week showed that 63 per cent of Americans view Israel favourably, the fifth-highest-ranking country and Israel’s best rating in nearly two decades.

Israeli officials, however, are reported to be increasingly concerned that the attack on Gaza has damaged Israel’s popularity in the rest of the world.

A report presented to the Israeli cabinet this month by the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv think-tank, argued that Israel was facing an unprecedented “global campaign of delegitimisation” that should be treated as a “strategic threat”.

Why There Are No ‘Israelis’ in the Jewish State

Why There Are No ‘Israelis’ in the Jewish State

Citizens Classed as Jewish or Arab Nationals

by Jonathan Cook

Dissident Voice

April 6th, 2010

A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as “Israelis”, a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self-declared status as a Jewish state.

Israel refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel”, the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish nation”, meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.

Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalisation, access to land and employment.

Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of “Arab” nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment.

The interior ministry has adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or ethnic terms, with “Jewish” and “Arab” being the main categories.

The group’s legal case is being heard by the supreme court after a district judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing the state’s position that there is no Israeli nation.

The head of the campaign for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor, said: “It is absurd that Israel, which recognises dozens of different nationalities, refuses to recognise the one nationality it is supposed to represent.”

The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to “undermine the state’s infrastructure” — a presumed reference to laws and official institutions that ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in Israel.

Mr Ornan, 86, said that denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin of state-sanctioned discrimination against the Arab population.

“There are even two laws — the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs — that determine how you belong to the state,” he said. “What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”

Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had resorted to creating national groups with no legal recognition outside Israel, such as “Arab” or “unknown”, to avoid recognising an Israeli nationality.

In official documents most Israelis are classified as “Jewish” or “Arab”, but immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000 arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically registered according to their country of origin.

“Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as “Jewish” or “Christian”,” said Mr Ornan.

The professor, who lives close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the interior ministry refused to change his nationality to “Israeli” in 2000. An online petition declaring “I am an Israeli” has attracted several thousand signatures.

Mr Ornan has been joined in his action by 20 other public figures, including former government minister Shulamit Aloni. Several members have been registered with unusual nationalities such as “Russian”, “Buddhist”, “Georgian” and “Burmese”.

Two Arabs are party to the case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be allowed to live in one of several hundred communities in Israel open only to Jews.

Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the parliament, said the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens.

“The State of Israel cannot recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”

International Zionist organisations representing the diaspora, such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, are given in Israeli law a special, quasi-governmental role, especially in relation to immigration and control over large areas of Israeli territory for the settlement of Jews only.

Mr Ornan said the lack of a common nationality violated Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which says the state will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex”.

Indications of nationality on ID cards carried by Israelis made it easy for officials to discriminate against Arab citizens, he added.

The government has countered that the nationality section on ID cards was phased out from 2000 — after the interior ministry, which was run by a religious party at the time, objected to a court order requiring it to identify non-Orthodox Jews as “Jewish” on the cards.

However, Mr Ornan said any official could instantly tell if he was looking at the card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the IDs of Jews was given according to the Hebrew calendar. In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included the grandfather’s name.

“Flash your ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which ‘clan’ you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to ‘handle your kind’,” Mr Ornan said.

The distinction between Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on interior ministry records used to make important decisions about personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on entirely sectarian terms.

Only Israelis from the same religious group, for example, are allowed to marry inside Israel — otherwise they are forced to wed abroad — and cemeteries are separated according to religious belonging.

Some of those who have joined the campaign complain that it has damaged their business interests. One Druze member, Carmel Wahaba, said he had lost the chance to establish an import-export company in France because officials there refused to accept documents stating his nationality as “Druze” rather than “Israeli”.

The group also said it hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign border officials.

B Michael, a commentator for Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, has observed: “We are all Israeli nationals — but only abroad.”

The campaign, however, is likely to face an uphill struggle in the courts.

A similar legal suit brought by a Tel Aviv psychologist, George Tamrin, failed in 1970. Shimon Agranat, head of the supreme court at the time, ruled: “There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people. … The Jewish people is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of diaspora Jewries.”

That view was echoed by the district court in 2008 when it heard Mr Ornan’s case.

The judges in the supreme court, which held the first appeal hearing last month, indicated that they too were likely to be unsympathetic. Justice Uzi Fogelman said: “The question is whether or not the court is the right place to solve this problem.”