This article was originally published by The San Francisco Chronicle and is republished with the author's permission.

Palestinian refugee children play in the narrow alleys of the Jabalia camp, in the Gaza Strip. (Maan Images)

Mayor Gavin Newsom's acceptance of an all-expense-paid trip to Israel this week exhibits poor moral and political judgment. The Jewish Community Federation organized the junket ostensibly to connect Bay Area and Israeli business leaders.

Not coincidentally, the mayor's trip overlaps with Israel's 60th anniversary. As such, the visit communicates a powerful message that Israel is a country to be celebrated, economically integrated and politically sustained.

This vision of Israel - like the mayor's itinerary - is dangerously lacking in perspective.

On May 15, my family will commemorate an-Nakba, Arabic for "the catastrophe," which is the dark underbelly of Israel's foundation. Sixty years ago, Jewish militants and, later, the Israeli army, forced 2 out of every 3 Palestinians - more than 700,000 people - to flee their homes. Many Palestinians who resisted expulsion or were unable to leave were massacred in cold blood, as were those who returned to harvest food from their orchards or gather personal belongings left behind. The Palestinians who fled now constitute the oldest unresolved refugee population in the world, despite their internationally recognized right to return. Meanwhile, Israel permits any Jew from anywhere in the world to immigrate and obtain citizenship.

Israel's original aim in 1948 was to ensure that historic Palestine was cleansed of its Arab population so that a Jewish majority reigned. However, this task - necessarily brutal and violent - was never fully achieved. The Palestinians who managed to survive an-Nakba now constitute nearly 20 percent of Israel's citizenry. Given its higher birthrate, this Arab minority will eventually challenge Jewish demographic predominance, and, ultimately, Jewish political power.

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The Palestinians who did not receive Israeli citizenship after an-Nakba - but who nonetheless live under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza - present a similar dilemma for Israel, which wishes to rule them without granting them equal rights as citizens. These Palestinians live alongside hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers who use Israeli-only bypass roads, hence avoiding all contact with nearby Palestinians whose lands were stolen to accommodate them. To ensure that Palestinians remained ghettoized and economically strangulated, Israel encircles their towns and cities within a suffocating wall condemned by the International Court of Justice.

Newsom's itinerary will likely shield him from seeing the unequal and lawless treatment that Palestinians suffer 60 years after an-Nakba. He will not visit the political prisoners, detained without trial, who watch their children grow up in photos. He will not see the bright lights turned on at 3 a.m. that blind those like my cousin. He spends his days in an interrogation cell for resisting the occupation, instead of in a college classroom. And Newsom certainly will not offer condolences to the family of 4-month-old Naseem al Biok, who died April 30 in a hospital emptied of medical equipment and supplies by Israel's 2-year-long siege of Gaza. (Israel denied Naseem passage to obtain advanced medical treatment.)

In choosing to support Israel through this highly political visit, Mayor Newsom includes us in a journey with much broader moral and political implications, for him and for our city. The mayor will not press Israel to adopt the ideal of equal rights for all citizens or abandon the exclusivist and tribal aim of preserving the "Jewishness" of the nation's citizenry. Instead the mayor's decision to join Israel as it celebrates 60 years of apartheid conveys approval of its practices - contradicting the democratic, secular, progressive and humanistic values that San Francisco espouses. And his tour achieves nothing toward bettering America's tattered image among Arabs and Muslims, whose resentment toward the United States' unconditional support of Israel is palpable.

Israel has wooed enough American politicians into supporting its catastrophic and untenable discriminatory practices. The mayor should focus on issues of importance to San Franciscans rather than joining the ranks of those American politicians.

Ramiz Rafeedie is an attorney in San Francisco and president of the Arab Resources and Organizing Center, which grew out of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in San Francisco.