Israel: an apartheid state?
by Leila Farsakh
Le Monde Diplomatique, November
2003
http://mondediplo.com/
Bishop Desmond Tutu, the South African
Nobel Prize winner, described how he saw on his visit to Israel
"much like what happened to us black people in South Africa.
I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints
and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers
prevented us from moving about" (1). Comparisons between
apartheid South Africa and Israel/Palestine have often been made,
but not always clearly explained. Many factors have made the comparison
attractive.
The first, perhaps most important, is
the historical colonialist foundation of the two conflicts. White
settlers in South Africa, like Zionist pioneers, colonised a land
already inhabited. As in South Africa, the settlers in Palestine
expelled the indigenous population, some two-thirds of the Palestinians
in the land that became Israel in 1948, took possession of their
properties and legally segregated those who remained.
However, admitting that Israel's foundation
was colonialist does not mean that it is compar able to apartheid
South Africa. As Gershon Shafir, a leading Israeli sociologist,
has noted, while both conflicts were about control of the land,
they took place in different historical and economic conditions
that had an impact on their evolution and their relation to the
natives (2).
White South Africans and Israelis dealt
differently with the indigenous demographic reality. In Palestine
the Zionist project wanted to negate the idea of a native non-Jewish
population, coining the phrase "people without a land for
a land without a people" (3). It sought to establish Jewish
demographic dominance by expelling Palestin ians and preventing
structural dependence on the Palestinian economy, particularly
on its labour. Before 1948 fewer than a third of the workers in
the Jewish sector were Palestinian (4). From 1948-67, the remaining
Palestinian Arabs supplied no more than 15% of the labour force
(5).
South Africa was different. The white
settlers sought to dominate, rather than expel, the native population
by incorporating them as inferior citizens in a polity under exclusively
white control. The indigenous population was in the majority,
more than 75% of the total labour force since 1913, when the first
segregation laws were passed. The white minority imposed apartheid
in 1948, institutionalising legal, economic and residential discrimination.
Fundamental to this was the construction of territorial segregation,
through the labour reserves; the white-designated distinct geographic
spaces - 13% of the land - on which blacks had to live.
Between 1951 and 1970 four major Acts
(6) turned these reserves into bantustans. Those in these polities
were given "self-government" rights and responsibilities,
could define their own economic policies and run civilian and
functional affairs. However, they had to coordinate with settler
authorities on security matters, and could not have independent
foreign policies. In 1974 bantustan citizenship was created and
between 1976 and 1981 four of the 10 bantustans were granted independence,
so their people were no longer South African citizens.
In Israel/Palestine no such territorial
structure of segregation was created, though from 1948-66 the
military governments controlled Israeli Arabs' movements, curfewed
them, controlled where they lived and confiscated their land to
favour Jewish occupation. South African apartheid wanted the land
and the people, albeit with segregation; the Israeli leadership
tried to take the land without the people, a policy seriously
challenged by the 1967 war, which altered the demographic reality
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nearly a million Palestinians
remained in the occupied territories in 1967, equal to a third
of the Jewish population on the total land controlled by Israel.
Although Israel continued to pursue a transfer policy, more voluntary
than forced (7), most of the Palestinian population remained.
Examining Israel's response to this, we begin to understand the
similarities that have emerged between Israel and apartheid South
Africa, despite their initial historical differences.
After the 1967 war Israel consolidated
its claims to the occupied land. The rightwing government elected
in 1977 developed an elaborate policy of territorial integration
and demographic separation. The military government in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip (WGBS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian
land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied
territories: they continued to be governed by Israeli laws. The
government also enacted different military laws and decrees to
regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian
inhabitants. These strangled the Palestinian economy and increased
its dependence and integration into Israel. From 1967-90 the borders
between Israel and the occupied territories were kept open. More
than a third of the Palestinian labour force was employed in Israel
and generated over a quarter of the territories' GDP.
Israel had constructed more than 145 settlements
by 1993 and moved in 196,000 settlers; half lived in 10 settlements
around East Jerusalem (8). The settlements' exponential growth
and scattered distribution over the occupied areas began the structural-territorial
fragmentation of the WBGS; they were intended to challenge the
Palestinian demographic in the WBGS. Many view these Israeli policies
of territorial inte gration and societal separation as apartheid,
even if they were never given such a name (9).
The applicability of the South Africa
model to Israeli-Palestinian relations is problematic. The first
issue is the geographical delineation of Israeli "apartheid":
does it cover all of Israel or only the WBGS? Palestinians living
beyond the Green Line are Israeli citizens, while Palestinians
in the WBGS are not. The former are not confined to specific geographic
areas out of which they cannot move, nor are they excluded from
the Israeli political process - they vote and can be elected,
though they are discriminated against. The latter are an occupied
population awaiting a political solution.
THE second point of contention is the
role of territorial partition as a solution to the conflict. The
African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the main political
voice of the indigenous peoples, rejected the Afrikaners' separatist
position and called for the end of apartheid and the creation
of a democratic South Africa for all citizens. The Palestinian
Liberation Organisation (PLO) had accepted by 1974 the idea of
partition as the way to fulfil Palestinian rights to self-determination.
Although it took 19 years more, and the Oslo process, for Israel
to recognise the PLO as the only negotiating party, Israel accepted
the idea of partitioning land with the Palestinians. The question
was the definition of the boundaries and the political content
of this partition.
The third difference between Israel-Palestine
and apartheid South Africa is the position of the international
community over the resolution of the conflicts. The international
community never accepted apartheid or the idea of separate nationhood
in South Africa. In 1976, when the South African government tried
to get Transkei, one of the 10 bantustans, admitted to the United
Nations as an independent state, the UN refused (10). In the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the UN endorsed separate nation states as the model
for conflict resolution. The UN Security Council resolution 181
in 1947 clearly set up the idea of land-for-peace as the guiding
principle for solving the conflict. UN Security Council resolution
242 in 1967 reaffirmed that principle. While not specific about
the boundaries of the land that Israel occupied or about Palestinian
national rights, reso lution 242 affirmed that the way to peace
in the Middle East had to be through returning land and recognising
all states. The Oslo process was based on resolution 242.
Despite these important differences between
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and South African apartheid,
the past decade has brought them closer together. By institutionalising
the societal separation and territorial integration that Israel
created between 1967 and 1993, the Oslo process has prepared for
the bantustanisation of the WBGS, transforming the Palestinian
territories into fragmented population reserves, neither sustainable
economically nor sovereign politically.
Oslo led to the territorial fragmentation
of the WBGS. Although the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)
was supposed to control most of the West Bank by 1996, it only
had jurisdiction over 19%, or less, of the West Bank by July 2000
(area A) (11). It can be argued that political opposition to Oslo
- manifested in suicide bombings and their repercussions in the
Israeli political establishment (the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and
the election of Binjamin Netanyahu) - was a reason for the failure
to ensure adequate Israeli redeployment. But the Palestinian jurisdiction
before the al-Aqsa intifada was fragmented and excluded 59% of
the West Bank (other than East Jerusalem) and 30% of the Gaza
Strip.
Settlements were the key to the territorial
fragmentation of the WBGS and to the bantustan isation of the
Palestinian territories. Area C divided the West Bank into three
parts that were further subdivided into smaller population reserves
by the road bypass system and four major settlement blocs (Jerusalem,
Ariel/Shomron, Gush Etzion, Binjamin/Jordan valley). Between 1993
and 2000 the settler population (including East Jerusalem) doubled
to 410,000, around 15% of the terri tories' total population.
Israel built more than 400km of bypass roads and 72 settlement
outposts (12).
The Oslo process made the Palestinian
situation legally similar to South Africa's bantustans. The Oslo
accords did not make the native electorate the only source of
authority for the Palestinian entity (as in the South African
bantustans). Although the accords established a democratically
elected Palestinian National Council and presidency, the jurisdiction
of these elected institutions did not stem solely from the national
electorate. The Israeli military government, which was not dismantled,
continued to delegate to the newly elected Palestinian Council
its civilian and legal jurisdictions. The elected Palestinian
Council and the PNA were given mainly civilian, or functional,
jurisdiction over 93% of the Palestinian population, but provisional
territorial jurisdiction over 19%, or less, of the West Bank.
Oslo did not affirm the superiority of
international law over Israeli law. It did not end the occupation
and it did not mention the Fourth Geneva Convention, or UN resolution
181, which provides international legitimacy for an Arab state
in historic Palestine. The accords referred only to UN Security
Council resolutions 242 and 336, but these were vague about Palestinian
rights to statehood and the size and boundaries of the occupied
territories.
The Oslo agreements focused on establishing
an infrastructure of close cooperation between the Israeli and
Palestinian sides, rather than on separation. Joint Israeli-Palestinian
committees were created in every field, especially in security,
which remained under Israeli supreme control. This was the kind
of security cooperation there had been in South African bantustans.
The way that Oslo dealt with the Palestinian
demographic presence contributed to bantustan isation. By institutionalising
the permit and closure system, introduced in 1990, Oslo imposed
on Palestinians similar conditions to those faced by blacks under
the pass laws. Although the pass system in South Africa was created
to ensure the control and supply of cheap labour, while in the
WBGS it was introduced for security reasons, the consequences
were the same. Like the pass laws, the permit system controlled
population movement according to the settlers' unilaterally defined
considerations. The permit system, the pattern of Israel's territorial
control and the continuing Palestinian demographic presence, transformed
the WBGS into fragmented, unsustainable population reserves.
The Israelis' response to the al-Aqsa
intifada was to develop the permit system and fragment the WBGS
territorially. In April 2002 Israel declared that the WBGS would
be cut into eight main areas, outside which Palestinians could
not live without a permit (13). Settlement expansion went on unabated;
more than 2,500 houses and 52 settlement outposts were constructed
between September 2000 and January 2003 (14). The construction
of the wall between Israel and the West Bank, expected to be at
least 360km long, is establishing a unilaterally defined Israeli
border that encroaches on the 1967 boundaries and cuts Palestinian
areas off from each another (15).
The United States' proposed "road
map" is no different from Oslo; it insists on positive perform
ance in security cooperation and Palestinian institution building,
affirming Israel's right to intervene in Palestinian affairs.
It envisages the establishment of an independent Palestinian state
with provisional borders by 2005, but it does not specify how
such a state can be independent and sovereign while having only
provisional borders. It remains vague about three other issues
central to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state: settlements,
Jerusalem and refugees.
THE road map does provide a role for the
international community that was absent in Oslo. It makes the
Quartet (the UN, the European Union and Russia) guardian of the
agreement with the US responsible for monitoring cooperation between
the sides. However, the Quartet is given no power to impose arbitration
and monitoring. The road map is an international endorsement of
the bantustanisation of the WBGS; the international community
accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state with provisional
borders while settlements are not dismantled and the 1967 borders
continue to be redefined by Israel.
Despite their initial differences, apartheid
South Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become
similar since 1993. Will these similarities prove lasting? The
Palestinian bantustans are neither as clearly defined nor as large
as those of South Africa. Israel has less need of the Palestinian
labour force, replaced more than a decade ago by 250,000 workers
from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. If the current situation
continues, the two-states solution is in peril. The disappearance
of that option would condemn Israel to being an apartheid and
binational state, unless it were to embark on a massive programme
of population transfer. Palestinians and their supporters abroad
would do well to take the South African resistance movement into
account when rethinking their political vision and resistance
strategy.
Israel watch
Home Page