Udi Aloni has a strong and moving response to Richard Goldstone’s Op-Ed “Israel and the Apartheid Slander”:
The fact is that there is today a single political and geographic space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The whole area has been under Israeli sovereignty and control for the past 44 years. The skies, seas, borders, water rights, the judicial system as well as military and civic government are all controlled by Israel. Palestinians have municipal rule; not sovereignty.
Goldstone’s article inadvertently exemplifies the racist strategy of continued Jewish-Israeli control by means of violent maintenance of a demographic majority and the breaking of the Arab-Palestinian nation into pieces. There are 6 million Jews and almost as many Palestinians living today in this space. While the Jews live as one people tightly linked to world Jewry, and any Jew can become an Israeli citizen at any time, the Palestinians are broken into five separate pieces that cannot function as a people: There are approximately 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, 300,000 residents of Jerusalem, and finally the Palestinian Diaspora scattered throughout the world that Israel does not allow to return.
Judge Goldstone is, in fact, legitimizing apartheid. He describes the current condition as a precursor for a future two states. That utopian vision of an always yet-to-come future enables the ongoing cruelty of apartheid. Some examples: 1) Half a million Israelis have settled in the area that was conquered in 1967. The lands these settlers occupy have been robbed from Palestinians, simply because of their ethnicity, and have been transferred to Jews simply because of their ethnicity. These seized lands are being settled by Jews from other countries, especially the U.S., with the help of huge subsidies provided by Israeli and American taxpayers. In contrast, a Palestinian in Ramallah cannot even dream of moving back into his father’s home in Haifa or Jaffa, nor even marry an Israeli and live with her in Israel. Is that not apartheid?
The Supreme Court issued an evacuation order against Palestinian families in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and gave their homes to Jewish families who showed proof to the titles of the homes predating 1948. Millions of Palestinian refugees, however, cannot regain land or houses on the basis of such proof.
Israel attempts to maintain a semblance of equality under the law for Jews and Palestinians inside the Green Line, but all the zoning plans and investments in infrastructure discriminate unequivocally against the Palestinian Israeli population and thus reveal an administrative apartheid that’s quite distinct from the legal apartheid reserved for Palestinians in the territories. For example, in the mixed city of Lydda there are 700 houses marked for demolition, all of them but one belong to Arab citizens of Israel. llegal Jewish houses, however, received retroactive approval.
Israeli law separates Palestinians into fictitious subcategories. By annexing eastern Jerusalem, Israel applies Israeli law on the physical territory but not on its Palestinian inhabitants, thus creating a new class of “citizens” lacking the right to vote. Even departing their house for a certain period of time can serve as the basis for the state to revoke their already crippled citizenship status and their right to live in Jerusalem. These examples show that a clear policy exists to maintain a Jewish majority, a policy whose execution involves the systematic abuse of fundamental civil rights.
Goldstone claims that the theoretical two-state solution to come provides the legal justification not to consider the Israeli regime as practicing apartheid. Yet the state of Israel created and continues to develop the settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for 500,000 Jews, and only for Jews, while not building for the Palestinians from the refugee camps and elsewhere. This is sufficient to call this Israeli practice a form of apartheid.
A couple of years ago I approached my ardently Zionist mom, a woman who carried a weapon for the Jewish community of Jerusalem in 1948, and asked her a simple question: “Mom, is all this apartheid?”
With the sigh of a betrayed lover she indicated that, yes, this is apartheid. My heart broke.
Be sure to read the whole thing. The beginning of the piece describes Aloni’s own personal history of coming to terms with Israeli society, including his own family’s role in the Palestinian dispossession:
As a youngster embedded in a humanistic Zionist ideology I was unaware that my father’s daily business for the state consisted of, among other things, appropriating land from Palestinians who had been living on it for generations and granting it to Jewish newcomers. Only a strong ideology can explain the degree of blindness necessary to avoid recognizing that my father was implementing agrarian apartheid policies – and long before the occupation of 1967.
Aloni deals with all this and more in his new book, What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters. Read an excerpt here.
Wow! Shulamit Aloni used the “a” word. Does Justice Goldstone believe that the great Shulamit Aloni who has dedicated her life to the cause of peace also seeks “to retard rather than advance peace negotiations” (his characterisation of those who “slander” Israel with the apartheid label)?
Not quite. According to Justice Goldstone, it is not technically apartheid unless a significant percentage of the population bears the surname Van der Merwe.
Very well said. What you will find all the apologists and deniers, like Goldstone, doing is using the fictional ruse, the fantasy version of Israel within the 1967 borders. This is, as pointed out above, an entirely fictional landscape which serves the purpose of Israeli gerrymandering of citizenship and rights. All of the deniers use examples from within these virtual boundaries to claim that Palestinians have rights, the vote etc (even if glossing over the carefully circumscribed, inferior rights they have to Jewish citizens). This of course allows them, to make the pretence that the West Bank and Gaza don’t exist, or if they do, they occupy a zone in which Palestinians have no rights or recognition, but Jews are full Israeli citizens with all of the amenities and infrastructure that the state provides – in other words, they live in Israel, while their Palestinian neighbours who occupy the same land do not. The whole catastrophic, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque construction allows Israel to have the land, while pretending that the citizens who happen to be born to the bureaucratically ‘wrong’ parents do not live there, but in some limbo twilight neverland, ghosts at the feast of Israeli plenty, victims of a cruel cartographic conjuring trick which denies that they exist in any meaningful way. Mocked, derided, humiliated and robbed, their legitimate claims are dismissed as ‘science fiction’ by Israeli ministers, which tells you how realistic Israel views any claim for a Palestinian state, and how they control any such prospect with an iron fist. Two states, not side by side, but overlaid, one on top of another, ignoring it, and with a smug indifference, slowly burying the other in an unmarked grave.
Of course it’s apartheid. It’s run by Jews. Who have been persecuted through history. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is apartheid.
Ironically, according to a story that appeared at Ynet a couple of months ago, it is the Israeli FM that is insisting that the OPT are part of sovereign Israel, while those nasty Jew-haters the French are trying to save Israeli from the ignominy of apartheid by locating Israeli colonies in “Occupied Palestinian Territory”. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4146337,00.html
There is just no way salon publishes that a few years ago……….