The news today is that two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa have accused their country of practicing apartheid by creating bantustans for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. “It’s apartheid, say Israeli ambassadors to South Africa,” Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel write at Groundup.
This is yet another apartheid charge leveled by serious people in what Al Haq has said is the “mounting recognition” and “mainstreaming of the legal analysis of apartheid over the Palestinian people as a whole.”
There is of course stiff resistance in the American discourse. Before getting to Baruch and Liel’s argument, I’d note that in recent days Bernie Sanders has flicked away the apartheid charge saying progressives should “tone down the rhetoric,” and David Makovsky has said critics call Israel “all sorts of bad names.” And NPR has given a platform to a scholar calling the charge “offensive” to Jews.
Well here are two more Jews making the charge.
Baruch and Liel say that they “learned firsthand about the reality of apartheid and the horrors it inflicted.” And they relate South Africa to current conditions in the West Bank, where Palestinians are forced on to smaller and smaller tracts of land.
This reality reminds us of a story that former Ambassador Avi Primor described in his autobiography about a trip that he took with then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon to South Africa in the early 1980s. During the visit, Sharon expressed great interest in South Africa’s bantustan project. Even a cursory look at the map of the West Bank leaves little doubt regarding where Sharon received his inspiration. The West Bank today consists of 165 “enclaves” – that is, Palestinian communities encircled by territory taken over by the settlement enterprise. In 2005, with the removal of settlements from Gaza and the beginning of the siege, Gaza became simply another enclave – a bloc of territory without autonomy, surrounded largely by Israel and thus effectively controlled by Israel as well.
The bantustans of South Africa under the apartheid regime and the map of the occupied Palestinian territories today are predicated on the same idea of concentrating the “undesirable” population in as small an area as possible, in a series of non-contiguous enclaves. By gradually driving these populations from their land and concentrating them into dense and fractured pockets, both South Africa then and Israel today worked to thwart political autonomy and true democracy.
The former ambassadors say what Human Rights Watch said when it released its apartheid report in April. Israel has no intention of leaving the West Bank and East Jerusalem, after 54 years of occupation.
[T]he occupation is not temporary, and there is not the political will in the Israeli government to bring about its end…. It is time for the world to recognize that what we saw in South Africa decades ago is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories too. And just as the world joined the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, it is time for the world to take decisive diplomatic action in our case as well and work towards building a future of equality, dignity, and security for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Here’s how HRW put it in the report penned by Omar Shakir:
After 54 years, states should stop assessing the situation through the prism of what might happen should the languishing peace process one day be revived and focus instead on the longstanding reality on the ground that shows no signs of abating.
The Carnegie Endowment made a similar argument when it called for governments to start using their powers — i.e., sanctions — in pushing Israel toward equal rights. A co-author of that study, Zaha Hassan, used the “apartheid” designation, joining a long list of moral voices, from Jimmy Carter to Marc Lamont Hill to Charney Bromberg to Stephen Robert to Black Lives Matter to Rashida Tlaib.
Ten years ago a former Israeli pm warned that the country was going to face a “diplomatic tsunami” because of its occupation. “Israel’s delegitimization is on the horizon.” Now that tsunami finally seems to be arriving. Though it may take another few years to reach the U.S. Capitol.
South Africa isn’t the only inspiration. A friend of mine, working in Ramallah (I think) in 1985, was told by an Israeli official that he was going to the U.S. to visit the Indian reservations, “to see how they do it.”
“Israel’s delegitimization is on the horizon.” One down and one to go – we’re collectively waking up to the fact that Israel has been practicing apartheid for decades, but we’re still caught up in this idea that Israel is a moral state, the IDF is the most moral army in the world, etc.
If you read any professionally written history of Israel you will realize that in the 1982 war against the PLO in Lebanon and the 2006 war against Hezbollah – to give just two examples out of many – the IDF’s behavior towards civilians was positively psychotic, that’s the only way to describe it; both were ‘optional’ wars. Jerome Slater’s “Mythologies Without End”, page 183:
…on June 6, Israel launched its long-planed attack on Lebanon: 60,000 soldiers, backed by over 800 tanks and supported by heavy air and naval bombing and long-range artillery, advanced well beyond the Palestinian refugee camps and guerilla strongholds to the outskirts of Beirut. In the two-month course of the war, wrote Mordechai Bar-On, the former chief education officer of the Israeli army, “tens of thousands were killed or wounded by Israel’s massive employment of indiscriminate long-range firepower.”
When Desmond Tutu, HRW, B’Tselem, and now these Israeli officials can smell apartheid, the world must take notice and act upon it. There is nothing else to do but start boycotting and sanctioning this apartheid nation, just like the entire world did for South Africa. There is no other language that the zionist nation can understand. Hit them where it hurts, their economy. US Presidents have attempted to bring a resolution to this conflict, Obama even offered Israel fighter jets to get them attend peace talks, with the condition that they freeze the building of illegal settlements, but greed for land got the better of them.
Israel will pretend to show interest in a 2 state solution only when the Palestinians have lost most of their land, and over 2 million have lost their resources, and all they have worked hard for.
Or they will continue to inflict pain and suffering because the US after all have supported them with aid and weaponry.
Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa & the architect of South Africa’s apartheid policies, 1961: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” (Rand Daily Mail, November 23, 1961)
“‘Similarities between the ‘original apartheid’ as it was practiced in South Africa & the situation in Israel & the West Bank today ‘scream to the heavens,’ added [Alon] Liel, Israel’s ambassador in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994. There can be little doubt that the suffering of Palestinians is not less intense than that of blacks during apartheid-era South Africa…” (Times of Israel, Feb. 21/13)
Israeli Apartheid in the Holy Land (aka: HOLY Apartheid)
Here’s a picture of the Afrikaner imposed but failed South Africa 11-state apartheid solution:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bantustans_in_South_Africa.svg
Here’s a picture of the Israeli imposed 6-state apartheid status quo (as at December 2011):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Occupied_Palestinian_Territories.jpg
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As South Africa once had an Afrikaner imposed 11-state apartheid solution (1 large self-proclaimed “white” state, and 10 small fragmented Bantustans), Palestine now has an Israeli imposed 6-state apartheid status quo (1 large self-proclaimed “Jewish State” of Israel, and 5 small fragmented de-facto Palestinian Bantustans).
De-facto Palestinian Bantustans:
1. Area A – Palestinian Security & Civil Admin control (18% of West Bank land).
2. Area B – Israeli Security and Palestinian Civil Admin control (21% of West Bank land).
3. Area C – Israeli Security & Civil Admin control (61% of West Bank land).
4. East Jerusalem – Illegally annexed by Israel.
5. Gaza Strip – Illegally besieged by Israel (via air, land & sea) with help from Egypt (land).
*. Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are being further segregated and concentrated into even smaller enclaves/ghettoes that are encircled by the ever-expanding Jewish settlements (estimated at ~750,000 Jewish settlers across 137 settlements).
As the land under Palestinian habitation continues to shrink in size, the number of de-facto Palestinian bantustans is actually increasing. Excluding the 43% of the West Bank that is off-limits to Palestinians (reserved for Jewish-only settlements/councils and roads, closed military bases and zones, Israeli declared nature reserves, areas cut off by separation wall, etc), leaves Palestinians with only 13% of their ancestral homeland.
It’s ironic that this is equivalent to the 13% that the other Apartheid regime tried but failed to impose in the form of 10 bantustans.