Friday, January 02, 2004

Apartheid in Israel?

Dear Mr. Hand,

Your characterisation of me as a “supporter of Israeli apartheid” is false and offensive. I have never supported apartheid. Israel does not practise apartheid, but is a democracy in which the Arab minority has full equal rights including the ability to serve as members of the Knesset, in the army and in the Supreme Court. Your characterisation is therefore not only a libel on myself and on Israel, but effectively denies the suffering of black South Africans under real apartheid.

I would be obliged if you would post this message on your website to advertise to your readers your astonishing ignorance and malice.

Melanie Phillips


Mark Hand responds: Melanie Phillips dismisses my contention that Israel practices a form of apartheid. Hence, Ms. Phillips says she should not be characterized as, she says in her letter, a “supporter of Israeli apartheid.” I will stick with my contention that Israel indeed practices a form of apartheid and, furthermore, will agree with Uri Strauss, who I quoted in the article, on the point that characterizing Israel as both Jewish and democratic is contradictory. “A state can either be democratic, or it can be Jewish, but not both,” Strauss says.

Israeli and South African forms of apartheid, of course, are not identical. While Israel practices a milder form of apartheid toward its Palestinian citizens than the form that was carried out by white South Africans against the nation’s blacks, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip is highly comparable to the apartheid system in South Africa.

As Leila Farsakh explains: “White South Africans and Israelis dealt differently with the indigenous demographic reality.”

In Palestine, Zionists sought to negate the idea of a native non-Jewish population, coining the phrase “people without a land for a land without a people.” The Zionists sought to establish Jewish demographic dominance by expelling Palestinians and preventing structural dependence on the Palestinian economy, Farsakh says. In South Africa, the white settlers sought to dominate, rather than expel, the native population by incorporating them as inferior citizens in a region under exclusively white control. Fundamental to the discrimination conducted by whites in South Africa was the construction of territorial segregation through the creation of bantustans.

“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,” Farsakh writes. “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.”

The 1967 war, of course, resulted in Israel gaining full control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is in these occupied regions where the similarities between Israeli apartheid and South African apartheid are most striking and where differences with the treatment of Israeli Arabs are noticeable. Hasan Jabareen, head of Adala, an Arab human rights group in Israel, does not equate the plight of the two Palestinian communities too closely. “Of course, there is a difference. There [in the West Bank and Gaza Strip] the Israeli army kills people and expels activists and destroys houses, here we suffer from discrimination,” Jabareen told Aljazeera. “There, the women give birth at checkpoints, here our women give birth in hospitals.”

But let’s set aside examining the occupied territories, and go back to the form of apartheid, albeit less insidious than the form practiced by Israel in the occupied territories and by white South Africans, that Israel practices within its United Nations-recognized borders.

Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence defined the country as a “Jewish state,” but one with “full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex.” Maintaining the full rights to all has proved problematic to Israeli authorities, even after it rescinded in 1966 its draconian policies against Israeli Arabs.

Certainly, terrible atrocities were committed against the Palestinians during the 20 years after the birth of Israel. Here are other examples of how the implementation of official Israeli policy has resulted in an apartheid system that still today discriminates against Israeli Arabs:

  • Israeli has many laws on the books involving discrimination against Arab citizens. They include the Law of Return, which automatically grants Israeli citizenship to Jews, whereas Arab citizens who marry non-Israelis are refused the right to family reunification; the laws preventing Arab parties that do not recognize the Jewish character of the Israeli state from participating in elections; and the education law, which has the promotion of Jewish culture and Zionist ideology as one of its declared aims.

  • Michelle D’Amico writes: “Israel has practiced systematic and institutionalized discrimination against its Palestinian citizens in most areas — land possession and allocation, education, language, economics, and political participation. … The most important immigration laws, The Law of Return (1950) and The Citizenship Law (1952), allow Jews to freely immigrate to Israel and gain citizenship, but excludes Arabs who were forced to flee their homes in 1947 and 1967. In addition, although Jews of any nationality and origin may receive Israeli citizenship through The Law of Return, non-Jews who marry Arab-Israelis are not necessarily granted Israeli citizenship."

  • When Israel was created in 1948, 250,000 Palestinians who were removed from their villages but remained within Israel were classified as “internally displaced persons.” Israel enforces what it calls the Present-Absentee Law to prevent Arabs from reclaiming their lands. Although physically present in Israel, these Arabs are considered absent from their original home, thus their land belongs to the state.

  • In 1965, Israel’s National Planning and Building Law retroactively re-zoned lands on which many Arab villages sat as “non-residential.” As a result, despite the existence of these villages prior to the establishment of Israel, they were afforded — and continue to possess — no official status, D’Amico writes. These “unrecognized” Arab villages receive no government services, and residents are denied the ability to build homes and other public buildings. The authorities use a combination of house demolitions, land confiscation, denial of basic services, and restrictions on infrastructure development to dislodge residents from these villages.

  • Most recently, the Israeli Knesset in July 2003 passed a law that prevents Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from residing with their Israeli spouses in Israel and from obtaining Israeli citizenship. Under the law only Palestinians are specifically targeted — people of other nationalities marrying an Israeli can still apply for a residency permit and for Israeli citizenship.

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