Monday, January 08, 2007

Apartheid and a Right to Exist

"I have always supported a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. That is different from a Jewish state. There’s a strong case to be made for an ethnic homeland, but as to whether there should be a Jewish state, or a Muslim state, or a Christian state, or a white state—that’s entirely another matter." –Noam Chomsky

Much of the debate over whether Israel is an apartheid state focuses on Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Territories. Jimmy Carter, in his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, emphasizes that he is referring to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, not inside the Green Line, when he says Israel practices a form of apartheid.

But contrary to Carter’s depiction, apartheid should describe only what a nation-state practices within its internationally recognized borders. The West Bank and Gaza are not part of Israel. Therefore, Israel’s conduct inside the West Bank and Gaza is not apartheid. Instead, its conduct in these regions consists of a low-grade form of genocide and an advanced form of military dictatorship.

Israel ruthlessly discriminates against the Palestinians and supports the Israeli settler movement inside these lands. Israel is not only an occupying force in the West Bank and Gaza, it has embraced a clear agenda in these regions to seize control of precious and rapidly diminishing natural resources for the benefit of Israelis and to clear Palestinians from certain areas of the West Bank to make room for Israelis.

Despite Carter’s protests to the contrary, what Israel practices inside its own borders is indeed a form of apartheid. However, Israeli and South African forms of apartheid are not identical. Israel practices a milder form of apartheid toward its Arab citizens than the form that was carried out by white South Africans against the nation’s non-whites.

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. 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] the Israeli army kills people and expels activists and destroys houses, here we suffer from discrimination,” Jabareen said. “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 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.

  • 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.

    • Since Israel’s creation in 1948, academics and activists have maintained that the concept of a “Jewish state” cannot coexist with democracy. Furthermore, maintaining a “fundamental identity,” as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman says is Israel’s right, is also what Hitler sought to accomplish in Germany, although Jewish citizens of Germany were the ones whose existence didn’t mesh with Hitler’s warped concept of a German identify just as Palestinians today are cast aside in the development of an Israeli identity.

    Uri Strauss of the University of Massachusetts says 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 argues.

    Specifically, Strauss notes that the Israeli government can disqualify candidates for political office of any party that opposes the Jewish character of the state. “This law has been used to disqualify candidates for calling for a democratic state, in which all citizens have equal rights,” Strauss says.

    When characterizing opinions beyond its borders, the Israeli government and its supporters around the world often accuse groups, particularly Palestinian groups and governments of neighboring countries, of refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. What does such an accusation truly suggest? It has nothing to do with these groups refusing to recognize the land now serving as the nation-state of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Instead, what this charge essentially implies is that these groups are refusing to grant Israel a license to continue to conduct intense discrimination against Palestinians within its pre-1967 borders and to brutalize and decimate Palestinians (as well as the Lebanese and other groups of people) outside its internationally recognized borders.

    Given the circumstances created by its conduct during the past 60 years, Israel is not deserving of any respect, let alone consideration of the silly notion of a “right to exist.” But lsrael should not be singled out for such treatment. It should be the same rule for all the brutal governments (pardon the redundancy) of the Middle East and around the world. No nation-state or governing entity has a “right to exist,” particularly those that commit great atrocities against their own people and those of other nations.

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