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Palestinians fight apartheid
BY SIMON BUTLER
Over the past month Palestinians have once again risen up in defiance of their national oppression by the Israeli state. The Israeli military's brutal response has so far resulted in more than 150 Palestinian deaths.
The significance of this uprising can be seen in the mass participation in protests in the West Bank and Gaza, the concurrent and unprecedented uprising among Palestinians living in Israel and the large, and growing, expressions of solidarity from around the world.
Since its formation in 1948 Israel has worked hard to portray itself as a beleaguered oasis of democracy in the Middle East, a tiny outpost of decency constantly and incessantly threatened by hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs who are so blinded by their irrational hatred of Judaism that they refuse to leave peace-loving Israel alone.
Criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is routinely branded as "anti-Semitism". Zionist leaders have used the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the second world war to justify their own genocidal campaign against the indigenous Palestinian population.
The Jewish state of Israel is a racist apartheid state. In the same way apartheid South Africa was an attempt to build an anti-black, exclusively white-controlled state on African lands, Israel is an attempt to build an anti-Arab, exclusively Jewish-controlled state on Arab lands.
Colonialism
When Theodor Herzl, the ideological founder of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s, was asked what he proposed to do with the indigenous Palestinian population when his "state of the Jews" became a reality, he replied: "We will quietly spirit them across the border".
"For Europe", Herzl believed, "we would constitute a bulwark against Asia down there [in Palestine]; we would be the advance post of civilisation against barbarism."
The fundamental aim of Zionist policy in Palestine from 1917 to the United Nations' partition in 1948 was the creation of this "bulwark", of a colonial settler state with a population made of exclusively of Jewish immigrants coming mainly from Europe.
The Palestinian Arabs were not simply to exploited economically. They were to be replaced by European Jewish settlers. The Israeli state was to be founded on the basis of the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine of its indigenous Arabic-speaking inhabitants.
Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's colonisation department, confirmed this in his 1940 diary. "It must be clear", he wrote, "that there is no room for both people's together in this country ... not one [Arab] village, not one tribe should be left."
The common Zionist argument — that Palestine was uninhabited land — is comparable to the doctrine of terra nullius which was employed by a different group of European colonialists to justify the "ethnic cleansing" of the Aboriginal tribes from much of Australia.
The key foundation of the Israeli constitution and declaration of independence is that Israel is a "Jewish state". The predominantly Muslim and Christian Palestinians living in Israel are in theory Israeli citizens, but they can never enjoy the same rights as Israel's Jewish citizens.
Codified racism
The Zionist colonisation of Palestine is predicated upon anti-Arab racism. So accepted is this racism by Zionists that they have little shame in openly expressing it. In October 1973, for example, British MP Robin Maxwell-Hyslop told the House of Commons about the attitude of David Hacohen, at that time the influential chairperson of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs committee:
"Six weeks after the [June 1967] war six honourable members of this House, six from each side, including myself, went to Israel and to Jordan as guests of those countries. There was a horrifying moment for me. We were all present as guests at lunch of the foreign affairs committee of the Knesset in Jerusalem. After lunch the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Knesset spoke with great intemperance and at great length to us about the Arabs. When he drew breath I was constrained to say, 'Doctor Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which [Nazi journalist] Julius Streicher spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing?' I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said, 'But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs'."
Anti-Arab racism in Israel is not only expressed in the attitudes of Israeli Jews toward Arabs, but is embedded in the Israeli legal system.
The 1952 Law of Entry, for example, states that whoever "does not hold an immigration visa or immigration certificate" can face immediate deportation by the interior minister or can be denied a visa at any time.
But who is able to qualify for such a visa? The Law of Return restricts immigration visas solely to Jews. Palestinian refugees are therefore legally barred from re-entering Israel. The interior minister also has the ability to withdraw residence from non-Jews regardless of how long they have been living in Israel.
The 1952 Citizenship Law is also discriminatory in that it allows only Jews the right to retain their former citizenship after becoming Israeli citizens. The same law obliges non-Jews to renounce their former citizenship before becoming citizens.
Many discriminatory rulings have been delivered by Jewish rabbinical courts which are recognised as part of the state of Israel's judiciary. Under Jewish religious laws non-Jews are unable to validly testify in rabbinical courts.
A "harlot" is designated in the Torah as any woman who is not "a daughter of Israel" or who has sex with a man she is forbidden to marry. According to this interpretation, all non-Jewish women are considered "harlots" under Jewish religious law.
Under the Military Service Law an enumerator is appointed to call up draftees to be conscripted into the Israeli army. But the enumerator also has the authority to refuse to conscript people, i.e., Arabs. Palestinians are therefore denied all kinds of welfare benefits as access to many jobs, and the leasing of homes or land controlled by government bodies, is only available to draftees.
Israel was founded on the driving out of some 850,000 Palestinians from the territory conquered by the Zionist state in 1948. The of Palestinians number living in refugees camps now numbers around 3 million. While any Jew from anywhere in the world has the right to settle in Israel under the Law of Return, Israel refuses to even enter negotiations about allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
Instead the refugees have been the target of further Israeli abuses of human rights such as providing protection for the ultra-right Phalange militia as it massacred over 2000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. Israel has dealt with the problem of refugees in the Gaza strip by bulldozing refugee camps.
Land
Under the 1948 UN partition Israel was granted 54% of Palestine. The Palestinians rejected the partition on the grounds that the setting up of the Israeli state would necessarily lead to the ethnic cleansing of the local Palestinian population.
By 1948 Israel had taken control of 78% of Palestinian territory. Between 1948 and 1967 90% of Palestine had been conquered by the Zionist state.
Before 1948 there were 475 Arab villages within the borders of what became the State of Israel. By 1973, 385 of these had been destroyed by the Israeli authorities. In 1948 the average amount of arable land for each Palestinian village was 923 hectares; by 1974 it had diminished to 202 hectares as a result of the expropriation of Arab land.
The majority of these expropriations were carried out within the framework of Israeli civilian law.
Laws with relatively benign sounding names such as the Law of Acquisition of Absentee Property, Emergency Articles for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands, the Law for Acquisition of Land, and the Law for the Requisition of Land in Times of Emergency were passed in the early years of the Israeli state.
The Emergency Articles for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands were typically invoked after the military governor had designated a piece of land as a "defence area" to which civilians were denied access. The Palestinian owners of this land would be unable to farm it and so it would become fallow. The Ministry for Agriculture would then declare the land "uncultivated" and order its expropriation.
The Law of Acquisition of Absentee Property gave the Israeli state the legal right to confiscate all Arab land unless the owners could produce documentary evidence showing they owned that land and also proving they had not left their residence between September 29, 1947 and September 1, 1948 to go anywhere outside Jewish control. It was often impossible for many Arabs to prove land ownership as most land was never registered but has passed on through hereditary right.
By 1981 one third of the West Bank — conquered by Israel during its June 1967 war against Jordan — had been expropriated. Today 60% of land in the West Bank is owned by non-Arab Israeli settlers even though they constitute a tiny minority of the population.
In Gaza there are 6000 Israeli Jewish settlers living among a population of one million Palestinians. Yet 42% of the land in Gaza of is owned by Jews.
Ninety four per cent of land in Israel is under the administration of the Jewish National Fund, a member of the World Zionist Organisation. This land can be leased only to Jews. Palestinians and all other non-Jews are excluded from leasing this land without exception.
Israeli settlements are continually being constructed in the occupied territories. They are often built on strategic sites which overlook Palestinian towns and villages. Israeli settlements now form a ring around Jerusalem, isolating the Palestinian population in the city from the main Palestinian towns to the south: Hebron and Bethlehem.
The number of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has increased from three at the end of 1967 to 195 today. New settlements continued to be constructed on Palestinian land throughout the so-called "peace process".
The Israeli government has also pursued a grossly discriminatory water policy in order to control and enforce the dependence of Palestinians in the occupied territories. In Gaza in 1985, for instance, Israeli settlers consumed 2326 cubic metres of water per person; Palestinians were allowed to consume only 123 cubic metres per person.
Apartheid regime
During the "peace process" the Israeli government pursued a policy of "closure" around the occupied territories. Closure became a policy of segregation.
Eight road-blocks were set up between Israel and the territories. Israeli settlers were allowed to pass through freely. Palestinians were not. These restrictions led to 90,000 Palestinians losing their jobs as they were prevented from travelling to Israel to work.
With the mass uprising in the occupied territories in 1987 — the Intifada — the Israeli government began to issue identification cards. These cards list a "nationality" — either Jewish, Arab, Druze, Circassian, Samaritan, Kara'ite or foreign.
The purpose of the ID cards was to increase the ability of the Israeli government to restrict the travel of non-Jews. Palestinians living in the West Bank are routinely prevented from travelling to the Gaza Strip because they would have to travel through Israeli territory.
The cards also allow for discrimination against non-Jews when they apply at government offices for service regarding the acquisition of property, government support for young couples, educational curricula and government support for schools.
The Israeli education system is totally Jewish and racist in content. Almost no Arab history is covered and there are no Arab textbooks in the Israeli curricula.
Palestinians also face significant barriers to gaining a university education. In 1969, out of the 37,343 students in higher education, only 700 were Arabs.
A key component of Israeli rule in the occupied territories has been to ensure that Palestinians remain economically dependent upon Israel. No significant industry has been permitted to develop in the West Bank or in Gaza.
Most industrial and agricultural development in Israel is the exclusive preserve of the quasi-official Jewish Agency. The by-laws of the Jewish Agency prevent it from offering any services to non-Jews.
In consequence Palestinians are concentrated in the lowest paying jobs and form a super-exploited labour force for Israeli capital.
The Zionist labour movement, dominated by white European Jews, refuses to organise Palestinian workers. The Zionist labour movement fought strongly to exclude all Palestinians labour from employment in Israel in the years immediately following the founding of the Israeli state.
Today the occupied territories import 93% of the goods their inhabitants consume and export a mere 7% of what they produce. Palestinian exports to Western Europe have been banned so as not to compete with Israeli exports.
Israel has implemented a land tax, a value-added tax and export taxes upon Palestinians while subsidies and credit are made available to Jewish farmers and denied to Palestinians.
Electricity, sewerage, roads and water supplies are provided free to Israeli households whereas many Palestinian communities in Israel, let alone the occupied territories, have existed for decades without adequate services.
The occupied territories are economically depressed to the extent that 90% of Palestinian workers must travel to Jewish towns to find employment. In Gaza, one in five workers are unemployed.
Yet despite all the injustices and discrimination perpetuated by the Israeli state, Israel is far from an international pariah as was apartheid South Africa. As Elmer Berger, a Jewish American Rabbi, explained:
"Most of the world remains unaware of the dynamic of racial discrimination in the 'only democracy in the Middle East' because Zionism's propagandists rate with the world's best in phrasing plausible, even sympathy-attracting camouflage for the Israeli policies which flow from Zionism's racism: 'security', 'law and order', 'preventing fifth column subversion'. Such verbal disguises restrain the faithful of the democratic tradition from insisting upon corrective action."
But this is only a partial explanation. The nature of the apartheid regime in Israel has also been obfuscated and white-washed with the help of the Western "democracies", including the United States and Australia, whose rulers consider it in their interests to support and protect Israel's abuses of the human rights of the Palestinian people.