Apartheid

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rights violations, especially ones against Israelis, but increasingly also the ones carried out by
Israelis. The globalized ‘information society’ demanded more and faster news, and, just as
with the Soviet Union, South Africa, China and others, Israeli state censors were unable to
keep up with the pace.
Many civilians have been killed and wounded since then, mainly whilst participating
in rioting and demonstrations. A great number of these civilians were innocent of any activity
that could endanger the safety and well-being of the country. However, the Intifadas provided
the Israeli army and police with pretexts to act in any way they found necessary to control and
suppress resistance, i.e. Palestinian civilians. 234 At the same time, Israelis, including many
civilians, were targeted with suicide bombings and other violent attacks, mainly by the armed
wings of the militant islamist Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, and by the Al-
Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the militant wing of the mainstream Fatah political party. 235
As with the South African resistance against apartheid in the narrow sense, many
Palestinians were also targeted, attacked and killed abroad, along with other Arabs opposed to
Israel. In 2000 Noam Chomsky estimated the combined number of Lebanese and Palestinians
killed directly by Israel and its ally, the USA, in Lebanon from the Israeli invasion in 1982
and onwards at 45,000-50,000. 236 Lebanon, indeed, had become an Israeli equivalent to
Angola and Mozambique since long before that invasion. Five years before Chomsky’s, the
following estimates were made:
Human misery cannot adequately be conveyed in figures, and yet the
statistics give some order of scale. The Palestinian death toll from
1948 to 1993 was 261,000, with 186,000 wounded and 161,140
disabled. The refugees displaced in 1948 and 1967, and their
descendants, numbered 5.4 million by the early 1990s, according to
UN estimates. The civil wars in Lebanon which resulted from
complications of the Arab-Israeli conflict claimed a further 90,000
lives, 115,000 wounded, 9,627 disabled, and 875,000 refugees.
Egypt’s losses in five wars, (1948, 1956, 1967, 1968-70 and 1973)
came to 39,000 dead, 73,000 wounded, and 61,000 disabled, while 2.1
million people living in the Suez Canal area were displaced twice (in
1956 and 1967). 237
These overall figures point towards a death toll so far comparable in size order to that
of South African apartheid (in the narrow sense). Many Jews have been killed in and outside
of Israel too, yet the overall ratio to the number of Palestinians killed is only estimated at
somewhere between 1-12 and 1-25, according to two learned commentators. The
unprecedented wave of suicide bombings that accompanied the Second Intifada raised the
relative Jewish death toll to a quarter of the total of killings in that uprising. 238
Between December 1987 and November 1988, Al Haq 239 reported 204 Palestinian
deaths in the West Bank. 180 of these deaths were a result of Israeli live ammunition fired at
Palestinians. The remaining number of deaths were results of the use by authorities of tear
gas, beatings, plastic- or rubber-coated steel bullets and other instruments. Most of the dead
234 See, for example, Amr, W.: Israeli Army Snipers Fire into Palestinian Crowd, 2001; N.N.: Israeli Army
Blasted for Lack of Non-Lethal Weapons, October 1, 2003.
235 On a remarkably conciliatory Israeli victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing, who survived horrific wounds
and a four-month coma after the attack, see Sites: Skin Deep: When a Suicide Bomber Took Kinneret Boosany’s
Physical Beauty, She Found the Beauty Inside, 2006
236 Chomsky: The Current Crisis in the Middle East: What Can We Do?, 2000
237 Heikal: Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations, 1996: 7
238 Brand-Jakobsen 2000; Herman November 25, 2002; Herman 2001 (see footnote 15); Herman: Road Map,
2003. See Part III, below, on the strategic irrelevance of the higher relative Israeli death tolls due to the
Palestinian suicide bombing campaigns.
239 Al Haq, established in 1979, is an NGO affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists.