Apartheid

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unemployment rate, up to sixty per cent in Gaza at the time of writing. They in their turn have
also suffered in their childhoods, as boys, especially in the hard-hit families.
Non-Palestinian (‘non-Arab’) Israeli men suffer the least direct effects of this war, but
even they are victimized, for instance as objectified and instrumentalized immigrants. And
like everybody else involved they become enveloped by a poisoned atmosphere of hate and
objectified personal relationships that contributes enormously both to this war and to the
conventional war. This applies especially to the settlers and the soldiers, some of whom are
little more than pawns in the game of the elite Zionists.
But the first and most affected victims of this war are women, who are also reduced to
servants of the state and servants of the ethnicity. Their wombs, the very essence of their
female identities, have become instruments. They have become weapons. The demographic
war has been described as a ‘Battle of the Wombs’. 274 It is, however, more than just a battle –
it has been going on for many decades already. In Egypt and South Africa it went on for
centuries. It is a war.
The demographic war is basically a sexist and an ethnicist war. Are the Palestinians
ethnicist in this war? Yes, there is ethnicism among some Palestinian men and women against
Jews. There is ethnicism in every society that size, and smaller. But the Palestinian ethnicism
is not organized, certainly not as organized as the Jewish ethnicism, which is exemplified not
only in the ethnicist laws, but mainly in the Israeli occupation, expulsion, immigration, and
settlement policies and practices. The Palestinian ethnicism against Jews is a deeply provoked
ethnicism, very much like ethnicism against Whites among Blacks (so-called ‘reverse
racism’) on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But although it may be more or less
understandable, ethnicism is in essence unforgivable, even among Palestinians and Blacks.
Palestinian ethnicism against Jews as a whole is also less conscious than the Jewish ethnicism
against Palestinians, and more broadly, against Arabs. But there is unconscious ethnicism on
both sides, and although this fact may sometimes make it more understandable, it still remains
a crime against humanity.
The fourth presently unique fact, the high Palestinian birth rate, is often brought up in
the intra-Jewish debate, where it is usually referred to as the ‘demographic threat’ 275 , or, even
more dehumanizing against Palestinians: the ‘demographic bomb’ 276 . This means that, despite
the fact that the majority of Palestinians have been turned into refugees by the creation and
subsequent territorial expansion of the de facto state of Israel, a much faster growth of the
remaining Palestinian population than the Jewish one is likely to re-establish a Palestinian
majority on the territory of Historic Palestine within a few years’ time. Due to this context, the
mere existence of Palestinians is perceived as an actual ‘threat’ by believers in the Jewish
state. There could not be a stronger negation of being ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
Palestinians are pronounced guilty as soon as they are born, or even before they are born.
Newborn Palestinian babies are considered as ‘threats’ and ‘bombs’. But the predominance of
this perception is seldom admitted in the international, Jewish-Israeli-dominated, discourse. 277
The actual death toll for Palestinian women goes well beyond the reported violence.
The true statistics of Palestinian women killed in the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict since
September 2000 is not known and will not be known by anybody, because so-called ‘honor
killings’ – killings of women who refuse to enter arranged marriages, or who somehow have
disappointed their husbands, fiancées, fathers or brothers in other ways, supposedly in order to
protect the ‘honor’ of the murdered woman’s family – are sometimes not even registered as
killings with the PNA. In countless death certificates the cause of death is registered as
‘unknown’, although the cause is actually known, even by the authorities. Perpetrators of such
274 Foa: Letter from Israel: Battle of the Wombs, 2002
275 Ashrawi: World Should Intervene to End the Israeli Apartheid, 2001
276 Abu Nimah: Defusing Israel’s “Demographic Bomb”, 2005
277 HaCohen: Looking Behind Ha’aretz’s Liberal Image, 2002; Tamari: Demographic Nationalism: False
Assumptions and Inevitable Truths, 2005. See also footnote 267, above, and Chapter II.9.3, below.