Apartheid

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have reproductive rights, and they are basic human rights. Although Gaza is even more
densely populated than (all of) China: if a Gaza woman really wants seven children, then
having them must be up to her, more than to any man or any group of men or other women.
To let Palestinian refugees ‘return’ only to areas presently under Palestinian National
Authority rule is another pseudo-solution. These areas are already overcrowded and they have
unacceptably high unemployment rates. Most of the refugees or their immediate ancestors
were driven out of what is today Israel and therefore that is the only place to which they can
return, and to which they must be allowed to return with dignity, not only because of
international law, which demands the Palestinian right of return (UN Resolution 194). With
any other ultimate destination the use of the word ‘return’ would be hypocrisy. To play down
Israeli responsibilities in order to direct all blame and more pressure on Palestinian families
and the Palestinian National Authority to end femicide is yet another pseudo-solution. But so
is the opposite ‘strategy’: to play down Palestinian responsibilities. The problem of ‘honor’
killings is obviously much older than Israel. Therefore, I do not see any priority among the
three levels of responsibility for Palestinian femicide. This may seem a pessimistic
conclusion, as there is seemingly no simple solution. There is no logical or practical single
place to start attacking Palestinian femicide. But, at least, there is a solution. It is known as
human rights.
Both Jews and Palestinians, both in Palestine/Israel and in the Diasporas, both men
and women, both state or pseudo-state authorities and civil society, need to tackle their own
ethnicist and sexist warfare directly. I have argued here that male Israeli Jews carry more
responsibility for this demographic war and that they therefore have to do more; they must
change their ways more in this regard than the Palestinians or the Israeli Jewish women do.
They also have to become main targets of proactive peace-making efforts. But all participants
on all sides need to change. Perhaps the three tiers of responsibility for Palestinian femicide
identified above should be brought to bear on every single case of femicide. But that is not the
thesis that has been argued here. Rather, there will be no peace in the Middle East worth the
name until the demographic war is ended along with the conventional armed conflict.
Beyond the three forms of systematic apartheid violence we have studied here, there is
a fourth form of apartheid violence, namely, between members of the ethnic elite. Although
there have been sensational assassinations of two apartheid prime ministers, Hendrik
Verwoerd and Yitzhak Rabin, by extreme racists for whom apartheid was apparently not
enough oppression of indigenous people, there has never been systematic apartheid violence
between Israeli Jews or between white South Africans (the British who fought the Boers were
not (yet) South Africans, they were British citizens and British colonialists). Systematic
apartheid violence is either interethnic or it takes place within the indigenous community. We
shall come back to this issue in Part III.
In summary, Israeli apartheid reveals its most vicious face by widely denying
Palestinians the most basic of all rights, the right to life. This is done differently under
different circumstances. Being a young male Palestinian under Israeli military occupation is
one of the closest things to an a priori death sentence for a healthy human being in the world
since the end of the Second World War. 2001 was the cruellest year so far for Palestinians in
almost 35 years under military occupation, according to a leading Palestinian rights group, the
Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights. In that year alone, ‘excessive force’
by Israelis killed nearly 700 people, 100 of them children. In the following year, however, the
death toll was even higher, it rose to over a thousand Palestinians. The methods used to kill
them varied from bombarding civilians from military planes, high-power bullets penetrating
house walls and ‘accidentally’ killing people in their homes, to targeted assassinations by
death squads, summary executions of captives, deaths by means of torture during
interrogation or incarceration in Israeli military prisons, and many further entirely avoidable
deaths due to bureaucratic red tape or individual Israeli soldiers, for instance in ambulances
held up at roadblocks, or by the criminal (yet consistently unpunished) use of Palestinian