Apartheid

talent and principle this must include bigots and losers. The
settlements in particular attract fanatics: the nobody from New Jersey
who acquires an heroic new role in a narrative that puts him at the
forefront of a biblical struggle. Israel and the old South Africa
illustrate the dangers of the state based on ethnicity, where there is the
notion of a particular ethnic group which prospers at the expense of
the perceived lesser races. 327
167
Of course there is racism, structural and personal, in immigration bureaus around the
world, but the unique features of apartheid South Africa and present-day Israel are their
exceptionally strong structurally racist aspects and their preference towards, and active
encouragement of immigrant racists, as long as the latter belong to or wish to and are able to
belong to the privileged ethnic group. The healthy challenges to societies presented by normal
immigration are thereby eliminated or at least minimized.
2.3. Statisticians, Gynecologists, and Settlers
The state of Israel now has an 80 per cent Jewish majority. Yet, there are still almost
twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews, most of the former now being classified
by the United Nations as refugees. 328 That is the main reason why Israel does not (yet) qualify
as genocidal, but remains an apartheid society, although the degree of ethnic cleansing
achieved is very high by all standards.
[H]ow did Palestinians become a minority in their homeland when, in
1900, the Jews constituted less than 10 percent of the population, and
in 1947, on the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, less than
one-third[?] . . . [A]ll Jews are treated as de jure Israelis who enjoy a
permanent ‘right of return to the land of Israel.’ Thus, the Israeli state
has decreed that Jews, irrespective of their citizenship, are the
legitimate claimants to historical Palestine, and deny this right to its
indigenous inhabitants. 329
Beneath this tidy and cruel process of ethnic cleansing, however, is a demographic
situation equivalent to that in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in white-ruled South Africa. The
indigenous inside the conquered land multiply faster than the invaders and their descendants.
There are now 5.1 million Jews and at least 4.8 million Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied
Territories, and a Palestinian majority is expected by 2010.
From 1967, Israel outlawed and often harassed and arrested Palestinians gathering
population statistics. It recently put the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem at 180,000, about
30 per cent of the total 670,000 population of Jerusalem. Commenting on the first legal census
carried out by Palestinians in 1997-1998 and released in June 2000, the senior PLO official
Faisal Husseini said: ‘In 1967 there were 55,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem; now there are over
300,000. Israel underestimates the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem for political reasons’.
After thus coming to a tally almost twice the size of the Israeli estimate, he also said: ‘all
Israeli attempts to Judaise Jerusalem have failed and Palestinians’ resistance to being pushed
out of the city are represented in the statistics.’ The next Palestinian census that was published
claimed that there were 348,586 Palestinians in Jerusalem in 1999, twice as many as the
Israelis admitted there were. Israel now appears increasingly desperate about this situation.
Between 1967 and 1998, 5,768 residency permits of Palestinians were confiscated by Israel,
327 McGregor 2001
328 According to the Palestinian Census of 1997, there were an estimated 7,921,000 Palestinians worldwide in
that year. That included a total of 3,711,000 inside Historic Palestine. See Palestinian Bureau for Statistics, no
date.
329 Younis: Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements, 2000: 8f