Apartheid

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employees by Israeli employers and most of the Jewish nationals, rather than Palestinians or
other Arabic-speakers. These new intermediate ethnicities also have their exact counterparts
in South Africa (above all, the ethnic Indians and the descendants of South East Asian slaves)
as well as in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Jews and other non-Africans). Noam Chomsky was one
of the few western observers at the time who emphasized this as one of the principal causes
behind the eruption of the Second Intifada.
An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control, closure [of the
Palestinian areas] has been accompanied by the importation of an
essential commodity to replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian
labor on which much of the economy relies: hundreds of thousands of
illegal immigrants from around the world, many of them victims of the
‘neoliberal reforms’ of the recent years of ‘globalization’. Surviving in
misery and without rights, they are regularly described as a virtual
slave labor force in the Israeli press. The current Barak [then Israeli
prime minister’s] proposal is to extend this program, reducing still
further the prospects even for mere survival for the Palestinians. 348
Repopulation could thus be described as partial, indirect and gradual genocide. The socalled
‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ camp in Israel – represented for instance by the pro-torture
activist (see Chapter II.1.3) and former Shin Bet (secret service) chief, Ami Ayalon – favors a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This would in his view be a means to
show the world (and the Palestinians) that Israel does not really wish to wipe out the
Palestinian people. Sixteen months into the Second Intifada, Ayalon told the Reuters news
agency that an Israeli military victory would be a disaster for the Jews. In what initially seems
like a genuine change of heart, the former head of Israel’s secret service criticized the (even
more) heavy-handed tactics employed by his successors against the uprising. Ayalon said
Israel must now take the risk ‘to vacate the [occupied] territory in order to allow for the
Palestinian state to be created.’ But he continued in a different, painfully familiar vein: ‘It’s
not a matter of yielding to Palestinian hostility. It’s a matter of preserving Zionism’, he said,
citing Palestinian population growth which he said would ultimately make Jews a minority
within Israel’s borders in case a single-state solution were pursued, or, alternatively, if the
present situation were perpetuated. 349
A similar point was made by Yossi Beilin, a former Labor Party justice minister and
one of the authors of the 2003 ‘Geneva Accords’, intended to bring peace through the so-
348 Chomsky: Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000. On sex slavery in Israel, see Goldin: Sex Slavery Alive and Well in the
Holy Land, 2001; Plumb: Israeli Film’s “Promised Land” Is Sex Slaves’ Hell, 2004. On the wider notion of
‘pink-collar workers’, i.e. underpaid, mainly informally (i.e. illegally) employed people – mostly women – in
service professions from the Third World, working for wealthy employers, clients or customers, and on their
crucial importance in the globalized economy, making the inevitable slums in the global cities as
internationalized as the capital that flows through them, see Sassen: Globalization and Its Discontents, 1998 and
further Bauman: Globalization: The Human Consequences, 1998. See also N.N.: Expatriate Workforce in Israel
Jumps Since Intifada, June 7, 2001. According to this article, the Israeli Labor Ministry itself stated that the
foreign workforce, whether legally or illegally employed, grew from 76,000 people at the beginning of the
Second Intifada to 248,000 in June 2001. That means there were 172,000 new arrivals in only nine months’ time,
and that excludes all the Jews and others who were naturalized under the racist ‘Law of Return’. That is nearly
640 new non-Jewish foreigners every day, during a period of near-civil war. In my view, this must have been
planned by Israeli state and business elites long before the uprising erupted. In the same time period the
Palestinian workforce in Israel (those without Israeli citizenship) virtually disappeared after having been an
estimated 70,000 in September 2000. 20,000 of these Palestinians used to work in Israel with permits and about
50,000 without permits. However, a report issued that same week by the International Labor Organization (ILO),
a United Nations agency, said Israeli officials had told a visiting ILO team shortly beforehand that some 120,000
Palestinians (also referring to those without Israeli citizenship) worked in Israel before the Intifada. There
obviously seems to be strong propaganda value for the Israeli state in manipulating these figures.
349 Williams: Former Security Chief Warns Israel on Use of Force, 2002