Apartheid

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settlements were being built than previously. By 1988, more than 70,000 Israeli settlers were
living in West Bank and Gaza, acquiring control over 40 per cent of the land. Yitzhak Shamir,
the former Israeli prime minister, declared at the time that there would never be any domestic
or international force which would prevent Israelis from building settlements anywhere in the
land of Israel, by which he also meant land illegally occupied by that country’s armed
forces. 403 In 2002, according to the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, Jewish settlements
controlled nearly 42 per cent of the West Bank and 40 per cent of the Gaza Strip. Moreover,
the Israeli army has retaken vast areas since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Over 40 per
cent of the land in the occupied territories was now for 380,000 Jewish settlers, less than 60
per cent for over 3 million Palestinians, when and if the Israeli army retreats. 404 By 1996, east
Jerusalem alone had become the home of 150,000 to 200,000 new Jewish settlers. 405
One of Israel’s goals is to acquire as much of the land as possible, to secure its
dominance in the Holy Land. The main ‘justification’, i.e. excuse, for the expansion has
always been security: security for the Jewish state. At the same time, however, it aims at
minimizing Palestinian developments in the region. Large amounts of money provided by the
Israeli government and others, such as the World Zionist Organization, have been spent in
support of settlement expansion. Between 1968 and 1986 alone, the capital investment
reached a total of $2 billion. 406 Due to this being a governmental policy, it became legal under
Israeli law for settlements to expand, although it flies in the face of international law. Israeli
expansion is taking place for security as well as for the improvement of the inhabitants’ wellbeing
– the Israeli settlers’. The following description of that policy comes from Tanya
Reinhart, an Israeli professor of linguistics who actively opposes the occupation:
I believe that even much before its present atrocities, Israel has
followed the South African Apartheid model. Behind the smoke
screen of the Oslo ‘Peace process’, Israel has been pushing the
Palestinians in the occupied territories into smaller and smaller
isolated enclaves – a direct copy of the Bantustans model. Unlike
South Africa, however, Israel has managed so far to sell its policy as a
big compromise for peace. Aided by a battalion of cooperating
‘peace-camp’ intellectuals, they managed to convince the world that it
is possible to establish a Palestinians state without land-reserves,
without water, without a glimpse of a chance of economic
independence, in isolated ghettos surrounded by fences, settlements,
bypass roads and Israeli army posts – a virtual state which serves one
purpose: separation (Apartheid). . . . But what Israel is doing under
Sharon far exceeds the crimes of…South Africa’s white regime. It has
been taking the form of systematic ethnic cleansing… 407
Buffer Zone Plan Will Take Time, Has Flaws, 2002. More importantly, the buffer zone was another instance of
Israeli land theft. See Chapter II.6.3, below.
403 Al Haq 1988: 113. Especially in comparison with South Africa, the area is so densely populated that Jewish
settlement expansion necessarily entails confiscation of Palestinian land.
404 N.N.: Settlers Control 42 Pct of West Bank-Rights Group, May 13, 2002
405 Webb: Settlement Expansion Update, 1996: 26. Webb’s estimate is the higher one. The estimate of 150,000
Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem, cited in footnote 134, uses narrower city limits.
406 Al Haq 1988: 114
407 Reinhart: Academic Boycott: In Support Of Paris VI, 2003. The author applauds the brave boycott of Israeli
academic institutions by Marie Curie Université Paris VI due to Israel’s making academic life impossible in the
Occupied Territories, and for Israeli academic institutions not lifting one finger to stop it. The boycott
predictably ran into serious trouble for the esteemed French university. “Bodies ranging from the Jewish Lobby
to conservative parties came up with the standard anti-Semitism accusations. ‘Several hundred protesters,
including the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lèvy and Alain Finkielkraut, a leading Paris politician, the Nazihunting
lawyer Arno Klarsfeld and Roger Cukier, the president of the Jewish umbrella organisation CRIF, waved
banners and chanted slogans outside the campus entrance’ (The Guardian, January 7, 2003).” Reinhart 2003