Apartheid

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Palestinians have been more violent than black South Africans, it is true. But Israeli
Jews has been even more greedy for land than the white South Africans were, and they have
also expelled many more indigenous people, directly and indirectly.
Palestinians from Jerusalem do not have the right to buy land in Jerusalem from the
State of Israel. They are considered ‘residents’, not ‘citizens’ of Israel, just like the
‘Homeland’ South Africans were officially considered ‘visitors’ in their own country,
sometimes even in their own place of birth. Similarly, in Ptolemaic Alexandria, Egyptians
were considered ‘indigenous’, but Greeks were ‘citizens’ and ‘genuine Alexandrians’. In
Roman-ruled Alexandria, likewise, there were ‘true Alexandrians’ on the one hand, and
‘Egyptians’ on the other. 408
Those Arabs who still own land and property in Jerusalem owned it prior to the 1967
occupation. Therefore, if Palestinians wish to buy and sell land in east Jerusalem, then they do
it privately. Yet all Jerusalem Palestinians must still pay a land tax to the Israeli government
in addition to income tax. The tax revenues for this land tax are then used by the authorities
almost exclusively for the development of Jewish areas.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in rural areas face similarly blatant state-imposed
measures to deny them, not only of their citizen’s rights, but also of their human rights, and to
exploit them economically at the same time.
Israel’s Agricultural Settlement Law of 1967 expressly forbids Jewish
leaseholders of state lands from subleasing them back to Palestinian
Christians and Muslims. Moreover, in 1965, the Israeli parliament
passed the Planning and Construction Law, which zoned all land in
Israel as residential, industrial, or agricultural/nature reserve, and
forbade construction on all agricultural land. The law was retroactive,
which meant that designating any area as ‘agricultural’ immediately
made all its pre-existing buildings illegal. Dozens of historic and
ancient Palestinian villages in existence long before the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948, were subsequently designated ‘agricultural’ by
the Israeli government, making them ‘unrecognized’ and illegal.
‘Unrecognized’ Palestinian villages in Israel receive no access to
water, electricity, sanitation, or roads. Nevertheless, the Palestinian
residents of these villages are forced to pay taxes to Israel, which
reserves the right to demolish these historic sites at any time.
Coincidentally, no Jewish villages became ‘unrecognized’ as result of
this law. 409
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, after his election win in 1996, announced his full
support for the ‘right’ of Jewish settlers to move and live wherever they wanted in the
Palestinian territories (which were by then in part officially controlled by the Palestinian
Authority and no longer under Israeli control). Netanyahu’s government allocated NIS 900
million (approx. $300 million) for the 1997 budget to the expansion of Jewish settlements. In
2002, prime minister Ariel Sharon echoed that sentiment by declaring that: ‘The rights to the
land of Israel are Jewish exclusively’, referring to both the state of Israel and territories it
captured in the 1967 war. He reluctantly added: ‘But all living there are entitled to rights.’
Sharon left it at that, failing to explicate what rights he was willing to extend to non-Jews. 410 It
appears that the rights to vote or to survive Israeli army attacks, to move freely, to keep one’s
land, and many others, were not among the rights he envisaged for Palestinians after 35 years
of continuous Israeli military occupation.
The so-called ‘Oslo peace process’, initiated in 1993, achieved greater segregation,
408 Walbank 3 1992 (1981): 113; Davis, Simon 1951: 69f; Haas 1997: 60
409 Muhaisen: Israel Is the World’s Last Apartheid State! 2002
410 N.N.: Sharon Unrepentant on Israeli Claims, Army Conduct, September 14, 2002