Apartheid

Israel has constructed over 200 illegal settlements on the territories it occupied in
1967. It started slowly. In 1977 there were less than 4,000 illegal Jewish settlers. In 1980
Israel illegally annexed east Jerusalem to the country, which led to the construction of
suffocating semi-circle of settlements around this city. By 1985 Israel had illegally settled
45,000 Jews in the Occupied Territories (a war crime under the Geneva Conventions). By
then, their presence there was already seen as one of the main obstacles to peace in the entire
region. 133 Israel now illegally houses over 240,000 Jews in the settlements on the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip and around 200,000 more in Arab east Jerusalem. Another 17,000 have
settled in the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 war, and illegally annexed by
Israel in 1981. The Palestinians have since seen themselves pressed to make one concession,
effectively recognizing Israel’s statehood, i.e. its de facto right to sovereignty over the land it
was ‘given’ by the UN against unanimous Arab resistance and over the additional land that
Israel occupied in 1948 and 1949. The mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
made this concession in 1988 and was rewarded by the USA and the rest of the west by no
longer being considered and dealt with as only a terrorist group. Only the right to return to
personal Palestinian land property or financial compensation for having had that property
stolen from them were still being demanded by Palestinians. 134 Israel, however, has never
recognized the right to exist of a Palestinian state. Moreover, Israel refuses to accept moral
responsibility for the fate of the refugees and claims their expulsion was a direct consequence
of an Arab war of aggression against Israel. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution
194, adopted on December 11, 1948, nevertheless grants the Palestinian refugees the right of
return and the right to compensation. Israel never complied with the wish of the international
community. Since then, Israel has in fact continuously defied the United Nations and other
international and global organizations, often in tandem with its main ally. Edward Said
remarks: ‘no state (aside from the US itself) has defied the international community on so
many issues for so long.’ 135 From 1967 to 2003 alone, Israel had 130 UN resolutions issued
against it, none of which was implemented by the Jewish state. 136
In 1987, the first Intifada against Israeli occupation was initiated by youths armed with
mostly nothing more than stones and sticks as well as most of Palestinian civil society which
waged entirely non-violent resistance. It subsided in 1993, with the signing of an interim
peace accord in Oslo between the Israeli government and the PLO. By then, over 1,200
Palestinians and 179 Israelis had been killed in this first popular uprising. 137
The Oslo Accords, however, were not upheld by Israel. As frustration grew among
Palestinians, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, were invited
to Camp David by US President Bill Clinton in the summer of 2000. The new proposed peace
plan, championed by Clinton and Barak, essentially remained a Bantustan plan. The
Palestinian ‘autonomous areas’ would be reduced from around 200 to four or five. But each of
these would be isolated from the other, and ‘sovereignty’ was about equal to Bantustan
‘sovereignty’ in South Africa, something that neither the USA nor any other country in the
world, for that matter, had accepted during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Free travel and free trade
within the proposed Palestinian state would have been as impossible as it was within and
between the South African Bantustans. Moreover, Israeli ‘by-pass’ roads, to be used by Jews
133
Avishai: The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, 1985: 10
134
N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, October 25, 2004; Redden: Talks Turn to
Palestinian Refugees After 52 Years, 2000; N.N.: Israel Says Jewish Settlers Number Almost 200,000, July 27,
2000; Miftah: Perspective: What Red Lines, What Compromise? No date; Said: Palestinians Under Siege, 2000;
Tufakji: Settlements: A Geographic and Demographic Barrier to Peace, 2000: 52-58; N.N.: Factbox: Tension
Rises between Israel and Syria, October 7, 2003. Both the 4 th Geneva Convention and UN Resolution 242 render
the Jewish settlements illegal. See also N.N.: EU Presidency Condemns Illegal Israeli Settlements, April 5, 2001.
135
Said December 17, 2000
136
Ess: UN Resolution 1515 To Back Roadmap, 2003
137
Heritage: Cradle of Intifada Nervously Awaits Mideast Peace, August 24, 2000.
87