Apartheid

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only, primarily by Jewish settlers and Israeli military personnel, would criss-cross the
Palestinian cantons. These roads would in practice remain under Israeli sovereignty as well. In
essence, the Israeli-American plan for the Palestinians meant that 200 small prisons would be
turned into four or five larger ones, and Israel would control the land around them, between
them, and the airspace above them. Palestine would not be allowed to border its neighbors,
Jordan and Egypt. All land next to the borders would still be under Israeli control. The
Palestinian people would thus remain under total Israeli military, political and economic
control. Furthermore, as Seth Ackerman reported: ‘[i]n exchange for taking fertile West Bank
lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel [at Camp
David] offered to give up a piece of territory in the Negev desert – about one-tenth the size of
the land it would annex – including a former toxic waste dump.’ Nonetheless, the Israeli and
US media somehow managed to produce and successfully spread a depiction of the Barak-
Clinton plan as generous towards Palestinians, and PLO leader Arafat as the one who spoiled
the party by subsequently rejecting the plan. 138
The second major civilian Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada or ‘Al-Aqsa
Intifada’, erupted on September 28, 2000, and soon turned into a contained civil war,
involving heavy weaponry on the Israeli side, again pitched against mainly stone-throwers but
also a few light firearms, and from 2001 bombs and grenades for suicide attacks on the
Palestinian side. Intense pressure from the US and other Israeli allies have so far kept the
neighboring Arab states from attempting to intervene in the Intifadas as they had done in the
wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, although a majority of inhabitants of these countries would
probably favor such an intervention, despite the overwhelming military hardware odds
stacked against them.
The promises to the Palestinians incorporated in the spirit of the Oslo accords, that a
Palestinian sovereign state would be established by 1998, that the illegal settlements would
disappear or at least stop expanding, had been postponed repeatedly or broken. The first five
people to be killed in this Intifada, were again Palestinians, but somehow, the world’s
dominant media, led by the pro-Israeli, privately-owned US media, managed to turn this
around as well. Nine weeks later, at least 264 people had been killed in the violence in the
Occupied Territories, all but 29 of them Palestinians (including ‘Israeli Arabs’) or foreign
nationals killed by Israeli armed forces or settlers. 139 The US Secretary of State at the time,
Madeleine Albright, referred to this situation as a ‘siege’ by the stone-throwing Palestinians of
the state of Israel (see Chapter II.9.3). Youths with a Stone Age arsenal were allegedly
besieging one of the five greatest military powers in the world, a diversified, hypermodern
military machine with hundreds of nuclear bombs! In fact, the Israeli army had moved into
nominally Palestinian territory, where almost all of the clashes were taking place. That is a sad
138 See Ackerman, S.: The Myth of the Generous Offer: Distorting the Camp David Negotiations, 2002, for an
excellent treatment of the subject. See also Chomsky: US-Israel-Palestine, 2002; Hass: The Myth of the State
and the Reality of the Annexation, 2003. There is no known parallel to Bantustan policies in Graeco-Roman
Egypt. The obvious reason is that there were no international laws or conventions at that time granting peoples
the right to self-determination or demanding democracy, and consequently no need for such expensive and cruel
hypocrisy. However, there were temples of the ancient Egyptian religion, within which impoverished Egyptian
peasants were sometimes able to find asylum from the Ptolemaic or Roman state’s tax collectors. Led by the
least unprivileged group of Egyptians – the priests – the temples, however, had no other known rights vis à vis
the Graeco-Roman elites, and were thus much further away from true sovereignty than the Bantustans were.
They were also of course even smaller in size, and the apartheid-regime-instated puppets, who were presumably
in charge, had even less freedom than a South African or a Palestinian Bantustan authority did or does. Jews,
similarly, were also granted asylum from tax collectors in the numerous synagogues that existed throughout
Egypt in late ancient times. Fraser: Ptolemaic Alexandria, Volume I, 1972: 283f.
139 N.N.: Israel Uses Excessive Force - Israeli Rights Group, December 6, 2000. Additionally, four foreign
nationals had been killed by Israeli soldiers during this Intifada at this point in time. B’tselem, the Israeli human
rights group, condemned Israel for ‘grave’ human rights violations. The news agency Reuters’ own, unofficial
death toll was slightly higher, with at least 297 people killed, though that included people killed within Israel’s
1967 borders, mainly Israeli Arabs, killed by Jews, which the B’tselem toll did not include.