Apartheid

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territory, people from these different ethnic groups do not mix much in practice. 142 Even Jews
of different origins tend to stick together and live separately from other Jews. Especially the
Russian and Ethiopian Jews have a difficult relationship, and European Jews and Yemeni
Jews also tend to separate from each other. In 2002, the New African magazine reported that
77 per cent of Ethiopian Jewish adults in Israel were unemployed, that 72 per cent of their
children were living below the poverty line, and that further discrimination against them
existed in various ways. As a partial result of that, among many other things, the suicide rate
in the Israeli armed forces was highest among Ethiopian Israelis. 143 Apart from the issue of
separateness, there are other aspects of oppression and discrimination against the Palestinians,
as with the South African apartheid system, of ethnically motivated different wages, living
standards (especially for the Palestinian refugees) and rights to property, or as Edward Said
described it:
[M]inute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, [the Palestinians] are
losing more Palestinian land to the Israelis. Scarcely a road, or a
highway, or a village that...hasn’t witnessed the daily tragedy of land
expropriated; field bulldozed; trees, plants and crops uprooted; houses
demolished . . . Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is
Apartheid. 144
In South Africa, the Blacks in the 1980s owned 14 per cent of the land only. In Israel,
however, the indigenous people control only two per cent of the land. 145 Apart from the fact
that the majority of the population owns the smallest amount of land, it is also the least
desirable area of land, where ‘soil erosion and the overworking of the soil make it impossible
for them to live properly off the land.’ 146 These are some of the various measures which the
Blacks and non-Whites of South Africa had to face for almost 350 years and which the
Palestinians are still facing today.
‘The histories of our two peoples, Palestinian and South African, correspond in such
painful and poignant ways that I intensely feel myself being at home amongst my
compatriots,’ the first democratically elected president of South Africa told the Palestinian
Legislative Council in Gaza on October 20, 1999. ‘Arafat and I were allies during the days of
struggle. Our struggle was the same. Our hopes and aspirations and dreams were identical,
and that is why I am here today,’ he said later on that day in the Shati refugee camp in
Gaza. 147
142
A qualified exception to this would be the way some Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, so-called ‘Israeli
Arabs’, and some Jews mix in the pre-1967 areas. These Palestinians make up almost a fifth of the country’s
population and complain of entrenched discrimination against them in all walks of life. For example: ‘According
to the New Israel Fund, an organization that promotes social justice, only 3.7 percent of Israel’s federal
employees are Arabs; Arabs hold only 50 out of 5,000 university faculty positions; and of the country’s 61
poorest towns, 48 are Arab. But the most glaring discrimination is the way in which the Jews strictly limit the
Arabs from purchasing land.’ (De Préneuf: Israel’s Apartheid: 1,2,3, 2000). Furthermore, ‘[c]omprising over
18% of the population, Arab citizens of Israel receive only 4% of the [state] development budget’, according to a
press release by the Mossawa Center, The Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, on March 20, 2001. On
political suppression and discrimination, see also Williams: Israeli Arab Lawmaker Faces Sedition Trial, 2001;
N.N.: Israeli Arab Lawmaker Slams Sharon “Apartheid” Plan, April 21, 2002.
143
Aidi: How Israel Treats Its Ethiopian Jews, 2002: 56-59. See also Eaves: Ethiopian Jews Struggle to Adapt in
Israel, 1998; Ushpiz: Israel’s Ethiopian Jews: Doomed from the Start, 2000: 44f. A similar voluntary separation
of Whites, especially between those of Afrikaner and British origins, was well underway in 19 th century South
Africa. It sharpened and climaxed during and after the Anglo-Boer War.
144
Said: An Orphaned People, 1998: 18-20
145 3
Mandela: The Struggle Is My Life. 1990 (1978): 13. On Israel, see Chapter II.4.3., below.
146 3
Mandela 1990 (1978): 177
147
Amr, W.: Palestinians Tell Mandela He Is Their Dream, 1999