Apartheid

Today’s volatile situation in Palestine and Israel is characterized by vicious circles of
land confiscations and violent provocations by the Jews and terrorist acts 148 by Palestinian as
well as by Israeli extremists and by the Israeli armed forces. This goes back at least to the end
of the British mandate in the 1940s. At present, there are more than 370,000 Jewish settlers in
the Occupied Territories and Jerusalem, spread out over more than 200 settlements. With
regard to international law, they are all there illegally. The numbers are growing constantly,
but so are the numbers of Palestinians, despite vigorous Israeli decimation and a gradual,
direct and indirect, mass expulsion of the indigenous population.
The head of the Israeli government during most of the Second Intifada so far, Ariel
Sharon, represented the right-wing Likud Party, which has vowed ‘never to permit the
establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River’. Sharon’s inofficial yet obvious
policy was ‘to depopulate as much as possible the Occupied Palestinian Territories by making
life for its citizens unbearable’. This was done mainly through assassinations and random
shootings and bombings of Palestinian civilians, and also through closures, curfews and
sieges, which have led to chronic malnutrition of between 20 and 40 per cent of Palestinian
children, and a strangulation of the entire Palestinian economy, including the intentional
targeting of the education and culture sectors. Moreover, a massive campaign of army- and
settler-induced daily harassment and terror, which has wounded more than ten times as many
Palestinians as it has killed since the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000,
contributes to the widespread impression that it is not genocidal, although this could certainly
be debated. Around 80,000 Palestinians reportedly fled the Occupied Territories during the
first two years of the Second Intifada, most of them economic as well as political refugees,
who left mainly in order to earn money abroad in order to help their families at home. 149 That
seems to be the main reason why the Israelis led by Sharon provoked and prompted the
Palestinians to start the Intifada (see further Chapter II.9.3, below).
The Oslo peace process had led on the one hand to increasing self-administration of
the Gaza strip and sparsely scattered dots of returned Palestinian land on the West Bank; but,
on the other hand, these dots of land closely mirror the ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’ unto
which the South African apartheid government granted ‘independence’ in the 1970s and
1980s. These patches of land are too poor in quality and they are too small and isolated from
each other to ever become viable economic or political entities, let alone a single such entity.
No one is more aware or more approving of this than the powers that decisively formed and
148 Although I consider apartheid to be a state of war against the entire indigenous majority – including all
civilians – initiated and perpetuated by the de facto invading ethnic minority (see Section II.1, below), including
its civilians, I also consider any targeted or collateral killing of civilians to be war crimes, whoever it may be that
commits these offences. Thus, the indigenous are at an additional military disadvantage: having to be morally
superior to the occupiers. But in my view the alternative, considering civilians as legitimate targets or their
deaths as unavoidable collateral damage, will in the long run make liberation and reconciliation more difficult to
achieve. See Said: Palestinians Must Occupy the Moral High Ground, 2001. Regarding the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, including east Jerusalem, the Fourth Geneva Convention renders resistance even more acceptable. It
is the right of the subjugated people to resist a military occupation such as this. Israel and the USA are the only
countries fighting the notion that the Convention should apply to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, mainly by
boycotting any implementation, enforcement or even discussion of the Convention on an international level.
Israel claims that it observes the humanitarian provisions of it, but disputes that it legally applies to the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, which it says were under no legitimate rule when it captured them in the 1967 war. See
Nebehay: Israel, U.S. Set to Boycott Talks on Territories, 2001. The huge discrepancy between Israel and the
USA on the one hand and the rest of the international community on the other was exemplified in 2001 by the
former labeling the anti-Israeli militant groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah, as ‘terrorists’, which the
United Nations did not. However, the USA has received considerable backing from the other NATO countries –
and with regard to Hamas, even from the EU – on this issue since then. See N.N.: Syria, Lebanon: Fight against
Israel not Terrorism, December 20, 2001; N.N.: EU Joins US in Denouncing Hamas as Terrorist Group,
September 6, 2003, and Chapter II.9.3, below.
149 Quotes from Awwad: Palestine: Ethnic Cleansing by Starvation, 2002
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