Non-Jewish majority: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Security has been a "primary justification" for Zionist policies of land expropriation and removal of Palestinians.

A GOOD, LONG ARTICLE

By Mark LeVine

Al-Jazeera

"........It's not merely an historical coincidence that in South Africa the National Party, which was the driving force behind apartheid, came into power in 1948, the year of Israel's establishment. Most every white settler colony, whether South Africa, Rhodesia, or Israel, as well as existing states born out of this model of settlement, such as Australia or the United States, required restrictive racial laws to ensure the ongoing power of the dominant group.

The various apartheid laws enacted in the 1950s were particularly intense because whites were a small minority in South Africa compared with the black population. In contrast, Israel was able to expel and/or prevent the return of most of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants, thus producing a strong Jewish majority inside the Green Line and a slight majority in all of mandate Palestine.
This ratio would be skewed significantly towards Jews for several decades before returning to a level of relative parity in the last half decade that hasn't been seen since the immediate aftermath of the 1948 war.
One of the reasons Israel has been able to enact and continue policies of systematic discrimination for decades without serious reproach from Western powers is because of the expert way it has attenuated them to provide a veneer of democracy within Israel and while being subsumed under the rubric of "security" in the Occupied Territories.......

In the Occupied Territories, which have from the start been administered under a de jure system of separation, exclusion, discrimination, economic domination and removal from land - that is, apartheid - these violations are either justified or buried under the discourse of security. Indeed, security has been a primary justification for Zionist policies of land expropriation and removal of Palestinians since the very beginning of Zionist settlement in the late 19th century.
Apartheid is both a crucial strategy and natural consequence of most colonial projects, which require the separation of the coloniser and colonised in order to establish and maintain the political, economic and social hierarchies that entrench the power of the former over the latter....


With the demographic tipping point now having been reached, that balance, if painfully and violently, will inevitably swing toward the Palestinian side. As this occurs Israel/Palestine could suffer the same fate as 1980s-era Lebanon, or Israelis and Palestinians could seek inspiration from the largely forgotten and often distorted memories of Jewish-Arab co-existence to create a future in which all the country's inhabitants, "from the River to the Sea, are free". That may sound naive and pollyanish but one thing is for sure, when practical solutions are no longer viable, utopian solutions suddenly no longer seem so unrealistic. And that offers both peoples a unique opportunity to move towards a just and lasting settlement to their century-old conflict, if they're able to seize it."