Apartheid Israel

A GREAT ARTICLE

By VIRGINIA TILLEY
CounterPunch

Johannesburg, South Africa

".........Talks with the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Olmert declared, will begin only after a newly elected Palestinian government "renounces violence", recognizes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, abandons the right of return on behalf of the entire Palestinian people, and agrees that the large urban Israeli settlements that now dismember the West Bank will be permanently annexed to Israel.

After this abject betrayal of all Palestinian national aspirations and social needs, Mr. Olmert said, Israel will then open "negotiations" with the new government (unless Israel doesn't like that government), "significantly diminish the number of roadblocks" (how many does Israel consider "significant"?), "improve the operation of the border crossings to the Gaza Strip" (what does "improve" mean?), and release Palestinian VAT funds that Israel is illegally withholding........

Israel will also "assist" the new Palestinian government "in formulating a plan for the economic rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip and areas in Judea and Samaria," which might sound promising until we consider that "assist in formulating a plan" does not mean Israel will assist in implementing any plan. But "areas in Judea and Samaria" is especially ominous wording. First, "Judea and Samaria" are biblical-era terms for the West Bank used by Israelis to conceptualize the West Bank as an intrinsic part of Israel. Using them in diplomatic language regarding peace negotiations signals that Mr. Olmert is now so secure in this notion that he is willing to deploy it casually as a political given. Second, Israel will evacuate only "areas" (plural) of the West Bank. Later, Mr Olmert again uses the plural form when he says that Israel "will agree to the evacuation of many territories and communities which were established therein". To everyone else, the West Bank is one territory. Now carved up by Israeli settlements, it is several territories only if those settlements remain.

In other words, we are back to Olmert's old Convergence Plan, already combusted on the altar of Lebanon. The entire speech was a stale reiteration of the same old hogwash.

The bankruptcy of Mr. Olmert's speech did accomplish one useful task: it highlighted and capped the current state of world paralysis. In fact, no one knows what to do. Daily in the West Bank, land is taken, people are confined, jobs are ruined or lost, families are divided, hopes are crushed. Daily in Gaza, conditions are far worse, as close to a million people face starvation while mortars, bulldozers, and tanks grind up people's lives. Anguished cries from Beit Hanoun ­ "why? why?" - receive no answer from Israel or anyone else. As one commentator noted, no one notices Gaza as long as the Palestinians' daily death toll remains in the single digits. We leave the Palestinians only the job of dying more dramatically to get any attention at all.......

As for Europe, its moral bankruptcy is emblemized by the UK official who admitted that Israel's blasting a sleeping eighteen-member Palestinian family into fragments was "hard to defend." (One wonders what she might have said if a Palestinian rocket barrage had smashed eighteen Israeli Jewish citizens to bloody fragments in their beds. "Hard to defend" seems unlikely.)

Still, some things are happening. The Palestinians are slowly winning the propaganda war, at terrible cost. Israel's stunning crimes in Lebanon and Gaza have turned the tide: Israel has never been such an international pariah in all its years. The Arab states finally ended the financial boycott of the Hamas government that they should be ashamed before their families and clans that they ever deployed in the first place. The heroic new international boycott movement, finally standing up to shrieking Zionist slander and charges of anti-Semitism, expands rapidly through cyber-space and into serious and principled activism. Hopeful eyes turn to Ireland's victories and bold statements from Canada.........

We know the agents of this debacle: the complicit US government and the brilliant Zionist lobbying machine; dithering Europeans; legless Arab states; a rhetorically heated but intimidated and divided global South. But to sort out what to do, we need to consider how we got here. First, let's finally face it: The two-state carrot, dangled before the diplomatic donkey for the past fifteen years, has led us straight to this debacle.......

Second, Israel's sovereignty in Mandate Palestine has moved into a new stage. Israel has long controlled the airspace, sea, ports and border controls, economy, land, water, infrastructure, and the social management of the entire territory's population. But Israel has also become sovereign in Max Weber's famous sense: "a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." .......

But consider: the international community has endorsed Israel's insistence that Hamas and all Palestinians are required to "abandon terror" and "recognize Israel". These conditions signal that continuing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is now considered illegitimate. This shift is immensely important. The right of a population to resist occupation is enshrined in the UN Charter. Resistance to occupation becomes illegitimate only if and when the occupier is recognized as the legitimate sovereign......

In sum, Israel has used the Road Map only to mask its own one-state program: retain sovereignty over all the land and exclude the native people. Israel is even being treated like a sovereign power. But here is the trick: Israel is getting away with its astoundingly brutal treatment of the Palestinians ­ and Israeli Jewish citizens sustain their impressive immunity from caring about it - only through the collective fiction that Israel is not sovereign.......

The way out? Change the definition to suit the facts. Right now, one state power is sovereign in Palestine and that state is Israel. It is an apartheid state because it excludes the territory's indigenous people from citizenship solely on the basis of ethnicity. For let us remember: The Palestinians' original sin - the "failing" has consigned them collectively to expulsion, dispossession, exile, and a cruel and humiliating occupation - is not bad leadership, missed opportunities, stubborn insistence on their demands, Arafat, or any of the usual shibboleths. It is that they are not Jewish.

And, just as apartheid did in southern Africa, Israel's fearful and zealous commitment to racial exclusion of the indigenous people is tearing the entire region apart........

John Dugard, the eminent South African legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on the Question of Palestine, wrote frankly in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that racial oppression in Israel is worse than it was in South Africa. But his assessment also offers hope. Identifying that we presently have a one-state solution - Israel's apartheid version - allows us to affirm a different one: a unified secular-democratic state, in which everyone is equal in dignity and rights, and where the Jewish and Palestinian national homes can share the land as they should. With that shared goal, disparate activist struggles around the world can find, at last, true direction.
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