II. The Imperialist Underpinnings of the Founding of South African Apartheid and the State of Israel

“You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.”

Israeli General and Statesman Moshe Dayan - Chief of Israel’s General Staff, Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Defence, and finally Foreign Minister in the Israeli Government –advising his government  associates what to tell the Palestinians

(Washington DC, 20 August 2001)

Ayalon’s comments point to a similarity between racial discrimination in South Africa – known as “apartheid” - and racial discrimination in Israel. A comparison of the two regimes seems to confirm that Israel virtually mimics major features of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s. There are even some similarities in the way the two regimes were created.

For more than three centuries, South Africa was a site of vicious struggle between European colonialists and various indigenous and immigrant population groups. Non-European groups opposed to the expansion of European colonial settlements in the country included indigenous African ethnic groups, various mixed groups collectively identified as “Coloureds”, and immigrant indentured labourers and traders from Asia (mainly India). There were two main European groups seeking power in South Africa: the British, who were the dominant colonial presence in southern Africa; and the Afrikaners (which in English means African), who were primarily the descendants of Dutch traders and livestock farmers (called “boers”) but also included political and religious refugees from western Europe (mainly Flemish speakers, German speakers, and French-speaking Huguenots). The European colonial imperative was motivated fundamentally by commercial and economic interests in lucrative regional resources such as diamonds and gold.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, British imperial rule was established over Afrikaners and Africans alike. However, the British accepted a historic compromise with their fellow Europeans - the Afrikaners or Boers - by opening up the corridors of power to embrace the Afrikaner community at the expense of the indigenous African, Coloured, and Indian communities. The result ultimately was that Boer and Briton together would control a new nation-state, the Union of South Africa, in 1910. From 1910 until 1948, power in South Africa was shared by the white political parties aligned with their respective British and Afrikaner traditions.[8] Throughout this period racial segregation and the supremacy of whites had been traditionally accepted in South Africa, although it had not yet been officially implemented by the state by law.

In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the 1948 general election and immediately began to officially implement through a variety of discriminatory laws the policy known as apartheid, which in Afrikaans means “apartness” or “separation”. The purpose of apartheid was separation of the “races”: not only of whites from nonwhites, but also of nonwhites from each other, and, among the Africans (called Bantu in South Africa), of one group from another. Apartheid, however, not only implied racial segregation. It also specifically involved a policy of political and economic discrimination against non-European groups. All of the population groups in South Africa classified by the government as non-European would now be governed separately and subordinated at every level to white South Africa. Initial emphasis was on restoring the separation of races within the urban areas. A large segment of the Asian and Coloured populations was forcibly displaced – effectively ethnically cleansed - out of so-called white areas. African townships that had been overtaken by (white) urban sprawl were demolished and their occupants removed to new townships well beyond city limits. About 1.5 million Africans were forcibly removed from cities to rural reservations in this way between the passage of the Group Areas Acts of 1950 and 1986. The vast majority of Africans - now two-thirds of the total population - were restricted to these rural reservations (called reserves or “bantustans”). They were refugees in their own country: refused their right to self-determination; restricted to broken tracts of poor-quality land incapable of supporting their populations; and consequently victims of racial discrimination in all areas of social, economic and political life.[9]

The creation of the State of Israel was rooted in a similar background of Western European imperialism with the intent of subordinating the indigenous population to Western interests. As the New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) observes: “British imperialist interests in the region were linked to the war and coincided closely with the Zionist project of establishing, in [Zionist theoretician Theodore] Herzl’s words, ‘a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’.”[10] This notion of ‘civilising the natives’ was typical of Western European colonial policy in non-European continents, and was rooted in racist contempt for the supposedly barbaric and uncivilised indigenous population, in relation to whom Europeans were undoubtedly considered superior. Furthermore, therefore, Zionism exploited already existing imperialist interests. According to one Zionist historian:

“The British Government’s business was to win the War and to safeguard British interests in the post-war settlement. Fully realizing that these in the end must be the decisive tests, Weizmann was never under the illusion that the Zionists could rely on an appeal ad misericordiam. Zionist aspirations must be shown to accord with British strategic and political interests.”[11]

A century ago the Palestinian Arab claim was unchallenged, and included rather than excluded Jews. The area had been long inhabited by a minority Jewish population. Like other minorities, Palestinian Jews did not identify themselves as a separate “nation” in opposition to the Palestinian Muslim majority. In fact, national identification was not linked to religious or even ethnic affiliations - Muslims, Christians and Jews all considered themselves as Palestinian Arabs. Zionism aimed to change this state of affairs. As with South African apartheid, the leading pioneers of the Zionist movement envisaged the establishment of an exclusively Jewish State in which Jews would predominate over a subordinated indigenous non-Jewish population, from whom they would be largely separated, and who would in fact ultimately be completely expelled from the land. Joseph Weitz, the Director of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, wrote in 1940:

“It should be clear for us that there is not room for two peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave it, there will be enough for us... There is nothing else to do but to remove them all; we mustn’t leave a single village, a single tribe... We must explain to Roosevelt and all the heads of friendly states that the land of Israel isn’t too small if all the Arabs leave and if the borders are pushed back a little to the north, as far as the Litani, and to the east, on the Golan Heights.”[12]

Israeli commentator Yoram Bar Porath forcefully pointed out the essence of Zionist project in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aahronot:

“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their land.”[13]

That is why the finalised 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised a national Jewish homeland without prejudicing native Arab rights in Palestine was bitterly disliked by Zionist leaders. Initial drafts of the Declaration prepared by Zionists with Lord Balfour’s approval, provided that: “Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.”[14] This manifested the British commitment to establish a Jewish State encompassing the entirety of Palestine without any regard for its non-Jewish inhabitants. However, intervention by the highest-ranking Jew in the British Government, Edwin Montagu, in the British War Cabinet successfully weakened the British commitment to Zionism in the final adopted text, promising “the establishment in Palestine of a national home” (italics added). Also included as a consequence of Montagu’s intervention were legal ramifications designed to safeguard the rights of non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine by recognising that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The Zionist reaction to the Declaration was at first, very simply, opposition – it was not enough: Zionism wanted the whole of Palestine. Chaim Weizmann expressed his fear that the Declaration “can be interpreted to mean such limitations on our work as completely to cripple it.” Later though, opposition became reinterpretation, and Weizmann decided that: “[I]t would mean exactly what we make it mean – neither more nor less… and a foundation had to be built for it through years of exacting work.”[15] Thus, we find Zionist pioneers such as Golda Meir later denying the very existence of the Palestinian people prior to Israel: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”[16] Crucially then, Palestinian Arabs – 90 per cent of the population – were totally denied any form of participation in the formulation of the Declaration, although it dealt with their own rights and status in their own land. The CESR thus rightly comments that: “This points to the imperialist underpinnings not only of the Balfour Declaration, but of most application of international law to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leading right up to the partition resolution.”[17]

Both the regimes of South African apartheid and Israel were thus founded on the basis of long-standing European imperialism, and were designed to include the securing of interests based on thereon.

“Serfs they [the Zionists] were in the lands of the Diaspora, and suddenly they find themselves in freedom [in Palestine]; and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.”

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed the famous resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which recommended the partition of Palestine into “Arab” and “Jewish” states. The Jewish minority was to receive the majority of the land, which included most of the fertile areas. The Palestinians rejected the resolution as violating their right to self-determination in a single state for the entirety of Palestine. Sami Hadawi, a Palestinian Christian who lived through the period in which Israel was created, explains the indigenous position well: “Arab rejection was… based on the fact that, while the population of the Jewish state was to be [only half Jewish] with the Jews owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area…

“… the Jews were to be established as the ruling body - a settlement which no self-respecting people would accept without protest, to say the least… The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the rights of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own Charter.”[18]

The Partition Plan’s denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination thus constitutes another similarity to the South African National Party’s denial of the right of the non-white population to self-determination. The international community at the time was well aware of the tensions between the UN’s own Charter and the Partition Plan for Palestine with respect to the issue of self-determination. Indeed, the resolution only passed under intense United States pressure and manipulation of the UN’s member states. U.S. President Truman was responsible for pressurizing the State Department. Under-Secretary of State S. Welles recorded that: “By direct order of the White House American civil servants had to use direct or indirect pressure... to ensure the necessary majority in the final vote.”[19] Then U.S. Minister for Defence James Forrestal similarly observed: “The methods used to pressure and to constrain the other nations within the U.N. were close to scandalous.”[20]

As noted by John Quigley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University:

“By this time [November 1947] the United States had emerged as the most aggressive proponent of partition… The United States got the General Assembly to delay a vote ‘to gain time to bring certain Latin American republics into line with its own views.’… Some delegates charged US officials with ‘diplomatic intimidation.’ Without ‘terrific pressure’ from the United States on ‘governments which cannot afford to risk American reprisals,’ said an anonymous editorial writer, the resolution ‘would never have passed’.”[21]

In this sense the moral legitimacy of the origin of UN resolution 181 is highly questionable with respect to the UN’s recognition of the State of Israel.[22] Nevertheless, while Israel seems to have moved further and further away from the acknowledgement of the resolution’s validity, Palestinians have come to acknowledge it as the UN’s legal declaration of the right to independent Palestinian statehood. Yet although resolution 181 allowed the creation of the State of Israel within Palestine, Zionist leaders privately rejected its validity due to its recognition of certain rights due to the indigenous population. The resolution, like the Balfour Declaration, was not enough. Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University explains:

“While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israeli society – including… Ben Gurion - were opposed to or extremely unhappy with the partition and from early on viewed the [ensuing 1948] war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN-earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.”[23]

The Zionist leadership had planned from the very beginning to absorb the entirety of Palestine in accordance with consolidating the State of Israel. In internal discussion in 1938, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared that:

“[A]fter we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realisation of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine.”[24]

He also stated that: “The State of Israel considers the UN resolution of 29 November 1947 to be null and void.”[25] A later Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin similarly announced:

“The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”[26]

Such sentiments were rooted in the very heart of mainstream Zionist ideology. Leading Zionist theoretician Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, outlined at the inception of the Zionist movement his vision for the indigenous Palestinians: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” He added that “expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly”, to avoid international outcry.[27] The implications were clear. Israeli military analysts predicted that as a result of the Partition Plan and Zionist attempts to establish a State in Palestine while also superceding the limits of international law as designated in resolution 181, either the Palestinians would be utterly expelled from their own land, or they “would be crushed”. It was assumed that “some of them would die and most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries.”^[28] Yet this was not considered a problem - and still is not considered a problem. Indeed, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes – comparable to the forced deportations of nonwhites in South Africa from their urban homes to rural Bantustans - was an integral dimension of Zionist plans. As Jewish scholar Professor Norman Finkelstein writes:

“One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet… The latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement.”[29]

This intention was clearly rooted in racist contempt for the Palestinian Arabs. Israeli correspondent Gideon Levy comments that:

“For most Israelis, the Palestinians are almost non-existent. They’re like thin air… For the overwhelming majority of Israelis - again, both the right and left wing - the desired solution is separation: They want the Palestinians to play their parts in the form of thin air and not get in our way. There’s only one small problem with this solution, aside from the whiff of racism that emanates from it: It’s not possible.”[30]

According to the late Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli Prime Minister made clear early on in the establishment of the State of Israel his wish to expel the Palestinian population to make way for the Zionist State. Rabin relates that: “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’”[31] Israel’s first Minister of Education Professor Ben-Zion Dinur echoed Ben-Gurion’s sentiments when he declared in 1954: “In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don’t agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force.”[32] Today this philosophy of total separation between Israelis and the Palestinians, which included the task of driving the latter our by force if necessary, has been adopted by many Israelis in tandem with their government. “The idea of a separation between the State of Israel and the Palestinians has many supporters in Israel”, reports Danny Rubenstein.

“… One of Yitzhak Rabin’s election slogans in 1992, ‘Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv,’ was a big hit. People don’t like seeing hordes of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza roaming our streets. Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s variation on this theme is: ‘We are here and they are there’.”[33]

Israeli historians have recorded that there was indeed a clear Zionist objective to expel the indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian population in order to achieve this form of “separation” – or “apartheid” - between Jews and Arabs. Professor Benny Morris for example points out that: “Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October [1948].” However, this was never enunciated in any official written format outlining a general expulsion policy. Although “Ben-Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders”, it is nevertheless true that:

“… he preferred that his generals ‘understand’ what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the ‘great expeller’ and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy… But while there was no [written] ‘expulsion policy’, the July and October [1948] offensives were characterized by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards Arab civilians than the first half of the war.”[34]

According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan:

“That Ben Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose… most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants …even [if] they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.”[35]

Another Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Associate Professor in Middle East History at the University of Haifa, concurs that: “There was an unwritten Zionist plan to expel the Arabs of Palestine in 1948.” From 1 April 1948 to the end of the war, “Jewish operations were guided by the desire to occupy the greatest possible portion of Palestine.” In an interview with Belgian journalist Baudouin Loos, Professor Pappe emphasised that the Zionists “were cautious enough not to write it although there was this ‘plan D’ (Dalet), that reveals enough of the systematic expulsion.” Plan Dalet (D) was first prepared by Zionist military forces in March 1948. The plan “defined a very important principle: any Arab village or neighborhood that would not surrender to the Jewish forces, that would not raise the white flag, would be uprooted, destroyed and the people expelled.” The Zionists “knew well that there was very little chance for more than five or six villages to surrender. Why should they surrender, especially after (the massacre of) Deir Yassin in April and the big fright in the Arab community?

“In fact, only four villages rose the white flag. All the rest were potentially an object of expulsion. I must add that a few other neighborhoods rose the white flag but it didn’t help them... All this is very clear. We have to remember that the UN partition plan of November 1947 would have left an equal number of Jews and Arabs in the Jewish state. This contradicted the idea of a Jewish state. So they had to make sure that as few Arabs as possible were still there. And that’s what happened.”[36]

Thus, Tzvi Shiloah, a senior veteran of the Mapai Party and a former deputy mayor of the town of Hertzeliyah recalled that “in 1948, we deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war, expelled Arabs. Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we expelled many Arabs.”[37] Not only were Palestinians deliberately expelled, their villages were destroyed in the hope that this would mean that they could never return. During May 1948, Zionists began contemplating ways of consolidating and making permanent the Palestinian exile. Professor Benny Morris notes that “the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim.” Indeed, Zionist forces carried out massacres of the indigenous population even earlier than May:

“On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha… The village was destroyed that night…Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on April 20…Abu Zureiq was completely demolished…By mid- 1949, the majority of the [350 depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and uninhabitable.”[38] 

There can therefore be no doubt that the exodus of over three quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes was deliberately engineered by the Zionist army by the illegal use of force. The Palestinians were simply never considered to be on an equal level to that of the Zionists who were taking control of the land for their own purposes. They were merely obstacles to be brutally eliminated. This conclusion has been well documented by the Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzakhi – Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Eretz Yisrael Studies at Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and Senior Lecturer in Military History in Israeli Defence Force (IDF) courses for army officers. Yitzahki is particularly qualified in this area due to his in-depth acquaintance with IDF archives, on which his conclusions are based. In the 1960s, Yitzakhi served as director of the IDF archives within the framework of his IDF service in his capacity as historian. “The time has come,” he observes, “to face the ocean of lies in which we were brought up. In almost every conquered village in the War of Independence, acts were committed, which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings, massacres and rapes…

“For many Israelis it was easier to find consolation in the lie, that the Arabs left the country under orders from their leaders. This is an absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of their flight was their fear from Israeli retribution and this fear was not at all imaginary. From almost each report in the IDF archives concerning the conquest of Arab villages between May and July 1948 - when clashes with Arab villagers were the fiercest - a smell of massacre emanates. Sometimes the report tells about blatant massacres which were committed after the battle, sometimes the massacres are committed in the heat of battle and while the villages are ‘cleansed’. Some of my colleagues, such as Me’ir Pa’il, don’t consider such acts as massacres. In my opinion there is no other term for such acts than massacres. This was at the time the rule of the game… In the first phase a village was usually subjected to heavy artillery from distance. Then soldiers would assault the village. After giving up resistance, the Arab fighters would withdraw while attempting to snipe at the advancing forces. Some would not flee and would remain in the village, mainly women and old people. In the course of cleansing we used to hit them. One was ‘tailing the fugitives’, as it used to be called (‘mezanvim baborchim’)… In a typical battle report about the conquest of a village we find: ‘We cleansed a village, shot in any direction where resistance was noticed. After the resistance ended, we also had to shoot people so that they would leave or who looked dangerous’.”[39]

This grim record of acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population in order to establish an exclusivist Jewish State, is corroborated by authoritative Israeli military historian Professor Uri Milstein. Milstein, however, goes even further than Yitzhaki in his conclusions about Zionist killings of Palestinians:

“If Yitzhaki claims that almost in every village there were murders, then I maintain that even before the establishment of the State, each battle ended with a massacre. In all Israel’s wars massacres were committed but I have no doubt that the War of Independence was the dirtiest of them all.”[40]

The most commonly cited example of such terror is the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, in which 254 Palestinian inhabitants, including men, women, children, and old men, were massacred by Irgun troops whose leader was the future Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin. Begin himself described the massacre as a “victory” without which the State of Israel could not have been established. He admitted that: “The Haganah carried out victorious attacks on other fronts... In a state of terror, the Arabs fled, crying, ‘Deir Yassin’.”[41] Numerous other massacres were committed by Zionist forces in the same vein. One of the biggest but least publicised massacres is that of al Dawayima village in Hebron District (population 4,300). On the afternoon of Friday, 29 October 1948, 3 units of the 89th Battalion (8th Brigade) entered the village from 3 directions, leaving the east open, and occupied it “without a fight” according to an Israeli soldier’s testimony. The soldier continued:

“The first wave of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms was employed to clean the courtyard.... [They] shot her and the baby.... This was not in the heat of battle.... but a system of expulsion and destruction.”[42]

Israeli historian Teddy Katz has also uncovered credible evidence that Israeli troops had massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel came into existence in 1948. Basing his conclusions on testimonies and information from witnesses including soldiers, Katz observed that “at least 200 people from the village of Tantura were killed by Israeli troops” in what was “definitely one of the biggest massacres”. “Palestinians were killed inside their homes and in other parts of the village”, while Israeli soldiers “shot at anything that moved.”[43]

As a result of this deliberate policy of terror, by 1949 the Zionists had successfully driven out approximately 770,000 Palestinians who thus became refugees in their own country, and took control of 80 per cent of their land. Only 100,000 remained of a population approaching one million. Just as whites took over the former homes of the expelled non-white populations in South African apartheid, “Whole Arab cities - such as Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramle, Baysan, and Maidal - 338 towns and villages, and large parts of others, containing nearly a quarter of all buildings standing in Israel during 1948, were taken over by new Jewish immigrants.

“… Ten thousand former Arab shops, businesses and stores were left in Jewish hands as well as some 30,000 acres of groves that supplied at least a quarter of the new state’s scarce foreign currency earnings from citrus. Acquisition of this former Palestinian Arab property helped greatly to make the Jewish state economically viable and to speed up the early influx of refugees and immigrants from Europe.”[44]

Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees were forced to live in squalid conditions; prevented from returning to their homes; permanently debarred – separated - from the territory on which they had once lived and which had now become the exclusive property of the Zionist State and its Jewish citizens; and confined to restricted areas under an expanding Israeli occupation. “The winter of 1949, the first winter of exile for more than seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians, was cold and hard”, reports the People’s Press Palestine Book Project.

“Families huddled in caves, abandoned huts, or makeshift tents… many of the starving were only miles away from their own vegetable gardens and orchards in occupied Palestine - the new state of Israel…At the end of 1949 the United Nations finally acted. It set up the United Nations Relief Works Administration (UNRWA) to take over sixty refugee camps from voluntary agencies. It managed to keep people alive, but only barely.”[45]

However, international law recognised the Palestinian refugees’ inviolable right of return to their ancestral homeland in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. The basis of the resolution lay in the findings of the UN Mediator for Palestine Count Folke Bernadotte. In his first report submitted to the UN he wrote that: “The right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date should be affirmed by the United Nations… It would offend basic principles to prevent these innocent victims of the conflict from returning to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flood into Palestine and, what’s more, threatening to permanently replace the dispossessed Arab refugees who have been here for centuries.” He described an ongoing process of “Zionist pillage on a grand scale and the destruction of villages without apparent military need.”[46]

Consequently, on 11 December 1948 the UN adopted Resolution 194 that included the establishment of the Conciliation Commission on Palestine to implement the resolution. According to the Commission’s authoritative interpretation of the resolution:

“The General Assembly had laid down the principle of the right of refugees to exercise a free choice between returning to their homes and being compensated for the loss of or damage to their property on the one hand, or, on the other, or not returning to their homes and being adequately compensated for the value of the property abandoned by them.”[47]

Israel, however, has ignored the Palestinian right of return in violation of international law on the pretext of maintaining the exclusively “Jewish” character of the State. Israel’s blocking of the Palestinian right of return virtually mimics the South African policy of “separation”, with whites segregated from non-whites – in this case, Jews partitioned off from the exiled non-Jewish Palestinians. While permitting the unimpeded influx of Jewish immigrants into Israel after what many Jews consider to be a 2,000 year absence, the Zionist “Law of Return” follows an entirely different policy in relation to non-Jews, with the result that Palestinians are officially to remain exiled forever. After 1948 Palestinian refugees attempted to return to their homes in the land that had by then become the State of Israel. Dubbed “infiltrators” by Israel, the returning refugees clashed with Israeli settlers, army and police. Only very few succeeded. An estimated 2,700-5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces while attempting to cross the borders. To stave off the return of the indigenous population, the Israeli army began launching attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benny Morris has documented extensively the numerous killings committed by Israeli forces during this period.[48]

There are at least 3,469,109 Palestinian refugees (UNRWA, January 1998), including 1,308,438 in the territories (548,874 in the West Bank and 759,564 in Gaza), now living in squalid conditions of an Israeli-imposed system of discrimination. Palestinians forced to leave their homes in 1948 are still unable to return after 53 years. This is perhaps the most well known instance of Israeli discrimination against the non-Jewish indigenous Palestinian population. Professor Anita Shapira of the Department of History at Tel Aviv University observes: “The [Israeli] Law of Return gave preference to any Jew born in Britain or Morocco over an Arab born in Jaffa and driven into exile as a result of the 1948 war… Arab settlements have been short-changed and discriminated against for decades.”[49] The policy is rooted in the guidance of the foremost pioneers of the Zionist movement. For instance, Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary on the 18 July 1948 that “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.”[50] A confidential report written for the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin leaked to the press in September 1976, known as the Koenig Memorandum, elaborated on the strategies included in “everything”. Northern District Commissioner Israel Koenig advised that: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”[51]

The similarities between all these Zionist policies and the apartheid policies of South Africa’s white rulers were noted at an early stage in the newspaper of the Afrikaners, Die Transvaler: “What is the difference between the way in which the Jewish people struggles to remain what it is in the midst of a non-Jewish population, and the way the Afrikaners try to stay what they are?”[52] Such a similarity must clearly be rooted in deep-seated racism. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin threw light on this when he observed in a speech to the Knesset that the Palestinians “are beasts walking on two legs.”[53] The extent of the similarity between racial discrimination in Israel against the Palestinians and South African apartheid was thus inadvertently admitted in the heated remarks of General Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli army during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, at a guest lecture at the School of Law, Tel Aviv University:

“I don’t understand this comparison between us and South Africa. What is similar here and there is that both they and we must prevent others from taking us over. Anyone who says that the blacks are oppressed in South Africa is a liar. The blacks there want to gain control of the white minority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the White minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over. I was in a gold mine there and I saw what excellent conditions the black workers have. So there is [sic] separate elevators for Whites and Blacks, so what? That’s the way they like it.”[54]

“We have uttered a lot of nonsense, but have failed to implement anything. We have declared, on several occasions, that we would extend equal rights to Jews and Arabs in the city - but those were empty words. Levi Eshkol and Menachem Begin made commitments to grant equality to the Arabs, but neither of them kept his promises and never provided them even with a semblance of equality under the law; they were and remain second and third class citizens…I did something for Jewish Jerusalem during the past 25 years, but in East Jerusalem nothing! What did I do? Schools? Nothing. Pavements? Nothing. Cultural centers? None. Yes, we did build a sewage system for them and we improved water supply. Do you know why? When several cholera cases were declared on the Arab side [early 1970s], the Jews panicked at the prospect of the disease reaching them, so we set up the sewage and water networks to contain the cholera.”

Apartheid in South Africa consisted of a system of discriminatory laws and policies implemented by the government designed to subordinate all population groups classified as non-European or nonwhite at every level to the white minority. There are a similarly vast variety of laws within Israel that officially discriminate against non-Jews in favour of Jews within a system designed to systematically favour Jews at their expense, with the ultimate effect of marginalising and subordinating the non-Jewish population. Longtime U.S. Middle East expert and head of the Middle East Project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Phyllis Bennis, observes that: “Jews from anywhere in the world, like me, can travel to Israel, declare citizenship, and be granted all the privileges of being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have lived in the area for hundreds of years.”[55] The laws that grant such privileges – denied to non-Jewish Palestinians – bear close resemblance to the apartheid laws of South Africa. Israeli Professor Uzi Ornan, for example, noted in 1991 that “it is amazing how closely the discriminatory laws of South Africa - which began to be legislated in 1913 and which are now about to be abolished - resemble the discriminatory laws which began to be legislated in the state of Israel in 1948.”[56]

There are several basic (irrevocable) laws with discriminatory implications for non-Jews in Israel. The 1948 Law of Citizenship, for example, establishes eligibility for citizenship status, yet citizenship without “Jewish nationality” grants few fundamental rights that are granted to Jews. The 1950 Law of Return mentioned previously refers to the exclusive “nationality right” for Jews from anywhere in the world to enter and live within Israel, and to claim a superior legal status with full rights (such as those to land and housing) which are denied to the indigenous Palestinians. The 1952 Status Law recognises certain “national” institutions operating within Israel, and extraterritorially, as part of the government of Israel to serve “the Jewish people” exclusively (e.g. the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency, which is affiliated to the Jewish National Fund).[57] Such organisations possess statutory power within Israel to purchase and develop land, build new settlements, and provide social services. On the basis of legal compacts with the Israeli state, they are allowed to operate as pseudo-statutory bodies despite a declared mandate to operate only on behalf of Jews, and despite being unaccountable to the residents of the state in which they operate.

There are three other particular areas in which Israel officially discriminates against Palestinians in favour of Jews, these being residency, employment, and legal equality. With regards to the first issue, of all the land of Israel, 92 percent is considered to be the “inalienable property of the Jewish people” as per Israel’s Development Authority Law. In principle, Israel defines itself as a “Jewish State”. In 1985, a Constitutional Law was passed by the Knesset prohibiting the existence of a political party that openly opposes the principle of Israel as “the state of the Jewish people” or even proposes to change this principle democratically. By this official definition, Israel in fact “belongs to persons who are defined by the Israeli authorities as ‘Jewish’, irrespective of where they live, and to them alone. On the other hand, Israel doesn’t officially ‘belong’ to its non-Jewish citizens, whose status is considered even officially as inferior.”[58] This means that 92 per cent of Israel’s land is owned by the state and administered by the Israel Land Authority in accordance with Jewish National Fund (JNF) regulations, which deny the right of residency, to open a business and often to employment, to all non-Jews solely because they are not Jewish. Yet Jews possess full freedom to reside or open businesses throughout Israel without restriction. In practice this means that Arabs are forced to live only in very limited areas. Indeed, although Israeli Arabs are theoretically entitled to equal treatment, in reality the regime ensures that their houses are demolished to make way to build new homes for Israeli Jews, as and when is considered necessary.[59]

JNF regulations also officially deny non-Jews their right to work on land administered by the Israel Land Authority. Although these regulations are not necessarily strictly and continuously enforced, their existence indicates the institutionally racist nature of the State of Israel. The Israeli authorities do, however, periodically embark on “enforcement campaigns”, such as when the Agricultural Ministry has attempted to stamp out “the pestilence of letting fruit orchards belonging to Jews and situated on National Land be harvested by Arab labourers”, whether or not they are citizens of Israel. Jews are also forbidden from sub-renting their land, or a part of it, to Arabs, for any period of time – and accordingly punished with heavy fines if found to be doing so.[60]

The right to equality before the law is also denied non-Jewish citizens of Israel by numerous laws that refer to Jews and non-Jews respectively as “anyone who can immigrate in accordance with the Law of Return” and “anyone who is not entitled to immigrate in accordance with the Law of Return.” The late Jewish scholar, Professor Israel Shahak of Hebrew University - Chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, a Holocaust survivor of the Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp and a tireless campaigner for civil and human rights for over 30 years - observes that:  “Depending on the law in question, benefits are granted to the first category [Jews] and systematically denied to the second [non-Jews]… There are so many laws and regulations in Israel which discriminate in favour of the persons defined as those ‘who can immigrate in accordance with the Law of Return’.”[61]

Professor Uzi Ornan, writing in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, elaborates on the nature of this vast complex of Zionist laws of the State that are racially discriminatory in character:

“Blatant discrimination against non-Jews can also be found in other laws dealing with the acquisition of property, government support for young couples, educational curricula, and government expenditure for schools, to cite just a few examples. The routine means for enforcing discrimination is the ID card, which everyone is obliged to carry at all times. ID cards list ‘nationality’, which can be Jewish, Arab, Druze, Circassian, Samaritan, Kara’ite, or foreign. When a person presents his ID card to a policeman, a security official, or to a clerk at a government office whose services he requires, they can know which ‘sector’ he belongs to and treat him accordingly, or, refer him to those who are responsible for dealing with his ‘sector’. Apartheid is so powerful a mindset in this society, that its existence and preservation is championed by all the members of the ‘Zionist parties’, including those who believe themselves to be in the vanguard of the struggle for socialism, peace and equal rights.”[62]

Within the internationally-recognised borders of the State of Israel, this has resulted in a documented inequality between Jews and Arabs. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, for instance, has found that “although [Palestinian Arab citizens] comprise over 19 percent of the total population… This discriminatory attitude is apparent in the lower standard of living of Israeli Arabs as a result, inter alia, of lack of access to housing, water, electricity and health care and their lower level of education.”[63]  The United Nations Human Rights Committee concurs that there exist in the State of Israel:

“… deeply imbedded discriminatory social attitudes, practices and laws against Arab Israelis that have resulted in a lower standard of living compared with Jewish Israelis, as is evident in their significantly lower levels of education, access to health care, access to housing, land and employment. It notes with concern that most Arab Israelis, because they do not join the army, do not enjoy the financial benefits available to Israelis who have served in the army, including scholarships and housing loans. The Committee also expresses concern that the Arab language, though official, has not been accorded equal status in practice, and that discrimination against members of the Arab minority appears to be extensive in the private sector.”[64]

The most dire state of affairs, however, exists principally within those Palestinian territories under Israel’s illegal military occupation. The plight of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories has been compared by many scholars to the plight of nonwhites under the apartheid regime of South Africa. Indeed, a comparison between the conditions faced by nonwhites in South Africa and Palestinians under Israeli occupation shows clearly that, like South Africa in the 1980s, the Israeli regime has integrated a system of institutionalised racism, or in other words, apartheid. The British press, for example, acknowledges that:

“If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United State. Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-administered ‘bantustans’, with ‘whites’ monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa’s white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel’s treatment of Israeli Arabs - flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending - would be recognised as scandalous too.”[65]

“I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa.”

The apartheid regime in South Africa (under the National Party from 1948-1993) developed a policy known as “separate development.” Each of the nine African (Bantu) groups was to become a nation with its own “homeland”. The regime first categorised (according to arbitrary standards) and then transferred the indigenous nonwhite populations into these specified territories (known as “Bantustans”) under the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. Subsequently, in 1956, the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act classified each specific ethnic group as national units, who would develop their respective homelands apart from the rest of South Africa. Once these “homelands” received their independence, Transkei in October 1976, Bophuthatswana in December 1977, Venda in September 1979, and Ciskei in December 1981, their residents lost their South African citizenship. The totality of Bantustans together consisted only of about 14 per cent of the country’s land, the rest of which – including the cities and major mineral areas - was set aside for whites. Thus, white South Africans, while only representing 16 percent of the total population maintained control over 87 percent of the richest, most arable land. From 1960 to 1984, the apartheid regime forcibly relocated a total of some 3.5 million blacks from “white” areas to the barren wastelands of the territorially confined Bantustans, known euphemistically as areas of “self-rule”.[66]

Nonwhites were not allowed to vote or own land, movement to and between other parts of the country was strictly regulated, and the location of residence or employment (in the event that work permits were granted) was restricted. African urban workers were thus seen to belong only to confined rural reservations from which they or their ancestors had migrated. Only those holding the required work permits – which were granted in tandem with the demands of the labour market - were allowed to live within urban areas. Often, such permits did not include the spouse or family of a permit holder, which could easily result in the breakdown of African families. In fact, none of these reserves were viable nations. The Bantustans constituted broken tracts of poor-quality land, suffering from erosion and consequently incapable of supporting their large populations. The lack of industry meant that opportunities for employment were slim. Although urban wage earners tried to support their families in the Bantustans, wages for nonwhites were so miniscule that this was barely feasible. Most African urban dwellers had to live in townships on a city’s perimeter. Those Africans who were not confined to life in the Bantustans were subject to strict curfew regulations and passbook requirements, particularly in the cities; the failure to produce these when required led to instant arrest. Accordingly, the police had sweeping powers of preventive detention - in 1962, the maximum detention span was 30 days; but later this was extended to indefinite periods.[67]

There can thus be little doubt over the stark similarities between the plight of the three million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the darkest days of South African apartheid. Due to Israel’s expansionist ideals, the State has continued to embark upon policies designed to consolidate its already brutal military occupation of Palestinian territories, which have been subjected to a comprehensive programme of social, political and economic under-development. These ideals are rooted in the original Zionist intentions expressed by Ben-Gurion on the third day of the 1956 Suez War in the Knesset, that the real reason for the war was the “restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon” to its Biblical borders.[68] The most far-reaching interpretation of these borders include the following areas: “in the south, all of Sinai and a part of northern Egypt up to the environs of Cairo; in the east, all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of Iraq south of the Euphrates; in the north, all of Lebanon and all of Syria together with a huge part of Turkey (up to lake Van); and in the west, Cyprus.”[69] Although this is an extreme example of the Biblical borders of the Land of Israel, even the minimalist interpretations include the whole of Palestine and thus reach far beyond Israel’s internationally-recognised borders. The current Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had previously proposed in May 1993 in the Likud Convention that “Israel should adopt the ‘Biblical borders’ concept as its official policy. There were rather few objections to this proposal, either in the Likud or outside it, and all were based on pragmatic grounds.”[70] There can be no surprise then over the publication of previously secret protocols of Israeli government meetings revealing “that David Ben Gurion, prime minister and one of Israel’s founders, actually used the word ‘cleanse’ when referring to getting rid of Arabs.”[71] Thus, Zionist ideology entailed that Israel would have to expand its borders, which naturally included the expansion and consolidation of military occupation of Palestinian territories – if not beyond these – as well as the subordination and/or expulsion of non-Jewish Arab residents of these territories.

Cato Institute analyst Sheldon L. Richman reports that: “This policy [of expulsion] continued well into the 1950s. Most of the 2,000 Arabs living in the zone had been forced out by 1956. Many moved to the sloping land below the Golan Heights.”[72] This policy accordingly grew into a consistent pattern of expansion by military intervention. Israel’s official military policy is thus one of provocation for the purpose of manufacturing pretexts for war, to thereby engineer justification for military expansion and thus the escalation of regional occupation. In this respect, the observation of Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan clarifies Israel’s specific expansionist objectives to be fulfilled through military confrontation:

“[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no it must, invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation – and revenge…and above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we nay finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.”[73]

Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan similarly described Israel’s longstanding strategy of military aggression and racist subordination:

“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel.... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours... When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.”[74]

This aggressive strategy prescribing the tactical use of ruthless force to expand Israeli’s borders and expel Arabs was described by Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion as early as May 1948:

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.”[75]

The consequence of this expansionist strategy has been disastrous for regional peace since Israel’s inception. Award-winning British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk notes that:

“In 1948, Israel took more than its share of Palestine. In 1967,… the Israelis took the West Bank and Gaza and Golan and Sinai. In 1973, in a war with fewer excuses, the Israelis lost and re-took part of the Sinai, did the same to Golan, held the West Bank and, within five years, moved into 10 per cent of Lebanon as well. In the West and with the help of Israel’s friends Arabs were meanwhile vilified as uncivilised, undemocratic and anti-Western, cartooned as hook-nosed, greedy and debauched much as the Nazi had portrayed the innocent Jews of Europe in the 1930s… [I]f the cancer of the Arab world is corruption, the sickness of Israel remains expansion, the desire to enlarge the Israeli state at the expense of its neighbors. David Ben-Gurion himself maintained in 1948 that his new state had only been founded in ‘a portion of the state of Israel’.”[76]

Israel thus conquered the rest of Palestine in the 1967 War, creating another 300,000 refugees, many of them refugees for the second time. As Jewish scholar Alfred Lilienthal reports, UN figures indicate that after the war, from 11 June 1967 to 15 November 1969 Israeli forces “destroyed some 7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories seized during that war”. This UN figure, however, “excluded thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan Heights that were razed to the ground.” Notably, from September 1969 to 1971 the figure reached an estimated “16,312 homes.”[77]

Having created hundreds and thousands of refugees through and in the wake of the war, Israel had gone on to destroy two cities, 133 villages and 61 farms. “After this devastation”, reports the American group New Yorkers for a Just Middle East Peace (NYJMEP), “only 6,396 inhabitants remained in the six villages left standing.”[78] Israel has continued to implement this brand of policy to this day, consolidating its illegal occupation by continuing the forcible “cleansing” of Palestinians through demolishing their homes; establishing illegal Jewish settlements within the Occupied Territories; diminishing and restricting the rights and movement of those Palestinians left. Israel General and Statesman Moshe Dayan recalled that:

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”[79]

These policies bear stark resemblance to the South African apartheid regime’s methodology of forcibly relocating millions of blacks into poor and squalid Bantustans, to make way for whites to live in their former homes. For instance, NYJMEP reported in 1998:

“… On December 14, 1981, the Israeli Knesset unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in clear contravention of international law. The UN Security Council subsequently declared the annexation illegal and, to date, not a single state has recognized it. Israel has so far built more than 40 settlements, housing over 15,000 settlers in the Golan Heights.”[80]

Since 1967, Israel has confiscated over 52 percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip for military use or for settlement by Jewish civilians, in violation of international law. From 1967 to 1982, Israel demolished 1,338 Palestinian homes on the West Bank. Furthermore, in a manner similar to the arbitrary detention powers of South African police - used with impunity against nonwhites, particularly those who failed to conform to the regime’s apartheid laws - in the same period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were detained without trial for various periods by Israeli security forces.[81] A matrix of interlocking mechanisms in the Occupied Territories has culminated in a system of ongoing land confiscations, stifling restrictions on movement, and almost constant curfews, almost identical in nature to the harsh conditions imposed on the black population of South Africa by the white-dominated apartheid regime. Permits must be obtained by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for almost every activity, including such basic freedoms as obtaining employment, traveling to another town or even planting a single fruit tree. Yet the issuance of such permits is largely arbitrary, and thus frequently refused by the Israeli authorities. Consequently, it is virtually impossible for the vast majority of Palestinians to live decently.

The clear but undeclared parameters of this policy categorise the Palestinian population into three subgroups: Arab Israeli citizens; Palestinians who are “permanent residents” of Jerusalem; Palestinians living in the “self-ruling” Bantustans described above. Discrimination against these three groups is based ultimately on land: more specifically, ownership rights to, access to and use of land resources. Israeli correspondent Amira Hass reports that in the Occupied Territories, Israel’s policy of evicting Palestinians en masse while confiscating their private land in favour of Jews, forbidding their use of public lands and implementing discriminatory practices in infrastructure development “has created a uniform landscape of overcrowding and suffocation and has accelerated the conversion of agricultural land into construction sites.” Combined with restrictive economic legislation, the result has been the creation of “a vast reservoir of cheap labor discriminated against in job opportunities, pay and working conditions.” Meanwhile, Israeli Jews can live and work wherever they want throughout Israel and Israeli settlements. Other laws and regulations allow the easy cancellation and denial of Palestinian residency rights, citizenship, and the citizenship and residence rights of their spouses. Several military regulations have caused tens of thousands of Palestinians to forfeit their residency status on the West Bank and in Gaza prior to the establishment of the PA. Even now Israel continues to prevent them and their families from returning to their homes. This should be contrasted with the fact that Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel from anywhere in the world, be granted citizenship immediately and live anywhere they wish within Israel and the territories under its illegal occupation. Israel has also enforced an increasingly rigorous policy denying the over 3.5 million Palestinians toiling under Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza their basic right to freedom of movement. Limits are imposed “on their private lives, family relations, and economic, cultural and religious activities as well as on the effective functioning of the PA’s institutions and of non-governmental Palestinian agencies.” Indeed, both Palestinian individuals and institutions “are completely dependent on movement permits issued by the Israeli military authorities.  Only 100,000 Palestinians possess these permits.” In contrast, Israeli Jews have unrestricted freedom of movement on either side of the Green Line, except for administrative entry limitations on PA-controlled areas in Gaza.[82]

The Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), has thus come to describe Israeli policies in occupied Palestine as a form of apartheid. Executive Director of B’Tselem Eitan Felner wrote in an article titled ‘Apartheid By Any Other Name: Creeping Annexation in the West Bank’ for the French journal Le Monde diplomatique based on an extensive B’Tselem report, that Israeli settlement policies have been systematically “reinforcing the system of discrimination in the West Bank”. Describing what he labels “Apartheid in the Holy Land”, Felner records that:

“The massive network of roads and highways in the West Bank that connect the major settlements to Israel represents the most overt aspect of Israel’s relentless efforts to incorporate the settlements and settlers into Israel. It makes it possible for settlers to commute to Israel each day… Another aspect of the integration of the settlements into Israel - less conspicuous but no less important - is the application of virtually the whole Israeli legal system to the settlements. Throughout the years Israel’s civil and military authorities have enacted a myriad of laws, regulations, and orders relating to settlers in the Occupied Territories to ensure that in almost every respect the lives of settlers are like those of Israelis living in Israel itself…”

The result, he writes, is the establishment of a system of institutional racism against the indigenous Palestinians under the alien regime of Israeli military occupation:

“Israel has established a system of segregation and discrimination, in which two populations living in the same area are subject to different systems of law. While Palestinians are subject to military law and usually tried in military courts, Israelis who commit the same offence in the same place are subject to Israeli law and tried in civil courts inside Israel. Jewish settlers enjoy all the rights of Jews in Israel, including complete freedom of movement, speech and organisation, participation in local and national (Israeli) elections, social security and health benefits, etc. For Palestinians, on the other hand, even those living a few hundred metres from Jewish settlements, freedom of movement is limited. They cannot, obviously, vote to curtail the powers of the IDF and they do not enjoy Israel’s social security or health benefits. In Africaans they call it apartheid… [T]his institutionalised discrimination is spelled out in the government’s basic guidelines.”[83]

This system of institionalised racism is implemented through a complex web of mechanisms. Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper, Professor of Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, has described in detail the “matrix” of mechanisms resulting in the systematic discrimination against indigenous Palestinians under Israeli occupation:

“Only a decade after the fall of apartheid in South Africa, after we all thought we had seen the end of that hateful system, we are witnessing the emergence of another apartheid-style regime, that of Israel over the incipient Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem… Whether a Palestinian state actually emerges from the Oslo process or Israel’s occupation becomes permanent, the essential elements of apartheid - exclusivity, inequality, separation, control, dependency, violations of human rights and suffering - are likely to define the relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories/Palestine.”[84]

Professor Halper describes “the matrix of control” imposed by Israel as “an interlocking series of mechanisms, only a few of which require physical occupation of territory, that allow Israel to control every aspect of Palestinian life in the Occupied Territories.” This matrix, “similar in appearance to a Go board, has virtually paralyzed the Palestinian population without ‘defeating’ it or even conquering much territory.” In the Japanese game of Go, one wins by immobilising one’s opponent, through a process of gaining control of key points of a matrix so that every time the opponent moves, an obstacle of some kind is encountered. Extending the analogy to Palestine, the matrix is built of subtle “largely bureaucratic and legal” interventions “backed by overwhelming military force, which Israel reserves for itself the right to employ.” Forcible measures of control taken against Palestinian communities and individuals include “the extensive use of collaborators and undercover ‘mustarabi’ army units, administrative detention, arrest, trial and torture.” Indeed in this respect, by the end of the year 2000, over 2,000 arbitrary ‘orders’ from “the Military Commanders of the West Bank and Gaza have been issued since 1967, supplemented by policies formulated by the Civil Administration, under the direction of the Ministry of Defense…

“Today, 195 exclusively Jewish settlements housing some 400,000 Israelis are sprinkled across the Occupied Territories: about 200,000 settlers live in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza (the latter occupying a fourth of the land, including most of the coastline). The most significant development in recent years has been the consolidation of small settlements vulnerable to Palestinian demands of dismantling into settlement ‘blocs’ of 50,000 people or more. The blocs control strategic corridors of the West Bank and interrupt the territorial contiguity of the Palestinians’ areas. Areas A, B, C and D in the West Bank, areas H-1 and H-2 in Hebron, Yellow, Green, Blue and White Areas in Gaza, and ‘open green spaces’ of restricted housing covering more than half of Palestinian East Jerusalem - there is no freedom of movement between these four disconnected bantustans.”

Like the euphemistic application of the term “self-rule” to the administration of the South African Bantustans by its white rulers, “self-rule” in the Occupied Territories under the tutelage of the Palestinian Authority in fact only serves to submerge Palestinians more deeply into Israel’s apartheid system of management, control and subordination.

“A system of highways and bypass roads links the settlements, creating additional barriers between Palestinian areas and incorporating the West Bank into Israel proper. Ironically, the bypass road project enjoys the tacit and misguided support of the Palestinian Authority. ‘Security borders’ - the thick web of closed military areas and internal checkpoints in the Territories - enforce Israel’s declared policy of ‘separation’ from the Palestinians and further hinder Palestinian movement.

“Army bases occupy large tracts of land and keep weaponry ready for reasserting control through brute force… Yet a third set of control mechanisms, the most subtle of all, are those of a bureaucratic or ‘legal’ nature. They entangle Palestinians in restrictions, which trigger sanctions whenever Palestinians try to expand their life space. The West Bank and Gaza are permanently ‘closed’, violating freedom of movement of people and goods and impoverishing the Palestinian population. A system of permits causes, among other things, prolonged separation of family members and limits work, travel and study abroad. Building permits, enforced by house demolitions, arrests, fines and daily harassment, serve to confine Palestinians to small enclaves. Expansive ‘master plans’ around settlements (in contrast to the tight planning rings around Palestinian communities) allow Israel to contend that settlement building has been ‘frozen’ within the larger rings. Planting of crops is restricted, and Israel controls the licensing and inspection of Palestinian businesses.

“To all of this must be added, of course, the psychological costs of life under occupation: loss of life, imprisonment, torture, harassment, humiliation, anger and frustration, as well as traumas suffered by tens of thousands of Palestinians (especially children) who witnessed their homes being demolished, saw their loved ones beaten and humiliated, suffered from inadequate housing and lost opportunities to realize their potential in life.”[85]

It is this matrix of control that has established apartheid conditions within the Occupied Territories. Professor Uzi Ornan rightly observed in 1991 that “it is amazing how closely the discriminatory laws of South Africa - which began to be legislated in 1913 and which are now about to be abolished - resemble the discriminatory laws which began to be legislated in the state of Israel in 1948.”[86] Israeli correspondent Amira Hass has noted the dire consequences:

“This control is what has enabled Israel to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the West Bank, and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews only. During these days of strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can see how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000 Jews have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands.”[87]

This has been accompanied by the consolidation, as opposed to reduction, of Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine through the expansion of Jewish settlements in receipt of privileges systematically and officially denied to the non-Jewish Palestinian population. The ultimate goal of these policies is the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland which is to become the sole property of the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens. As recorded by the respected Israeli journalist Danny Rubenstein, “readers of the Palestinian papers get the impression (and rightly so) that activity in the settlements never stops.

“… Israel is constantly building, expanding and reinforcing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is always grabbing homes and lands in areas beyond the 1967 lines - and of course, this is all at the expense of the Palestinians, in order to limit them, push them into a corner and then out. In other words, the goal is to eventually dispossess them of their homeland and their capital, Jerusalem.”[88]

Palestinians are thus separated from Israel politically and geographically, albeit with the Occupied Territories under the administrative domination of Israel. The primary linkage between the State and the territories under its occupation is economic, in the form of cheap labour and captive markets. The population is confined in territorially non-contiguous Bantustans, encircled by and controlled through a network of Israeli settlements, roads and military checkpoints. Repression by PA security forces serves to submerge Palestinians only more deeply within the Israeli-dominated apartheid system. Israel has thus established a system of racial discrimination against Palestinians and non-Jews, in both law and practice. This system consists of an increasingly brutal and tightening military occupation that utilises ethnic cleansing amidst a policy of geographical division and socio-economic deprivation to further marginalise the indigenous population. All this is pursued in violation of an endless number of UN resolutions ordering Israel to halt the oppression of Palestinians and cease its occupation of Palestine.

VII. Conclusion

“Zionism has always seemed to me a mischievous political creed…[I]t seems to be inconceivable... that Mr. Balfour should be authorised to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home for the Jewish people’. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference… [and] that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners.”

Sir Lord Edwin Samuel Montagu,  British Minister of Munitions and Secretary of State for India - the highest-ranking Jewish member of the British Cabinet - writing in a secret memorandum, August 1917

(Great Britain, Public Record Office, Cab. 24/24, 23 August 1917)

The above documentation establishes beyond doubt that the Zionist State of Israel is an apartheid regime that is responsible for systematically discriminating against the indigenous Palestinian population solely because they are Palestinian. It is also clear that Israel has committed acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous population, among a host of other illegal policies many of which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also seems clear that the roots of Israeli apartheid lie in the regime’s Zionist ideology which views the indigenous population as a collection of insignificant obstacles to the task of consolidating and expanding the State of Israel which aims to be, ideally, an exclusively Jewish State. Professor Stanley Cohen, a distinguished sociologist who has a perspective gained from having lived in South Africa, England and Israel, notes Israel’s denial of responsibility in this regard:

“Denial of the injustices and injuries inflicted upon the Palestinians is built into the social fabric... There are, of course, good historical reasons why Israeli Jews should have a defensive self-image and a character armour of insecurity and permanent victimhood. The result is a xenophobia that would be called ‘racism’ anywhere else, an exclusion of Palestinians from a shared moral universe and an obsessional self-absorption: what we do to them is less important than what this does to us.”[142]

And as the British daily The Guardian points out: “A visitor to Israel today who takes the trouble to visit both the cosmopolitan and historic centres of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well as the captive degradation of the Gaza Strip cannot but think of the rottenest days of South Africa.”[143] Around 3.5 million Palestinians are now caged into a small strip of land with population densities and conditions that match anything in the apartheid townships of South Africa. For the last 10 years, the borders have been subject to closure meaning that few Palestinians can leave, even to work. The current unemployment rate is as high as 45 per cent, while no goods can leave or enter except via Israeli customs. Despite the image of “self-rule” under PA control, in fact internal movement within the Occupied Territories is effectively controlled by Israel, which regularly restricts water to Palestinians, bulldozes houses their homes, destroys arable land and confiscates more land for Jewish settlements. Through a combination of military policies and social, economic and legal mechanisms, Israel has successfully installed a system which discriminates against Palestinians, separates them off from Israelis as far as possible, and aims to expel them entirely from a territorially expanding State through programmes of deliberate underdevelopment and extreme force.

It is fast becoming increasingly difficult for honest observers to ignore the consolidation of Israel as an apartheid regime. Even the normally indifferent BBC recently reported on Israel’s institutional discrimination against Palestinians in its authoritative Newsnight programme.[144] Within Israel, there is a growing number of activists and academics documenting and publicly condemning Israel’s apartheid policies. Most recently officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross have spoken out bluntly against Israeli apartheid. Danish head of the Red Cross Freddy Karup Pedersen informed the Danish Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee following a visit to the region that:

“Children are prevented from going to school, the sick from going to hospital and farmers have great difficulty tending their fields. Homes and agricultural areas are destroyed and water resources unequally distributed… We think the conditions of life of the settlers resemble those of the apartheid period in South Africa… [These conditions amount to] a complete lack of respect for international humanitarian rules.”[145]

Within South Africa, respected political commentators such as Chris Gibbons – with first-hand experience of apartheid – have recently noted the very deep similarities between the systems of apartheid in South Africa and now in Israel. It is thus fitting to conclude this paper with the observations of Raymond Louw, who for 11 years was Editor-in-Chief of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, the South African newspaper that was at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. Louw, himself a Jew, has visited Israel several times, and most recently visited Hebron District in the Occupied Territories in June 2001 with Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. His remarks, considering his long experience of apartheid in South Africa and his outstanding record of anti-apartheid activism, must be taken very seriously indeed. Apartheid began in South Africa in 1948. It lasted for 42 years, with five million whites controlling 35 million blacks, “until we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t go on this way…

“… Luckily, we managed to reach a solution before we destroyed ourselves. We were on the verge of a civil war. It simply wasn’t right. There’s no way you can keep on preventing most of the residents from living their lives… With us, the situation was that the whites wanted to keep South Africa for themselves despite the black majority there. That’s why they kept them second-class citizens. It’s exactly like what you’re doing here: The Israelis are determined to hold on to the territories despite the people who live there… The blacks were only allowed to maintain very limited businesses in their areas - only one store and no more. Almost all the resources were at the whites’ disposal and hardly anything was available to the blacks. Perhaps it is similar here: With us, the whites saw the blacks as a political and economic threat. You appear to view the Palestinians the same way…

“It’s depressing. This is a city under military occupation without any rights for the occupied. There was never a situation like this with apartheid. The control in the black areas was not so forceful. I don’t think you can compare the two situations. Under apartheid, there was a recognition that the blacks would continue to live in their areas. Here the impression is that the objective is to push the Palestinians out.

“With us, there were several pockets of blacks living in the heart of white neighborhoods from which they were then expelled, but these were only in isolated places. There was an area in Johannesburg - Sophiatown - where blacks were living in the heart of an area inhabited by whites. They expelled all the blacks to a distance of 15 or 20 kilometers away. And even then, it was done by the police.

“Here it is being done by the settlers. I don’t know if that makes a big difference. It may not be exactly the same thing, but the motivation is the same. What’s happening here is an attempt to pressure them by means of attrition. The Israelis prevent some of the Palestinians from making a living, stores are closed or burned… The Israeli soldiers appear to me to be more brutal than ever. There’s an atmosphere of power and domination and contempt. I don’t believe it was so in the past. They used to seem like they were serving their country. It is my impression that the soldiers’ brutality and arrogance is penetrating all the authorities in their contact with the Palestinians. The police in South Africa also treated blacks as if they weren’t human. This is what is happening here. Non-people, non-humans, people without any rights or human dignity - so it’s okay to do any- thing to them. And it permeates everything. This is the ugly side of all political oppression…”[146

Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a political analyst and human rights activist based in London. He is Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and a Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He was an NGO delegate to the United Nations Conference Against Racism in Durban, where this paper was presented at the NGO Forum.