| |
Why Palestine Is Burning
Apartheid by another name
Praful Bidwai
The Hindu, 10 May 2004
No sensible person should regret the 60 percent negative vote in the May 2 referendum held in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Right-wing Likud Party on Israel’s proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. This might appear paradoxical because the plan would vacate some 7,500 settlers who occupy 40 percent of Gaza’s land (while its 1.5 million Palestinians have to make do with the rest). Wouldn’t "disengagement" redress a gross inequity and help the long-overdue establishment of an independent Palestinian state? Isn’t the Gaza pullout plan, which has the full backing of President Bush, the best way to restart the violently interrupted peace process under an "honest broker" (Washington)?
The honest answer is no. From Mr Sharon’s point of view, the Gaza plan had nothing to do with Palestinian independence. Rather, it was a way of getting rid of a "trouble-spot" to consolidate the much larger settlements in the West Bank-about 300 of them, with a population of 400,000-, and prevent the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state. The plan would have allowed Mr Sharon to claim that he’s a "man of peace". In reality, as Israeli writer Meron Benvenisti says, it would have helped him "‘improve’ the demographic situation by removing 1.5 million Palestinians from Israeli control" and reduce the danger that Israel "will cease to be a Jewish state".
Under "disengagement", Israel wouldn’t have ceded its suzerainty or "paramountcy" over Gaza. It would continue to control its airspace and sea and land approaches, and reserve the right to send its troops back into Gaza. The April 14 Bush-Sharon memorandum explicitly provides for this. "After the pullout, Gaza would have become a prison republic or mini-Bantustan", says Azmi Bishara, a distinguished Israeli-Palestinian philosopher-social scientist, and member of Israel’s parliament. "This wouldn’t have been a step towards a resolution of the Palestinian question based upon ending Israel’s occupation."
The pullout plan was a not-very-subtle means of furthering Israel’s occupation—in violation of international law, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Geneva Conventions, and global public opinion. Yet, a minuscule minority—60 percent of the 40 percent of Likud members who voted—rejected it. This only shows the clout of the hard-Right Settler Lobby. Mr Sharon himself is partly responsible for this. He has rooted for an aggressive settlement policy since 1977. His long-advocated strategy is crude: when under pressure to give up occupied territories, respond by further expanding the settlements!
This development further vitiates the Palestine-Israel situation. I had the opportunity to study the situation during a fortnight-long trip there. I travelled to several Israeli and Palestinian cities and West Bank villages (although not to Gaza, which was closed following Hamas leader Rantissi’s assassination). This was one of the most educative experiences of my journalistic career of 30 years. I witnessed "apartheid in practice", or what cannot be properly distinguished from it. I don’t use these words loosely. I was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1980s and in contact with the African National Congress. I closely followed the debates over the "pass laws" and attempts to create "Bantustans". I have since visited South Africa, and talked to many people who suffered under apartheid. I find it hard to demarcate Israel’s Palestine policy from the egregious ideology and politics of apartheid (literally, "separateness") based on ethnicity, including annexation of land.
The creation of Israel was meant to rectify a terrible historic wrong, culminating in the Holocaust. Instead, it created another catastrophe ("al-Nakba")—the uprooting and expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians. By 1948, Israel held 78 percent of historic Palestine’s land although Jews were only a third of the population. Israel then declared itself a Jewish state and turned the remaining Palestinians into second-class citizens. In 1967, it occupied the West Bank and Gaza, displacing 325,000 people.
The key issue in this unhappy land is not Hamas-style terrorism directed at Israeli civilians, which must be unequivocally condemned. The central issue and root-cause of all problems is Israel’s military occupation. This is brutal, oppressive and dehumanising. It’s much worse than colonial tyranny in, say, South Asia. During the first half of the 20th century, the British relaxed their iron-grip over India and accommodated the people’s aspirations. During the past half-century, Israel has tightened its grip over Palestinian land and practised exclusion.
Israel has confiscated 24 percent of the area of the West Bank and Gaza and 89 percent of East Jerusalem for settlements, highways, military installations, nature reserves, etc. It controls 80 percent of the water resources of the Occupied Territories (OT) and also appropriates a large quantity, equal to one-third of its consumption, from the Jordan River. Fourth-fifths of the water from the West Bank’s sole underground aquifer goes to Israel.
Israel’s human rights violations are systemic and endless. Israeli tyranny has reduced the Palestinians’ daily life to misery and humiliation. They have no freedom of movement sometimes even in their own mohalla. They cannot enter "unified" cities like Jerusalem without permits. The Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo accords, essentially represents municipal government. Its writ does not run even in Ramallah. Until a few weeks ago, the Israelis would shoot at its police if it wore uniforms. The Israelis aren’t willing to end the occupation of Palestine. Indeed, they have just received Mr Bush’s green light to keep the bulk of the settlements and cancel the Palestine refugees’ right of return.
Despite initial promise, the "peace process" launched in 1991 became, in its Oslo format, an instrument to further injustice. Events took a particularly ugly turn in September 2000, when Mr Sharon provocatively marched on the holy Haram-al-Sharif. Israel’s repression of the Palestinian resistance has been ferocious. In March 2002, it launched a massive invasion to re-occupy territories partially ceded to the PA. This bled the Palestinian economy white, producing unprecedented impoverishment. Israel’s post-September 2000 military campaigns have killed 2,984 people, including 500 children (until April 19, 2004). They have left 25,000 injured and 2,500-plus permanently disabled. According to a UN Conference on Trade & Development estimate, closures and losses from military operations have drained $2.4 billion out of the Palestinian economy. Palestinians have lost more than $4 billion in income.
Israeli-Palestinian economic disparities have now acquired staggering proportions. Israel is the world’s 16th wealthiest country, richer than Ireland or Spain. The Palestinian economy is among the world’ poorest. It has shrunk by one-half in three years. Agriculture and services are in acute distress. Seventy percent of firms have closed or severely reduced production. Unemployment is 67 percent in Gaza and 50 percent in the West Bank. The OT poverty-ratio has worsened gravely—from 20 to 75 percent (85 percent-plus in Gaza). Half its people require external food assistance.
The misery’s cause lies in Israeli-imposed closures and expropriations by military operations against "terrorism". Israel’s goal is to reduce Palestine to a cluster of Bantustans without contiguous territory or full sovereignty. This cannot be done except by practising a kind of apartheid—separateness/segregation. Mr Sharon is even trying to kill the "Road Map" promoted by the US, Europe, Russia and the UN. This was biased in Israel’s favour. Yet, the PA accepted it. The Israeli government also accepted it, but with 14 reservations. The Map was never implemented. It’s now virtually non-existent.
Israel wants to confine the Palestinians to small, economically depressed, enclaves or ghettos and keep them out of fully Israeli-controlled areas. It subjects them to extreme harassment, obstruction and economic punishment so that their will breaks. Israel has established 760 checkpoints to prevent people’s movement throughout the West Bank and Gaza. It is demolishing their homes to uproot them and impose ethnic segregation. Over the past three years, Israel has stepped up house demolitions—to fight "terrorism". Over 4,000 houses were destroyed, and 15,000 damaged. (Besides, lakhs of olive trees were uprooted and hundreds of water-wells closed.)
That’s where the 700 km-long "Apartheid Wall" comes in. Israel unilaterally started building this fence inside Palestinian territory to shield its settlements and bring them geographically into Israel. I visited the Wall at Abu Dis near Jerusalem. It brutally cuts village after Palestinian village into two, with the local school on one side, and the mosque or cemetery on the other. The monstrous $2 billion Wall doesn’t look like a temporary structure. It’s designed to tear Palestinian society into shreds. The gravest danger today is that of Palestine becoming a cluster of Bantustans without contiguous territory, sovereignty or independence.
Palestine’s occupation is the worst legacy of colonialism and the unresolved problems of the 20th century. It equals the Algeria of the 1960s, or the Vietnam of the 1970s, or the South Africa of the 1980s. Fighting it demands the same kind of international solidarity. The global community won’t find it easy to rein in Israel, which has roguishly defied international law. The US has been its closest backer and cannot be trusted to be an honest broker. Only a genuinely global, multilateral initiative can change things. Much will depend on what happens in Iraq, where US plans for Empire face their gravest crisis. If the global balance-of-power changes there, the US and Israel could yet be forced to see reason.
Copyright 2004
|
|
