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- #61
What is Apartheid? The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) defines apartheid as inhumane acts “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Some examples:
The water situation - in a desert country water is a resource rivaling gold. Israel gets 4/5 of the West Bank's aquifer water. Israelis use 240 cubic metres of water a person each year, against 75 cubic metres for West Bank Palestinians and 125 for Gazans. That is quite a discrepency. In a desert - would controling water, even to the point of destroying wells (as was discussed in another thread) be "inhumane" and "supression"?
Education - This also was brought up in another thread. There is a gross inequality in funding for Arab and Jewish education. Schools are for the most part seperate (to the point where one Arab child had to go to court to attend a Jewish school that was much closer to her). Arab schools often lack of basic learning facilities like libraries, computers, science laboratories, recreation space. Palestinian teachers have lower qualifications and lower salaries then Jewish teachers and surprisingly than non-Palistinian Arab teachers.
The Wall along with the system of roads and checkpoints - it is well known the wall creates de-facto seperation of Palestinians from Jews and even from portions of their own lands forcing them to travel miles out of the way to reach farmlands. Roads exist that are for Jews only which are denied to Palestinians.
Right of return: Right of return is for Jews only - a person with one Jewish grandparent anywhere in the world can settle on land that has been taken from Arabs inside Israel or on Palestinian land in the occupied territories. Palestinians are denied the right to return to homes and lands that have been taken from them in Israel.
Limits on growth of Arab communities: Since Israel's founding, many new communities have been founded for Jews, but almost none for Palestinians resulting in severe residential overcrowding. In addition many Palestinian villages remain unrecognized by the government, and receive no running water, electricity, or access roads and are subject to demolition. Hand in hand with this is the fact that all land in Israel must be leased - it is not privately owned. The Israeli Land Administration controls 93% of the arable land in Israel which is either either state-owned (80%) or owned by the Jewish National Fund (13%).
In addition you have the very real discrimmination that occurs in everyday life in jobs and social arenas....unequal protection in time of war (many Arab villages don't even have a bomb shelter), inequal compensation in deaths from military conflicts and more but it would take too much space to discuss.
There are some valid comparisons to apartheid. Yes, there are differences but in the end - which are greater - the differences or similarities?
What matters is what happens in the end - is aparthied created through deliberate design or unintended consequences of political policies?
When asking the question of whether it is occuring as a result of deliberate design it might be helpful to look at the words of some of the major actors in Israel's creation and history. Expressed, many times was the intention of "cleansing" the land of Arabs - not co-existence. Records of more private conversations show that contrary to public statements many leading Israeli political figures were very aware that they were not taking over an unpopulated land but one populated by Arabs. Ben-Gurion expressed an interesting sympathy with their resistance and an undestanding of the motivations though that of course did not change his views concerning destiny.
For example: "What Israeli Historians Say About 1948 Ethnic Cleansing" in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (September 1999)
Regarding the Galilee, Mr. Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee. They didn’t offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of cleansing the Galilee.
It is pretty clear that from the beginning there was little intent to co-exist with the Arab population and an intent to grab as much land as they could and hold on to it. You could argue that meant intent to create apartheid conditions but I'm not sure - I think in that time it was anticipated that the native population would be absorbed by other Arab countries thus neatly taking care of the "problem". This rather resembles the rationale to send freed slaves back to Africa (Liberia) or even, early in Hitlers campaign, when he planned on exporting Jews to Israel as the solution.
There are many more recent quotes indicating a disdain and out right dislike of Arab and Palestinian populations that seem to indicate that while "apartheid" was not the original intention, it is the current intention of some.
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