Palestinians and journalists gather to watch the ruling of the International Court of Justice on a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza (Anatolia)
On January 11, 2024, lawyer Adila Hashem stood before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, presenting her case that became famous around the world against Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip, expressing the position of South Africa, the country that volunteered alone to prosecute the occupying entity for the first time. In its blood-soaked history. The issue raised questions about the reasons for this solidarity on the part of South Africa, as it appears to the unwary observer that the country located in the far south of the African continent does not share any historical, linguistic, religious or national ties with Palestine. However, one companionship remained that united the two countries with a womb that would not dissolve: the companionship of apartheid.
Settlers of European descent rose to power in South Africa after nominal independence from Britain in 1948, and for more than four decades they led one of the most racist regimes in modern history, as they pursued a policy of apartheid or isolated islands, which legitimized the complete separation of whites/settlers. And black/indigenous people in all walks of life. This policy began with the seizure of most of the indigenous lands, including their natural goods and resources, with the evacuation of the owners of the land to a small geography with scarce resources, and on top of this, depriving them of exercising any political or social rights, as there is no governance, no election, no good education, and no transportation. There is no public health care, nor any of the necessities of life that the settlers enjoy. The landowners were oppressed by arbitrary security restrictions, and tempted by an illusion of independence under a government involved in security coordination with the new occupation (1).
Perhaps you have already realized the similarity, but to be sure, we can borrow some names and terms from the story of South Africa, and replace its name with the name of Palestine, and we will immediately recognize the enormity of the Israeli crime. The replacement Zionist entity robbed 78% of the land of historic Palestine in 1948, then invaded what remained of it in 1967, besieging, settling, and exterminating. At a time when the Israeli occupation introduced one of the fiercest apartheid regimes in human history, it made itself an alert and constant reminder to the people of South Africa of what they suffered at the hands of the white man.
For this reason, and for the sake of the broad Israeli support for the apartheid government in South Africa (2), Adila Hashem stood before the court to sue those who were exterminating the Palestinians, victims of apartheid like herself, and to give us the tip of the thread to go far in the search for the history of apartheid in both South Africa and Palestine.
Jerusalem and Cape Town... a tale of two cities
In his book “Hollow Earth,” the Israeli academic and architect Eyal Weizman tried to describe the racist settlement scene in the West Bank and Jerusalem. He did not find a more appropriate description of what his government and its settlers are doing than “Apartheid,” the term that was originally used to describe racial segregation within the occupied territories in 1977. 1948, and to describe what the Israeli government is doing towards the Palestinians inside. But researcher Islam Shehdeh Al-Aloul (1) has added to these two patterns (in the occupied territories and in the West Bank and Jerusalem) another, third pattern of apartheid, embodied in the Zionist siege of the Gaza Strip that has dominated its skies for decades.
Before detailing each of the three types, it is worth asking: What is apartheid? What does the Israeli and South African models have in common, and what separates them?
In this regard, we find that the beginnings of the term go back to the Afrikaans language (the language of white Europeans) in South Africa, and it refers to forced racial segregation between population groups that fall under one authority, but this authority differentiates between these population groups on a racial basis (1). With this concept, the apartheid regime has become a self-contained political system, just like the democratic and authoritarian regimes. Despite the great similarity between the history of settlement in South Africa and Palestine, Zionist settlement excelled in its racist policies by adding unique improvements.
The apartheid system in South Africa began to emerge with the country's independence from Britain in 1930, then crystallized in 1948 with the "National Party" campaign for elections, which came under the slogan "Protecting the white nation from black culture." The party succeeded and legislated its parliament, whose members were elected from Whites alone, the policy of apartheid in various aspects of life. This policy was based on four main pillars, the first of which was geographical separation between the races, as whites inhabited 87% of the lands populated with gold and diamond mines, ports, airports, and services, while millions of blacks were forcibly displaced to shanty towns after their property and wealth were plundered. These are cities that were called “Bantustans.” And it did not contain any resources and services (3) (4).
The second pillar was the demographic separation between whites and blacks, which prohibited blacks from leaving their isolated locations to the whites’ lands without a pass permit proving the purpose of the exit. Otherwise, imprisonment was the inevitable fate of those who violated the instructions. Thousands of black Africans had already been arrested on the pretext of violating the segregation laws. Demographic (3) (4). Then came the third pillar, as a logical consequence, of segregation in all aspects of life, in schools, restaurants, cinema halls, hospitals, transportation, jobs, places of worship, and even cemeteries. Black children in the Bantustans received a mediocre education that qualified them only for simple, poorly paid service jobs. Finally, all of this was framed under the protection of the fourth pillar, which is political separation, with no nomination or election except for the whites. On top of this, the blacks were granted nominal independence in special regions with their own presidents and new national anthems, but under the sovereignty of the central government for the whites, which meant that the loyalty of the Bantustan governments was Purely for the racist government, and that independence was only a nominal independence (3) (4).
Despite the similarity of racist policies between Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa, Al-Aloul believes that classifying the occupying state as only an apartheid regime reduces much of the reality of the settlement entity, which is based on a central, unchanging idea: erasing the Palestinians and replacing Jewish immigrants with them. Accordingly, apartheid represents only one aspect of the settlement project that does not stop. Regarding the similarities between them, Al-Aloul mentions that the common denominators between African apartheid and its Zionist counterpart are represented in the settlement-replacement dimension of the two systems, and in the claim of each of the two systems to be the only democracy in the region, whether that is on the African continent or in the Middle East, as well as in the racist ideology that It made whites a superior race to blacks, just as the Zionist doctrine today makes Israel's Jewish population God's chosen people to crush the Palestinians. The last of these similarities is the parliamentary apartheid legislation, which the occupying entity passed in 2018 by approving the “Nation State” law, which makes non-Jews second-class citizens at best.
But what is unique about Zionist apartheid, superior to its African counterpart, is the extent of the material and physical crime to which the Palestinians are exposed, according to what the South African professor and legal expert John Dugard (5) said about the logistical and service nature in both the Bantustans and the occupied Palestinian territories. The apartheid regime in South Africa aimed to achieve self-sufficiency for the Bantustans, and established for them schools, hospitals, paved roads, and everything that guarantees their residents a normal life, even if it is of poor quality, while the Zionist occupation deprives the residents of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip of these simple life services, as well as About building a apartheid wall, and adopting policies of looting, demolition, and bombing. All of this and more makes the Israeli-style separation regime “more racist” than its counterpart that ended in South Africa three decades ago, and more lethal to the Palestinians in all aspects of their lives.
Citizens without a home
Following the permanent truce between the nascent occupying state and the Arab armies in 1949, and overnight, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians found themselves transformed from Palestinian Arab citizens, enjoying a Palestinian passport and an extended Arab identity in the East and West, to second-class citizens in an occupying entity that Judaizes every... Whatever he gets from Palestine. These Palestinians were the lucky ones who were not able to be deported by Zionist gangs during the Nakba. They remained in their homes until they found themselves transformed into an ethnic minority subject to the worst practices of apartheid within their homeland.
From the first moment, the occupation authorities intended to “geographically fragment the Palestinians of 1948, demographically contain them, politically dominate them, and make them linked as much as possible to the economic infrastructure of the Jewish majority” (1). This included the confiscation of lands, which deprived many of them of their main source of livelihood based on agriculture and forced them to work for the Zionists, and also included the various legislative and executive policies that sought to codify the Jewishness of the state: politically, geographically, and culturally, and deprived the Palestinian of any right to his land or heritage, which produced a reality. The Palestinian lives in his occupied land and is emotionally wounded, socially marginalized, politically lost, economically bankrupt, and nationally injured, as Al-Alul described.
The Palestinian lives a life of constant persecution and racism. There are no adequate educational opportunities, nor wages equivalent to Jewish wages, if any work opportunities exist at all. Moreover, he is subject to this reality permanently, and it is not expected to end as long as the occupation remains, as it represents a demographic and cultural threat that threatens the foundations of The Zionist entity represented by the Jewish state, and for this reason the Palestinian was and remains vulnerable to all forms of persecution. In a study by the Israeli National Security Research Institute, many patterns of racial segregation practiced by the government against Palestinian Arabs inside the occupied territories were observed, and it concluded “that Israeli leaders and the state’s governmental, judicial, and educational institutions have failed in their mission to put an end to the phenomenon of widespread racism and incitement against Arabs” (6).
One of the biggest manifestations of apartheid within the Armistice Line is the Israeli citizenship law, due to which Palestinians live in constant threat of losing any identification papers before the world. According to Law (7) approved by the Knesset on July 14, 1952, the right to naturalization is granted to every Jew in the world as soon as he enters the occupied territories, while others, including Palestinians residing in Palestine and their children, are required to meet conditions similar to those imposed by states on those arriving there in order to Naturalization, while making the decision to refuse naturalization (determined by the Israeli Minister of the Interior) an effective decision that cannot be appealed, and based on those conditions, some Palestinians remain without citizenship or passport to this day.
Even obtaining citizenship does not mean enjoying full citizenship rights, and here apartheid is evident in its clearest form, as in 2018 the Knesset approved the “Nation-State” law, with the approval of 62 deputies, the opposition of 55 others, and two abstentions from voting. It is a law that stipulates that “Israel It is the historical homeland of the Jewish people,” and that the right to self-determination therein “pertains only to the Jewish people” (8) (9), which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considered at the time “a defining moment in the history of Zionism and the history of the State of Israel.” Thus, the occupying state legitimized what it had intended to do for decades by restricting the Arabs of 1948 and depriving them of the rights enjoyed by any citizen of the country whose passport it held. It even “forced” them to swear loyalty to the State of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state, despite what The so-called Declaration of Independence stated that “the State of Israel will guarantee full social and political rights to all its inhabitants regardless of religion, race, or sex.”
Racism towards the Palestinians of 1948 also manifests itself in a number of clear manifestations, including low government funding for all their areas of education, health, agriculture, and so on, in addition to constantly fabricating pretexts for demolishing their homes and displacing them into crowded poor communities, subjecting them to humiliating self-searches at airports, and despite the occupation government’s possession of advanced technology. Careful in inspection, they only use it with Jews or tourists. At the educational and employment levels, Al-Aloul (1) states in her study on apartheid that the Israeli government maintains a low level of education in the basic stages through a meager budget that is not comparable to that allocated to Zionist schools, which affects the academic competence of students and does not adequately prepare them for the university level.
A study by researchers Ismail Abu Saad and Hatem Mahameed (10) says that the Israeli educational methodology exacerbates the matter by using biased criteria for Jews in university admission systems. The psychometric proficiency exam is designed to suit the cultural and scientific capabilities of students in Israeli schools only, and the Palestinian student does not find an educational haven other than these universities due to the absence of any Arab university in the occupying state. Even if the student faces all these difficulties, on top of the scarce financial support from the government for Arab students, he leaves the university facing a major obstacle regarding job opportunities. The public and private sectors are closed to many Palestinian graduates, especially jobs capable of developing Palestinian society.
On the other hand, the Arab Bedouins of the Negev come to demonstrate another model of Zionist apartheid within the 1948 borders, as in 1976 the occupation government created the “Green Patrol,” a paramilitary unit whose mission is to force the Bedouins of the Negev to migrate toward towns recognized by the state. For this reason, the patrol used many racist practices to pressure the Arab population, such as demolishing homes, confiscating livestock herds, destroying agricultural crops, and cutting down trees. However, this was not enough, as the occupation authorities confiscated the “Joab” unit in 2012, which is a police unit to monitor inspectors and forces carrying out the ongoing demolition. The matter reached the point that one village, such as the village of “Al-Araqib,” was demolished by the occupation forces 160 times until 2019, using all possible means of oppression and terrorism against the Bedouins (11).
All of this is taking place under an aesthetic cover whose slogan is “urbanization and modernization of the Bedouins,” through which the occupation government claims that it is resettling the Bedouins in 6 civilized towns, but the truth is that it reduces the demographic presence of the Bedouins. It confines them (who constitute 34% of the population of the Negev) to an area not exceeding 1% of the entire Beersheba district (12). Despite the occupation's recognition of these six towns, the Arab towns always suffer from deliberate neglect and poor infrastructure, in exchange for the superior service provided by the government to the Jews of the Negev, such as water, electricity, sanitation, and the like. This is all for those who hold the nationality of the occupying state and whose existence it recognizes, so what about those it does not recognize?
Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir lives in the "Kiryat Arba" settlement, which was established illegally on the lands of Hebron in the West Bank, which are recognized as being subject to the Palestinian Authority. (Reuters)
Cross-border apartheid
How would you answer the question: Where does such-and-such minister of the Belgian government live? The answer is Belgium, of course, without hesitation and without a moment of thought, as a government official cannot run his government from another country, but apparently this rule is not logical in the occupying state, where a number of its ministers live in another country, according to the classification of the United Nations and international law. We find, for example, that Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir (13) lives in the “Kiryat Arba” settlement, which was established illegally on the lands of Hebron in the West Bank, which are recognized as being subject to the Palestinian Authority.
This simple feature gives us a key to the image that the occupation has been creating in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (before its withdrawal from it in 2005) since 1967. Despite the Oslo Accords, which allowed the Palestinian Authority to control Area A of the West Bank, and partial control of Area B, With pledges of their gradual handover of power in Area C, what actually happened is that the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is subject to all racist practices against the Palestinians. In this regard, Nev Gordon (14), former head of the Department of Political Science at Ben Gurion University, describes the occupation policy in the West Bank as “definitely an apartheid policy,” explaining that the settlement creates two population groups living in one place: the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers, and when “ “If there are two populations and two systems of laws in one area, and one group is subject to a different legal system from the other for racial reasons, this is apartheid.”
Gordon comments on the occupying state's claim that the residents of the West Bank do not live in Israel, and thus it does not commit to anything towards them. He invokes the example of a government official residing in the settlement, saying: "Is it possible for a German or British foreign minister to live in France?" Therefore, there is no escape from recognizing that the Israeli minister residing in the settlement actually lives under the Israeli sovereignty imposed there. So this means that there is apartheid in Israel, and Gordon finds no more evidence of this apartheid in the West Bank than he himself, as he says that he can move from Beersheba to Hebron easily and conveniently, while the Palestinian residents of Hebron find it difficult to move within Hebron itself. .
Hebron represents one of the many chapters of Israeli racism in the entire West Bank (Al Jazeera)
Speaking of Hebron, since the massacre of the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, the occupation has divided it into two areas: the “H1” area in which Palestinians are allowed to move and live, and the “H2” area, which is prohibited to them because of the 700 Jewish settlers who live there and enjoy luxury that is incomparable to the enormous suffering of the Palestinians inside. Their city. The occupation authorities imposed a special system of permits subject exclusively to the Zionist administration, in order to restrict the movement of the Khalilis within the “H2” area, to the point that the arrival of the Palestinian Khalili to his workplace or obtaining medical service became like hell. While the roads were paved and difficulties were overcome for the Jewish settlers, 20 permanent checkpoints and 14 partial checkpoints stand in the way of Palestinians in order to isolate them from the luxury settlers’ areas, forcing them to use alternative bypass routes, or move on rooftops and climb tall stairs, which is not suitable for the sick and the elderly (15).
With this apartheid, Hebron represents only one of the many chapters of racism in the entire West Bank. The settlements and their bypass roads (prohibited to Palestinians) divide the West Bank lands in a way that isolates each city from its sister, and makes passage through Palestinian cities in the West Bank more difficult than traveling between warring countries (16). Added to this suffering is greater suffering caused by the apartheid wall and its multiple security barriers, as the length of the wall’s path reached about 712 kilometers (with what has been completed and what is awaiting construction), which makes it longer than the green line specified by the occupying state, which is 320 kilometers long. The wall thus cuts off more than half a million dunams from the West Bank, approximately 9.5% of its total area, separating the Palestinians from their lands in more than 150 residential communities, and making more than 11,000 Palestinians who live between the Green Line and the wall in a situation similar to prisoners who are deprived of the right to leave. This narrow geographical space (1).
What makes this exit process difficult are the electronic barriers scattered along the wall at long distances, exacerbating the suffering, as the Palestinian farmer is forced to walk distances of up to 50 kilometers in order to reach the gate designated for his magnetic card, while his agricultural land may be only one kilometer away from his place of residence. While the settler moves between settlements and even occupied territories within the territories controlled by Israel in a few minutes on paved roads without any consequences. The wall has also greatly contributed to paralyzing economic life in the West Bank, as the permanent confiscation of lands and swallowing them behind the wall causes the West Bank to lose many natural resources, in addition to the fact that most of the agricultural lands and groundwater sources are located in Area C, which represents 60% of the West Bank area and includes Most vital economic resources (17).
Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank have become death traps for Palestinians (Al Jazeera)
Stifling siege and slow liquidation
On the other hand, despite the international legal ban, the occupation does not stop establishing settlements and settlement outposts and legalizing them unilaterally, in exchange for the continuous demolition of Palestinian homes built in Area C without licenses from the occupation government, given the severe overcrowding in Area A and the high licensing costs in Area C, which creates a living reality of the most severe types of apartheid. But this apartheid is theoretically created by the government of one state among the people of another state, based on the classification of the United Nations, in blatant and clear violation of all international laws that were enacted and recognized until the establishment of Israel.
The situation is not much different in the Gaza Strip, which has been besieged for decades, and whose siege does not depend only on the land, air and sea blockade imposed by the occupation since Hamas’ electoral victory and then assuming power in 2007, but also extends for more than three decades, specifically since June 1989 following The first intifada, when the occupation restricted the residents of the Gaza Strip from leaving Gaza without obtaining a magnetic card, and thus it became easy to besiege Al-Ghazawi inside his Strip by simply depriving him of this card (1).
The occupation imposed its air siege with the closure of Gaza International Airport in 2000 following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, before bombing it in 2001, then in 2008, 2009 and the years that followed (18). The airport collapsed completely, and Gazan dreams of air and economic independence collapsed with it, and the only outlet for freedom turned into... Big garbage dump. Even the sea was made by the occupation into another wall of the siege when it obstructed the process of building the Gaza port, despite the agreements signed with the Palestinian Authority and the pledge of international organizations to build it. In 2001, the occupation bombed facilities belonging to the implementing companies, which led to the withdrawal of these companies and the suspension of the construction process that was expected to take place in the future. Great economic and developmental potential for the sector (19).
However, this blockade appears to be unsatisfactory to the occupation, which imposed another naval blockade that prevented fishermen from sailing more than three nautical miles away, despite the Oslo Accords allowing twenty nautical miles (20). As a result, fishermen faced a major crisis due to the scarcity of fish wealth this close to land, and as a result their number decreased from 10,000 fishermen in 2000 to about 3,700 in 2019, of whom only 2,000 work daily, in addition to the permanent arrests and shootings that Fishermen from the Israeli naval forces are exposed to it. Because of all of this, which is just the tip of the iceberg of the daily violations of the occupation, the Palestinians do not find a single outlet for life in any part of their occupied lands, whether those that were occupied in 1948 or those that fell into the clutches of the occupation in 1967, and formal independence in Gaza does not give them any sense of security. Freedom while they are besieged from all sides and deprived of simple natural goods that people cannot live without, under the pretext that they are dual-use goods and may be used in the manufacture of weapons.
The occupation thus presents an exceptional, cross-border apartheid regime that violates all international values and laws, and is superior to its South African counterpart. But the biggest difference is that the African apartheid government is subjected to a global siege and a massive boycott on a number of levels, while the occupying state enjoys widespread global and Western support despite the genocide. Collectivism that began decades ago and continues to this day with crimes that the world could not have imagined facing in this era of its history. Will the Zionist apartheid regime continue to enjoy this unconditional support, or does the world have a conscience that can rise up and have mercy on these besieged people deprived of all means of life?
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Source: Al Jazeera