Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 09:29:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: An article by Azmi Bishara


Dear Bruce,
Your posting seems very angry. I think it is clear
that you, like many if not all members of this list,
were moved by the creation of more victims. However,
"make no mistake about it", your posting is based on
factless reading, if any, as to your simplistic
understanding to the postcolonial minds. Needless to
say, that benladenning Said as you did was McCarthyest
at both best and worst. 

Marwan




Al-Ahram Weekly
6-12 September, 2001
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/550/in5.htm

Calling a spade a spade

You can dress it up any way you like, but in the end,
its still apartheid, explains Azmi Bishara 
 
The state of Israel was established as a settler-
colonial project that was sponsored by different
colonial powers for different reasons. Because it was
not possible to establish a Jewish state in Palestine
without expelling the indigenous people who
constituted the majority of the population, the 1948
war provided a cover for their widespread and
systematic expulsion. 

As was the case with South African whites, Zionist
settlers' understanding of their project was not as a
colonising project, but a project for the rebirth of
an ancient civilisation. They saw it as a project of
self-liberation that, through the settling of land,
led to the formation of a nation. This understanding
was not disturbed by the usage of classical colonial
methods in the forcible dispossession of the
population, the appropriation of land, and the
formation of common economic interests with the
colonial powers. 

Any Jew, anywhere in the world, has the right to
become a citizen of Israel immediately on arrival,
with full rights and more privileges than the nation's
Arab population. At the same time, no Palestinian
refugee has the right to return to the home from which
he was expelled only a few decades ago. It is also
impossible for Arab citizens of Israel to pass
citizenship on to their spouses or other family
members. 

The Zionist movement achieved racial separation
through expulsion, and the Jewish minority --
appropriating all the economic resources of the
country, most importantly, the land -- considered the
state as an embodiment of its right to sovereign
domination. The Arab minority that remained was
marginalised and fully subjugated to the process of
planning and building the institutions of the Jewish
state. Indigenous Palestinians were granted
citizenship and the right to vote, but were kept under
military administration until 1966. This military
administration made a mockery of their citizenship and
violated the rights conferred by citizenship. 

Israel was in no need of formalised racial separation,
as it was the de facto system practised under the
military administration. And unlike other nationalist
movements, Zionism, as a secular movement, did not
attempt to subordinate religion to the aim of
crystallizing a national identity, but created an
overlapping identity, such that it became impossible
to separate religion and state. The concept of a
sovereign Jewish nation is perforce exclusive because
of its Zionist definition. 

When the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip fell under direct military occupation in 1967,
Israel's form of racial separation became problematic.
It was no longer possible to absorb the Palestinians
who remained through granting them citizenship, since
this would upset the demographic balance in Israel and
confront it with the historic choice once faced by
South Africa: declare an apartheid state in the
formal, legal sense (such a state would be doomed from
the start), or establish a democratic secular state
encompassing all citizens (which would negate the
Jewish definition of the state). 

How did the Israeli political establishment respond to
this challenge? It responded by rejecting both choices
and establishing a state of occupation far worse than
the apartheid practised in South Africa. All the forms
of atrocities spawned by apartheid in South Africa
were practised by Israel, which led to continuous and
bloody confrontations with the Palestinian national
movement. This was immediately translated into the
forcible suppression of people's daily activities. 

Furthermore, Israel initiated settlement activities
without formally annexing the Palestinian territories.
The settler movement is the truest expression of the
Israeli form of apartheid. Israel builds Jewish
settlements on Arab lands where an Arab majority
resides and provides the settlement movement with a
completely developed infrastructure. Meanwhile, the
needs and aspirations of the indigenous population are
ignored and repressed. 

By imposing closures and denying the population
freedom of movement, Israel has succeeded not only in
sealing off the occupied territories from the outside,
but cutting off towns and villages from each other,
ultimately tearing the tiny territory of the West Bank
and Gaza into 63 closed military zones. This state of
siege has become permanent. In the very period that
apartheid and its "pass-laws" was being dismantled,
Israel was enforcing a system of closures on the
population of the West Bank and Gaza -- a system
without "pass-laws". 

The permanent nature of the settlement movement, and
Israel's insistence on it, contradicts the apparently
temporary nature of occupation. At the same time an
official policy of annexation, leading to the
formation of a formal system of apartheid has never
been declared. Israel strains to escape this dilemma
by imposing a deeply flawed system of self- rule on
the Palestinian population. This system is then touted
as a permanent peace settlement, should violent
conflicts in the area be eradicated. But limited
self-rule in a Bantu state is a compromise between
Israel's inability (due to international constraints)
to establish a formal apartheid system, and its
refusal to accept the conditions of a just peace -- a
recognition of the unconditional right of the
Palestinian people to true independence. This is the
new form of apartheid that exists in historical
Palestine. 

Israel will never acknowledge the nature of the
colonial apartheid system it has established in
Palestine. Israel's suggestion to the Palestinians is
to give up the refugees' right of return in exchange
for limited or extended self-rule in the West Bank and
Gaza (without Jerusalem), while simultaneously keeping
enough space for Jewish settlements in these areas. In
doing so, Israel not only undermines the possibility
of Palestinian statehood, but it also undermines its
own exclusive national character and sets up the
foundations for a new era of Palestinian struggle
against apartheid, which cannot be expressed in the
"two state" solution. 


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