Is Israel an apartheid state? Comparisons between apartheid South Africa and Israel have often been made, but not always clearly explained. Before we delve into the subject, let us try to understand what the term apartheid really means. The word originated in South Africa and is derived from Afrikaans meaning, literally, apartness or separateness. The term originated as a political slogan coined by Dr Daniel F. Malan, leader of the South African National Party, in 1944. The policy of apartheid was included in the party platform during the successful election campaign in 1948, forging a coalition of disunited Afrikaner (White) groups and classes, and would serve as the basis for the regime’s racial program until it was repealed in 1991-92.

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. Initial emphasis was on restoring the separation of races within the urban areas. A large segment of the Asian and Colored (i.e., mixed races) populations was forced to relocate out of the so-called white areas, as were the native Africans whose townships were demolished and occupants forcibly removed.

The main architect of apartheid was Hendrik F. Verwoerd (1901-66), the leading intellectual and ideologue of the National Party. Under his prime ministership, apartheid developed into a policy known as “separate development,” whereby each of the nine Bantu groups was to become a nation with its own homeland, or Bantustan. An area totaling about 14% of the country’s land was set aside for these homelands, the remainder, including the major mineral areas and the cities, being reserved for the whites. The basic tenet of the separate development policy was to reserve within the confines of the African’s designated homeland rights and freedoms, but that outside it blacks were to be treated as aliens.

According to Ian Campbell, “Having been assigned a national homeland, or Bantustan, Africans settled and working in South Africa would lose their residence and other rights and became liable to deportation in the event of political unrest or large-scale unemployment. Under the guise of ‘trusteeship’, government policy was to confine the African majority to reserves that could not support them, thus ensuring the continuation of a cheap, compliant labor force.”

The African population, three-quarters of the total, was disenfranchised and subject to coercion backed by law. Non-whites were required to carry identification papers. Laws forbade most social contacts between those of European descent and others, authorized segregated public facilities, established separate educational standards, restricted each group to certain types of jobs, curtailed nonwhite labor unions, and denied nonwhite participation in the national government. Movement to and between other parts of the country was strictly regulated, the location of residence or employment (if permitted to work) was restricted, and the urban African workers were seen as transients. Only those holding the necessary labor permits, granted according to the labor market, were allowed to reside within urban areas without their spouses. None of the African reserves were viable nations. They were made up of broken tracts of poor-quality land, riddled with erosion and incapable of supporting their large designated populations. With no industry, opportunities for employment were few.

So, how realistic is the comparison of Israel’s policy towards the indigenous Palestinian people with those practiced by the White racists, segregationists in South Africa? None is probably better equipped to answer this question than Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who won the Nobel Prize for peace. Speaking about his visit to Israel in April, 2002, he said, “I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”

The similarity does not end there. It is much deeper. Like White settlers who colonized SouthAfrica, Israel has been a settler enterprise of the European Zionists to colonize Palestine inhabited by indigenous Palestinians. It was no accident that Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, had written about his plan to Cecil Rhodes, the most typical of British colonialists of his time: “How then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out of way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial … And what I want you to do is … to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes, have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable.”

Lies and Deceptions:

The Zionist plan was more hideous than that of the Afrikaners. In South Africa, the white settlers sought to dominate, rather than expel, the native population by incorporating them as inferior citizens in a polity under exclusively white control. Zionists, on the other hand, tried to take control of the entire Palestine by excluding its indigenous non-Jewish population, whose very existence they tried to deny before the Israeli state was born. With misleading slogans: “people without a land for a land without a people”, they tried to claim ownership of an “un-inhabited” Palestine, which by the time of partition had some 1.3 million Palestinians living.

Land-grabbing and Expulsion of Palestinians:

The expulsion of the Palestinian people and occupation of their land was a deliberate and systematic undertaking. Joseph Witz, head of the Jewish National Fund, responsible for land acquisition, wrote in 1940: “Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country … The only solution is Eretz Israel, at least the Western Israel, without Arabs, and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from her to the neighboring countries; to transfer them all … Only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brethren.”

As one can see this devious program was formulated well before Israel was born. It was criminal and racist to the core. In 1980, Professor Israel Shahak of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem noted, “Basically, the State of Israel was founded on by people who were not conscious of the rights of non-western people … They had absolutely no sense of justice for people outside this group.” He noted that the dominant attitude of the Israeli state was “fundamentally racist.”

When the Partition Plan was announced on Nov. 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly made a non-binding recommendation (Resolution 181) for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State and a small internationally administered zone including the religiously significant towns Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Jews were allotted 56% of the Mandatory Palestine and Arabs 43%. The Jewish territory was to include some 0.47 million Arabs living with nearly half a million Jews.

The Arab League rejected the plan because of being too unfair to the majority Palestinians who comprised more than two-thirds of the overall population. Initially, most of the Zionist leaders, including those from the Jewish Agency and Ben Gurion, also criticized the Plan. Menachem Begin, the progenitor of today’s Likud, warned that the partition would not bring peace because the Arabs would attack the Jewish state and that “in the war ahead we’ll have to stand on our own, it will be a war on our existence and future.” Many extremist Zionist settlers simply wanted an Israel that would have no non-Jew inhabitant. To them, the important question was: how to create a Jewish majority in a country with majority indigenous Palestinian people? The answer was: expulsion of the indigenous population and promotion of Jewish immigration to the new colony.

On April 1, 1948, the Security Council adopted Resolution 44 “to consider further the question of the future government of Palestine.” However, the Zionist leaders did not want to wait too long and, being prepared militarily, declared independence of the state of Israel unilaterally on May 14, 1948. As expected when the war broke out with the Arabs, the Zionists sought to establish Jewish demographic dominance by expelling nearly 770,000 indigenous Palestinians. By the time the Armistice Agreement was signed in July of 1949, the Zionists ended up grabbing nearly 78% of the original territory, leaving a mere 22% of the land to the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Out of a total of 475 villages existing in 1948, 420 Palestinian villages were destroyed within the new state of Israel where Jews were settled. In 1950 Israel used the Absentee Property Law to expropriate property belonging to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes during the 1948-49 war. The Israeli law violates Article 46 of the Hague Convention, which prohibits confiscation of private property in occupied territory.

Denial of Citizenship:

The apartheid doctrine is officially professed by the Zionist state in its proclamation of special status for the Jewish people, the Law of Return for the Jews and the Law on Nationality. Under Israeli law, a Jew from Philadelphia or anywhere on earth becomes an Israeli citizen at the very moment he sets foot on Tel Aviv airport, whereas a Palestinian, born in Palestine of Palestinian parents, may be treated as stateless. He has no right of return to his ancestral home once he was forced out in the wars. Nor is his property rights honored if he is an absentee landlord, even though he may be residing inside the West Bank and Gaza. The same apartheid that applies to citizenship is in force where rights of residence and marriage are concerned. It was no fluke that when the UN General Assembly passed the Resolution 3379 in 1975 equating “Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination” it did so for the right reason.

Segregation and Discriminatory Laws:

During the 1948-67 period while no structured physical segregation of the Palestinian population from the usurping Israelis was attempted, the Israeli military administration controlled Israeli Arabs’ movements, imposed curfew on them, controlled where they lived and confiscated their land to favor Jewish occupation. It also prevented structural dependence on the Palestinian economy, particularly on its labor. Before 1948 less than a third of the workers in the Jewish sector were Palestinian. From 1948-67, the remaining Palestinian Arabs supplied no more than 15% of the labor force.

Following the pre-emptive strikes in June of 1967, Zionist settlers were able to consolidate their authority over the entire territory, while making sure that Palestinian grip of their own territories ever shrinks. The 1967-War brought some one million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli government resorts to forced eviction of the Palestinian people so as to lower their proportion in comparison to the settler Jews. It also encourages Jewish immigration from Russia and elsewhere to Israel giving them the right to citizenship to maintain an edge in population over the Palestinians. Conversely, it denies such rights of return, let alone citizenship, to all those Palestinians who fled the country.

As can be seen from the above analysis, South African apartheid wanted the land and the people, albeit with segregation; the Israeli leadership tried to take the land without the people. Since 1967, Israeli government developed a detailed policy of territorial integration and demographic separation. It encouraged encroachment of Zionist settlers into Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli law also allows Jewish settlers to carry arms.

Like the South African White settlers, within the OccupiedTerritories, the Israeli government enacted different laws and decrees to regulate lives of its Palestinian population. Like the Blacks in South Africa, the Palestinian people don’t have freedom of movement. Like SouthAfrica, Israel’s highly discriminatory and strangulating economic decrees forces the indigenous people into not only providing cheap labor for the Israeli market but also selling their properties at a cheaper price to the settler Jews and Jewish agencies. Between 1967 and 1990, according to Dr. Leila Farsakh, a Palestinian political economist, who teaches at University of Massachusetts, “More than a third of the Palestinian labor force was employed in Israel and generated over a quarter of the territories’ GDP.” So horrible is the condition of Palestinians inside the Occupied Palestine that they are forced to reflect everyday if exodus is not a better option for them to live, raise their children and care for the elderly.

(To be continued ...)