The Apartheid Wall (Segregation Fence):

When Sharon took power in 2001, to him, a worthy heir of David Ben-Gurion and Zeev Jabotinsky, the 1948 war of independence wasn’t finished. He spent the next two years by resuming complete control of the West Bank. But, as Dominique Vidal has pointed out elsewhere, that was not enough. He faced a major challenge – demographic, which said that Palestinian population would soon outnumber the Jewish population. He had two solutions – expel all the Palestinians or allow the creation of a Palestinian state. He rejected the second choice and recognized that the first one was impractical to carry out. So he came up with a third option that involved erection of a segregation wall that would allow Israel to annex the remaining half of the West Bank, in particular the blocs where 80% of the settlers live. The Wall, at least 3.5 times Israel’s international recognized border, not only separated Jews physically from Palestinians but also divided Palestinian villages separating them from each other, and separated Palestinian farmers from their own fields. The other major impacts on the indigenous people include loss of land, increased difficulty in accessing medical services in Israel, restricted access to water sources, and adverse economic effects.

The route of the Wall in the West Bank was set to take the Palestinian water supply into Israeli boundaries, in addition to what is already taken by the Israeli settlements inside the West Bank. Thus, as much as the Israeli government has managed to control the continuity of its landmass from those within the pre-1967 border to those settlements and outposts located deep inside the WBGS via the connecting roads, it is clear that it has also been able to control and connect all its water resources in the Occupied Territories.

Life within Palestinian Bantustans:

Israelis, irrespective of whether they are nominal civilians or military personnel, impose exodus upon the Palestinian population through harassment, whose ultimate goal is expulsion of the natives. As hinted earlier, access to water, e.g., remains a persistent issue. Each Israeli settler uses five times as much water as a Palestinian neighbor, who must pay four times as much per gallon. There are Israeli swimming pools adjacent to Palestinian villages where drinking water had to be hauled in on tanker trucks and dispensed by the bucketful. Most of the hilltop settlements are on small areas of land, so untreated sewage is discharged into the surrounding fields and villages. Palestinian researchers have accused Israel of destroying large parts of the water utilities, such as the demolition of wells and the destruction of irrigation systems, reservoirs and water lines in the West Bank. Such crimes result in a major deficit in the underground reservoir, and the increasing suffering of the population for access to drinking water on a daily basis. Israel's destruction of the water supply for many Palestinian cities added to the salt content of the well water in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which has also led to a decline in agricultural production.

As noted by Dr. Farsakh in her book - Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, land and occupation, the West Bank aquifers and water from the Jordan River produced a total of 1.9 billion cubic meters of water per year, which is 70% of total water resources available in the pre-1967 Israel and the WBGS. The denial and limited supply of this water to the indigenous Palestinians is criminal to the core. It is reducing farmers to beggars and strangulating Palestinian economy forcing the emergence of a captive labor force for the Israeli colonial settler state. According to Farsakh, “The release of labor from the Palestinian economy is affected through four main channels: land expropriation, extraction and control of water resources, industrial and economic policy that handicaps the development of productive local employment; and transformation of the Palestinian into a captive market for Israeli goods.”

Palestinians are deprived of their most basic human rights. They have little freedom of movement or independent activity. Any demonstration against Israeli abuses results in mass arrests of Palestinians, including children throwing stones, bystanders who are not involved, families of protesters, and those known to make disparaging statements about the occupation. Once incarcerated, they have little hope for a fair trial and often have no access to their families or legal counsel. Most of these cases are tried in military tribunals, but 90% of the inmates are being held in civilian jails. One of the attorneys told former President Carter, “Here there is one system under civil judges and another under the military. Most of our cases, no matter what the subject might be, fall under the military. They are our accusers, judges, and juries, and they all seem the same to us.”

From September 2000 until March 2006, 3,982 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis were killed in the second Intifada and these numbers include many children: 708 Palestinians and 123 Israelis. During the Israel-Lebanon conflict of 2006, while world’s attention was in Lebanon, Israeli forces killed more than 200 Palestinians, 44 of them children, in Gaza. During its December 2008-January 2009 war on the Gaza Strip alone, Israel killed nearly 1,200 Palestinian non-combatants.

The Oslo Peace was supposed to let Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to control most of the West Bank by 1996. Instead, by July 2000 it had jurisdiction over only 19%, or less, of the West Bank.

In a recent article, dated June 10, 2009, Stephanie Westbrook of the U.S. Citizens for Peace & Justice in Rome, Italy, wrote, “Not only are Palestinians restricted in their movement in and out of Gaza, but also within. In late May, Israel began dropping thousands of leaflets near the border areas warning the people of Gaza not to come within 300 meters of the border or they would be fired upon. Farmers are forced to risk their lives in order to work their fields that fate has placed too close to the border. The same restrictions are imposed on Palestinian fishermen. The sound of shots pierce the silence nightly, as Israeli gunboats fire on fishing boats that dare to venture far enough away from the shore in order to catch fish to sell and provide a living for their families. These are the absurdities that have become the norm in Gaza. But perhaps most absurd of all is how anyone can believe that Israel's severity in the closures, the destruction of the economy and social fabric of the Gaza Strip, will serve to convince Palestinians to place their trust in international law.”

John Pilger, the award-winning journalist and documentary film maker, writes, “At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable. Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way.” This happened just the day before Obama’s historic speech in Cairo.

Truly, in the 21st century, there is hardly a place more closely resembling Bantustan of the South African apartheid days than Gaza. In 1948 there were 90,000 natives in Gaza. The population more than tripled by 1967, and there are now more than 1.4 million – 4,118 people living per sq. km, making it one of the most densely populated places in our planet. There, before Sharon’s plan for disengagement in June 2004, 8,000 Israeli settlers (comprising 0.6% of the overall population) were controlling 40% of the arable land and more than one-half the water resources. These settlers were defended by 12,000 Israeli troops. Israel does not allow air and sea transportation from Gaza. In his fact finding mission there, President Carter observed that fishermen were not allowed to leave the harbor, workers were prevented form going to outside jobs, the import or export of food and other goods was severely restricted and often cut off completely and the police, teachers, nurses, and social workers were deprived of salaries. Per capita income decreased 40% during 2004-06, and poverty rate reached 70%. This was the situation before reinvasion of Gaza in July 2006.

When asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, who is Jewish, replied, “I think not.”

Detention:

Like South Africa, Israel has her version of Robben Island. It is Facility 1391. It is not marked on maps, it has been erased from aerial photographs and recently its numbered signpost was removed. Censors have excised all mention of its location from the Israeli media, with the government saying that secrecy is essential to “prevent harm to the country’s security”. As a newspaper described it, Facility 1391 is “Israel’s Guantanamo”. Outside a few senior Israeli government and security officials no one knows how many inmates there are in Facility 1391. Testimonies from former inmates suggest it is crowded with detainees, many of them Lebanese captured during Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon. What little information is available suggests that interrogation methods using torture are routine. A high-profile detainee, Mustafa Dirani of the now defunct Lebanese Shia militia Amal, has alleged that he was raped by his interrogators.

The Permit System: