User talk:Nagle/Backups/Israeli apartheid

Allegations of Israeli apartheid refer to statements which compare the policies of Israel toward West Bank Palestinians, and to a lesser extent, its own Arab citizens, to the practices of the apartheid-era South African Government. Opponents of this allegation state that the term is without merit, and is misused to isolate and condemn Israel.

Introduction to the controversy
Allegations that Israeli policies approximate those of apartheid-era South Africa are highly disputed. Its proponents use it to compare Israel's policy with respect to the Palestinians on the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, its own Arab citizens to apartheid-era South Africa. According to its opponents, it is both without merit, and misused to isolate and condemn Israel.

The comparison has also been made by some within Israeli politics and academia to warn of adverse scenarios that would result from current trends. Critics of the analogy argue that it is a factually inaccurate pejorative political epithet.

The expression has been used by diverse groups and individuals, such as John Dugard, a professor of international law of South African-origin serving as the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations in a disputed report   on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Desmond Tutu,  Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli writer and political scientist, left-wing members members of the Knesset, and by Palestinian-rights activists.

The term has also been used by far right elements, including white supremacist David Duke, Holocaust denier Paul Grubach of the Institute for Historical Review, and anti-Semitic groups such as Jew Watch.

Origins
In 1961, the prime minister of South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd, widely considered the architect of South Africa's apartheid policies, stated "Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state".

Following the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six Day War war, there was an intense debate in Israel and elsewhere about the right way to deal with the Palestinian Arab population within the the territories captured by Israel from Jordan and Egypt, particularly on the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

At the time, some brought up the example of the establishment of self-ruling bantustans of South Africa, where a white-dominated government had embarked on a process of creating homelands for its black citizens. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defence Minister, publicly called for the creation of "a sort of Arab 'Bantustan'" in the West Bank structured along similar lines to the nominally independent "homelands" established in South Africa.

Others saw South African policy as an unmitigated evil to avoid, rather than emulate. The senior British Conservative politician Ian Gilmour was an early proponent of this school of thought. In June 1969 he wrote a lengthy article in The Times of London arguing that an apartheid-style system was the "logical culmination" of "Zionist exclusiveness."

Similar views have been expressed by many others since then, often in connection with the much-disputed and controversial assertion that Zionism is an inherently racist doctrine. The argument was adopted by the Soviet Union, Arab countries and a number of non-aligned nations, against the opposition of Israel and most Western countries. In December 1971, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yakov Malik, accused Israel of promulgating a "racist policy of apartheid against Palestinians.

In 1987, Uri Davis, an Israeli-born academic and Jewish member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, wrote a book Israel: An Apartheid State, which alleged a comparison of Israel and South Africa.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu supported this analogy when, in 2002, he wrote: "Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through", and stating that a letter signed by Ronnie Kasrils, Max Ozinsky, and "several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans" had drawn "an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies."

Occupied territories
Proponents of the term argue that, while Israel grants rights to its Arab citizens, its policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are (or were, in case of Gaza) analogous to the Apartheid policies of South Africa towards blacks. They reject Israel's claims to self-defense and claim that Israel has created roads and checkpoints in the occupied territories to isolate Palestinian communities, a practice they say is equivocal to Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans; that the government of Israel has termed its policy of disengagement Hafrada, which literally means "separation" ; and that the Israeli West Bank barrier is referred to by detractors as the Apartheid Wall for its alleged impact on Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinians living in the non-annexed portions of the West Bank (ie East Jerusalem) do not have Israeli citizenship or voting rights in Israel, but they are under Israeli occupation and subject to the policies of the Israeli government and its military.

John Dugard, a South African professor of international law and an ad hoc Judge on the International Court of Justice, serving as the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories described the situation in the West Bank as "an apartheid regime ... worse than the one that existed in South Africa." . Dugard has since become an outspoken critic of Israel.

According to Leila Farsakh writing in Le Monde diplomatique, after 1977, "(t)he military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories: they continued to be governed by Israeli laws. The government also enacted different military laws and decrees to regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian inhabitants. These strangled the Palestinian economy and increased its dependence and integration into Israel." Fasakh adds that "Israel has constructed more than 145 settlements by 1993 and moved in 196,000 settlers; half lived in 10 settlements around East Jerusalem. The settlements’ exponential growth and scattered distribution over the occupied areas began the structural-territorial fragmentation of the WBGS (West Bank and Gaza Strip); they were intended to challenge the Palestinian demographic in the WBGS. Many view these Israeli policies of territorial integration and societal separation as apartheid, even if they were never given such a name."

Israeli West Bank barrier
The Israeli West Bank barrier is sometimes called the "apartheid wall".

Some argue that it promotes the crime of apartheid by isolating Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and by its consolidating the annexation of Palestinian land by Israeli settlements. The International Solidarity Movement describes the barrier as part of a "long-term policy of occupation, discrimination and expulsion," which effectively constitutes a feature of "Israeli apartheid". These concerns have been echoed by Israeli left wing groups such as Gush Shalom and more recently by the Israeli State Prosecution itself (referring only to the part built beyond the 1949 Armistice lines.)

Some reject both the "apartheid" and "wall" designations, mainly because they disagree with the implicit analogy with South Africa, but also because over 88% of barrier is currently fenced while only around 11.5% actually walled. Opponents of the term argue it is not appropriate in the context of Israel, as West Bank Palestinians were never citizens of Israel, and Jews and Palestinians are not racially distinct. Opponents of the term claim that the barrier is not intended to separate Jews from Arabs, as over 1 million Arabs on the Israeli side of the barrier are full citizens of Israel, and constitute 15% of Israel's population . While apartheid involved the forced removal of about 1.5 million South Africans to Bantustans, the Israeli foreign ministry claims that the West Bank barrier will cause no transfer of population and that none of the estimated 10,000 Palestinians (0.5%) who will be left on the Israeli side of the barrier (based on the February, 2005 route) will be forced to migrate. Moreover, opponents argue, the Bantustans were created in order to force legal borders and eliminate the rights of the majority South African black population. Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, claimed in 2004 that the barrier is not a border but a temporary defensive measure designed to protect Israeli civilians from terrorist infiltration and attack, and can be dismantled if appropriate. Opponents of the term also point out that the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the barrier is indeed defensive and accepted the Israeli claim that the route is based on security considerations Accordingly, they argue that if this separation barrier is an expression of apartheid, then any number of similar defensive barriers around the world must also meet that definition.

Land policy inside the Green Line
Proponents also allege that 93% of the land inside the Green Line is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israeli Lands Authority (ILA). The actual figures are 79.5% of the land is owned by the government and 14% is privately owned by the JNF, Thus, the ILA administers 93.5% of the land in Israel. ILA lands cannot be sold- they can only be leased.

As part of its land development efforts, the Israeli government utilizes the ILA and the JNF to establish towns in Israel. The JNF's bylaws prohibited the sale or leasing of land to non-Jews. It appoints half the directors of the Israeli Lands Authority. In March 2000, Israel's High Court ruled in Qaadan v. Katzir that the government's use of the JNF to develop public land was discriminatory due to the agency's prohibition against leasing to non-Jews. According to Dr. Alexandre Kedar of the Haifa University Law School "Until the Supreme Court Qaadan v. Katzir decision, Arabs could not acquire land in any of the hundreds of settlements of this kind existing in Israel..

Nevertheless, Arab could and did acquire access to lands which belonged to the ILA in some cases: "Upper Nazareth, a relatively new community (founded in 1957), is built on the slopes above the ancient city of Nazareth, has always had a Jewish majority, and was built entirely on “state land.” Today, it has a population (look for Nazerat Illit in the following link) that is more than 20% non- Jewish, at least half of whom are Israeli Arabs, who, like their Israeli Jewish neighbors, lease their land from the Israel Land Administration (ILA). "The availability of state-owned land to Israeli Arabs has occurred in practice. For example, about half of the land farmed by Israeli-Arabs is leased from the ILA.

Although there are formal restrictions on the lease of JNF land, which is privately owned by the JNF and comprises just 14% of the land total, "in practice JNF land has been leased to Arab citizens of Israel, both for short-term and long-term use. To cite one example of the former, JNF-owned land in the Besor Valley (Wadi Shallaleh) near Kibbutz Re'em has been leased on a yearly basis to Bedouins for use as pasture."

Employment
Proponents of the apartheid analogy also argue that while 18% of the population within Israel's pre-1967 borders is Arab "only 3.7 percent of Israel's federal employees are Arabs; Arabs hold only 50 out of 5,000 university faculty positions; and of the country's 61 poorest towns, 48 are Arab."

Identity cards
Some Israeli identity cards indicate "nationality". As of 2005, the nationality is not listed; a line of eight asterisks appears instead. In the past, the nationality of Jewish Israelis was shown as "Jewish", rather than "Israeli". Currently, the only way to determine whether an Identity card belongs to a Jew is to check whether the Hebrew date of birth appears in addition to the civil date.

Carrying an identity card is required of all residents over 16 within Israel proper. The West Bank and Gaza use different documents.

Usage in the press
In a controversial Guardian special report, Chris McGreal, the newspaper's Middle East Correspondent, compared Israel with South Africa and alleged numerous similarities. This article has been heavily criticized by pro-Israel organizations.

External response
The term "apartheid" has been used by groups protesting the Israeli government, particularly student groups in Britain, the United States and Canada, where "Israeli apartheid week" is held on many campuses. It has been widely used by Palestinian rights advocates, anti-Zionists, and by some on the Israeli Jewish left.

The apartheid analogy was used in a 1984 Syrian letter to the UN Security Council, which stated: "... Zionist Israeli institutional terrorism in no way differs from the terrorism pursued by the apartheid regime against millions of Africans in South Africa and Namibia ..., just as it in no way differs in essense and nature from the Nazi terrorism which shed European blood and visited ruin and destruction upon the peoples of Europe."

By contrast, Dr. Jean-Christophe Rufin, president of Action Against Hunger and former vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières, recommended in a 2004 report about recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in France commissioned by the French government that the allegation that Israel practises apartheid be criminalized in France on the grounds that it is a "perverse and defamatory use of the charge of racism against those very people who were victims of racism to an unparalleled degree" and has "major consequences which can, by contagion, put in danger the lives of our Jewish citizens". (See the criticism section below.)

Apartheid as a spectre
A number of voices, both within Israel and internationally, warn that Israel could become an "apartheid state" if the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza were to continue or if certain government policies were implemented. Such arguments are raised both by those advocating complete Israeli disengagement from the West Bank and Gaza and by those who advocate a binational solution.

Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli political scientist and the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem warns that Israel is moving towards the model of apartheid South Africa through the creation of "Bantustan" like conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip

An academic paper by Professor Oren Yiftachel of the Ben Gurion University of the Desert warns that Israel unilateral disengagement plan will result in "creeping apartheid" both in the West Bank and Gaza as well as within Israel itself. .

The analogy has also been used as a warning of what Israel may become if a two state solution is not realised. This allusion has been used in reference to the debate on Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza and West Bank. The Economist, in an article on the debate over withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, asserted that "Keeping the occupied land will force on Israel the impossible choice of being either an apartheid state, or a binational one with Jews as a minority."

In January 2004, Ahmed Qureia, then the Palestinian Prime Minister, said that Sharon's unilateralism could prompt an end to the Palestinian efforts towards a two-state solution: "This is an apartheid solution to put the Palestinians in cantons. Who can accept this? We will go for a one-state solution... There's no other solution. We will not hesitate to defend the right of our people when we feel the very serious intention [of Israel] to destroy these rights.'"   Colin Powell, then U.S. Secretary of State, when asked about Qureia's threat of a one-state solution responded "No. We're committed to a two-state solution. I believe that's the only solution that will work: a state for the Palestinian people called Palestine and a Jewish state, state of Israel.  [...]  I don't believe that we can accept a situation that results in anything that one might characterize as apartheid or Bantuism." Ehud Olmert, then Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, later commented in April 2004 that, "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."

Several left wing Members of the Knesset (MKs) have drawn an analogy between Israeli policies and apartheid, such as Zehava Gal-On of the Meretz party who said of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling upholding the country's citizenship law: "The Supreme Court could have taken a braver decision and not relegated us to the level of an apartheid state."

Shulamit Aloni, former Education minister and a former leader of Meretz, has said "if we are not an apartheid state, we are getting much, much closer to it." This comment was in response to a proposal by the then-government of Ariel Sharon to bar Arabs from buying homes in "Jewish townships" within Israel proper. The proposed bill was "narrowly defeated" in the Knesset. At the time, Tommy Lapid, leader of the liberal Shinui party, said he opposed the bill because it "smells of apartheid".

Separation program
In response to the Intifada, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel began in 2002 to implement a "separation program" designed to physically separate Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank. Some critics of Israeli policy allege that this program is an implementation of "apartheid". The program includes fences and walls between Israeli and Palestinian areas, limitations on travel by Palestinians within the West Bank, and Israeli-only roads.

Israel describes the features of the "separation program" not as methods of enforcing apartheid rule of Israel over the Palestinians, but rather to approach a two-state solution unilaterally. Dismantling Israeli settlements and withdrawing the army from the Gaza Strip (and most of the West Bank if the proposed (2006) realignment plan of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert takes place), will allow the Palestinians self determination in the areas "separated" from Israel, and thus be a major step towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. The "separation barrier" can be seen as one approach to such a solution. Other features of the "separation program", such as limitations on travel by Palestinians within the West Bank, may disappear if the realignment plan is successful and Israel withdraws from most of the West Bank, and thus may be a temporary security measure.

Arguments against legitimacy of the term
Some critics of the term argue that it is inaccurate, anti-Semitic, dangerous, and used as a rhetorical device with no substantive merit.

David Matas, senior counsel to B'nai Brith Canada, argues that the starting point for anti-Zionists is the "vocabulary of condemnation", rather than specific criticism of the practises of Israel. He writes that "any unsavoury verbal weapon that comes to hand is used to club Israel and its supporters. The reality of what happens in Israel is ignored. What matters is the condemnation itself. For anti-Zionists, the more repugnant the accusation made against Israel the better."

Because apartheid is universally condemned, and a global coalition helped to bring down the South African apartheid regime, anti-Zionists "dream of constructing a similar global anti-Zionism effort", writes Matas. "The simplest and most direct way for them to do so is to label Israel as an apartheid state. The fact that there is no resemblance whatsoever between true apartheid and the State of Israel has not stopped anti-Zionists for a moment."

In November, 2002, Lee Bollinger, in his capacity as President of Columbia University, said in a statement about a divestment petition at the university that the analogy of Israel to South Africa at the time of apartheid, "is both grotesque and offensive".

In 2004, Dr. Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice-president of Doctors without Borders and president of Action Against Hunger, recommended in a report about anti-Semitism commissioned by French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin that the charge of apartheid and racism against Israel be criminalized in France. He wrote that a "subtle" form of anti-Semitism exists in "radical anti-Zionism", in which criticism of Jews and Israel is used as a pretext to "legitimize the armed Palestinian conflict".

He wrote: "[T]here is no question of penalising political opinions that are critical, for example, of any government and are perfectly legitimate. What should be penalised in the perverse and defamatory use of the charge of racism against those very people who were victims of racism to an unparalleled degree. The accusations of racism, of apartheid, of Nazism carry extremely grave moral implications. These accusations have, in the situation in which we find ourselves today, major consequences which can, by contagion, put in danger the lives of our Jewish citizens. It is why we invite reflection on the advisability and applicability of a law ... which would permit the punishment of those who make without foundation against groups, institutions or states accusations of racism and utilise for these accusations unjustified comparisons with apartheid or Nazism."

The conclusions of the report were welcomed by the anti-discrimination group, SOS-Racism, which called it "a good analysis" of a "new breed of anti-Israel, anti-Semitism". Norman G. Finkelstein, by contrast, described the recommendations as "truly terrifying", and as reflecting "a totalitarian cast of mind" with an "attendant stigmatizing of dissent as a disease that must be wiped out by the state".

The following arguments are have made against the term and the comparison:


 * Israeli law does not differentiate between Israeli citizens based on ethnicity. Israeli Arabs have the same rights as all other Israelis, whether they are Jews, Christians, Druze, etc. These rights include suffrage, political representation and recourse to the courts. Israeli Arabs are represented in the Knesset (Israel's legislature) and participate fully in Israeli political, cultural, and educational life. In apartheid South Africa, "Blacks" and "Coloreds" could not vote and had no representation in the South African parliament.
 * The features of legal petty apartheid do not exist in Israel. Jews and Arabs use the same hospitals, Jewish and Arab babies are born in the same delivery room, Jews and Arabs eat in the same restaurants, and Jews and Arabs travel in the same buses, trains and taxis without being segregated.
 * The director the "Program on Conflict Management" at Bar-Ilan University, and editor of NGO Monitor, argued in a Jerusalem Post Op-Ed piece:
 * The analogy "demean(s) Black victims of the real apartheid regime in South Africa."
 * Black labor was exploited in slavery-like conditions under apartheid; Palestinians are given the same rights and privileges as all other non-citizen foreign workers in Israel.
 * Zionism is not a manifestation of European colonialism.


 * Opponents of the term argue that the security barrier is a reasonable and necessary security precaution to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian terroristic violence. They reagard as a major causal factor in reducing incidents of terrorism by 90% from 2002 to 2005.
 * Unlike South Africa, where Apartheid prevented Black majority rule, in Israel (including the occupied territories) there is currently a Jewish majority.
 * Dr. Moshe Machover, professor of philosophy in London and co-founder of Matzpen, argues against the use of the term on the basis that the situation in Israel is worse than apartheid. Machover points out some significant differences between the policy of the Israeli government and the apartheid model. According to Machover, drawing a close analogy between Israel and South Africa is both a theoretical and political mistake.
 * In 2003, South Africa's minister for home affairs Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi said that "The Israeli regime is not apartheid. It is a unique case of democracy".
 * According to Fred Taub, the President of Boycott Watch, "The assertion ... that Israel is practicing apartheid is not only false, but may be considered libelous. ... The fact is that it is the Arabs who are discriminating against non-Muslims, especially Jews."

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