South Africa’s anti-black apartheid lasted 46 years. Jewish Israel’s anti-Gentile apartheid is at 72, and counting...
By Nathan Thrall: Last April, Haaretz ran a statement warning the Israeli government against formally annexing its settlements in the Jew occupied West Bank. Opinion polls showed that the public didn’t care much about the issue, but political elites were debating it fiercely. Both proponents and opponents of annexation claimed that the future of Jewish Israel and Zionism was at stake. The statement argued that ‘annexation would mean a fatal blow to the possibility of peace and would be the establishment of an apartheid state.’ It was signed by 56 former members of the Knesset, among them former ministers of the interior, foreign affairs, finance and more than a dozen other departments, as well as former ambassadors, generals in the Jewish Israel Death Force, chairs of political parties, a head of the semi-governmental Jewish Agency for Jewish Israel, a former speaker of the Knesset, and a winner of the Israel Prize.
The signatories included not just members of Jewish Israel's left factions but two dozen from centrist and centre-left parties, and even a former justice minister, Meir Sheetrit, of the right-wing Likud Party.
The following week the two largest parties in
the Knesset – Likud and the centrist Blue and
White, which together commanded a parliamentary
majority – signed an agreement to form a
coalition government that could apply Israeli
sovereignty to parts of the West Bank no sooner
than 1 July, after Israel and the United States
had finalised annexation maps. These maps,
detailed versions of the ones in Donald Trump’s
‘peace plan’, called for Israel to annex 30 per
cent of the West Bank, leaving the Palestinians
a ‘state’ made up of several discontiguous
cantons entirely surrounded by Israeli
territory. The Trump plan also proposed
rescinding the citizenship of around a quarter
of a million Palestinian citizens of Israel by
transferring ten Israeli towns to the
jurisdiction of the future Palestinian state. By
the end of the week, Israel’s Labor Party, the
originator of the settlement enterprise, agreed
to join the new government and vote in favour of
annexation.
Much of the Israeli press misinterpreted the
agreement between Likud and Blue and White.
Reporters treated 1 July not as the earliest day
that annexation could take place but as a
deadline, creating a sense of urgency around the
move. In the days after the coalition agreement
was signed, liberal Zionist groups issued their
battle cries. Their reasons for opposing
annexation were telling. Concern for human
rights was often secondary to the harm
annexation might do to Israel. They warned that
it would damage the perception of Israel as a
democracy. They urged Israelis not to give
impetus to campaigns promoting boycotts or the
reduction of economic and military aid, and
cautioned that annexation would only widen the
divide between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.
And they brandished the spectre most feared by
the Zionist left: that Israel will eventually be
forced to give citizenship to all Palestinians
living under its control – there are nearly five
million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,
all without Israeli citizenship, and roughly
360,000 in annexed East Jerusalem, more than 90
per cent of whom have permanent residency but
not citizenship or the right to vote in national
elections – thereby ending Israel’s existence as
a Jewish state, with all the privileges that
entails for Jews. (In 2018, an Israeli army
official reported that Palestinians outnumbered
Jews in the territory between the River Jordan
and the Mediterranean.)
‘Whether annexing one settlement or all of
them,’ the liberal Zionist group Peace Now
asserted, ‘such a move would constitute the
foundation to an apartheid state. Annexation is
bad for Israel.’ J Street, a Washington-based
lobbying group aligned with the Democrats,
stated: ‘As pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans, we
believe that annexation would severely imperil
Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the
Jewish people, along with the future of
the US-Israel relationship.’
Many of the arguments against annexation
conceded that the territory was already de facto
annexed and would remain in Israel’s possession.
Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition and chair
of the centrist Yesh Atid party, contended that
formal annexation wasn’t necessary because the
largest area in question, the Jordan Valley,
which makes up more than a quarter of the West
Bank and ensures the full Israeli encirclement
of the Palestinian population, ‘is now part of
Israel. It’s not like somebody is threatening to
take it away from us.’ Amos Gilad, until 2017
one of the most senior officials in the Ministry
of Defence, said that Israel’s permanent control
over the Jordan Valley would be better achieved
by increasing Jewish settlement rather than a
‘purely declarative’ annexation: ‘The government
could take measures to ensure that the Jordan
Valley becomes home to tens of thousands of
Israelis, and not just several thousand.’ The
mainstream debate, then, was not whether but how
to entrench Israel’s acquisition of West Bank
territory.
Critics had trouble articulating a persuasive
reason for Israel not to formalise an annexation
that had, in practice, already taken place. A
typically contorted attempt was a report
published by Israel’s leading national security
think tank, INSS, a centre-left institution that
supports a two-state solution. The paper began
by arguing that unilateral annexation was a
terrible mistake. It concluded, however, that
Israel should nevertheless proceed once
annexation had won public support, which would
come once the Palestinians rejected Trump’s
peace plan. The danger of annexation, the INSS argued,
was that it might undermine [Israel’s] founding
vision as a Jewish, democratic, secure and moral
state that seeks peace with its neighbours. It
is therefore recommended that the new government
in Israel call on the Palestinian leadership to
return to the negotiating table, with the Trump
plan included in the terms of reference for
negotiations. If the Palestinians continue to
refuse to discuss the plan, then the government
will be able to receive public support in Israel
for steps toward unilateral separation from the
Palestinians, including gradual annexation
conducted in a way that ensures that Israel’s
political, security, economic and social
interests are met.
Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of staff of
the army and current representative of Meretz,
the most left-leaning Zionist party in Israel,
said he would vote in favour of annexation ‘if
the Israeli government declares that its supreme
goal is to separate from the Palestinians’.
Palestinians were almost entirely absent from
the debate on annexation. The questions of
whether they would get a state, what territory
and powers it would have, whether they would be
granted citizenship, residency or some other
status in the annexed territory, what rights
they would or would not be given and which of
them would be stripped of their Israeli
citizenship were being decided solely by
coalition negotiations between two Zionist
parties. Yet even the fiercest critics of
annexation – those who warned that it would turn
Israel into an apartheid state – described
Israel as a functioning democracy that was
merely at risk of some day ceasing to be one.
According to this logic, as long as Israel
refrains from formalising annexation, it may
indefinitely withhold civil rights from millions
of Palestinians while offering every form of
support to Israelis in the occupied territory:
infrastructure for Israeli cities, towns and
industrial zones in the West Bank; nature
reserves; municipal buildings; police and fire
stations; government schools and play areas;
state medical facilities; cemeteries. As long as
Israel declares that the absorption of the West
Bank is temporary, it will continue to be
considered a democracy. Israel will never become
an apartheid state unless it declares itself to
be one.
The premise that Israel is a democracy,
maintained by Peace Now, Meretz, the editorial
board of Haaretz and other critics of
occupation, rests on the belief that one can
separate the pre-1967 state from the rest of the
territory under its control. A conceptual wall
must be maintained between two regimes: (good)
democratic Israel and its (bad) provisional
occupation. This way of thinking is of a piece
with the general liberal Zionist belief that
it’s legitimate to condemn Israeli settlements –
and even, for some, to boycott their products –
but not to call for reducing support to the
government that planned, established and
maintains them. What seemed most troubling about
annexation for these groups was that it would
undermine their claims that the occupation is
occurring somewhere outside the state and that
it is temporary, a 53-year-long departure from
what liberal Zionist groups like the New Israel
Fund call Israel’s ‘liberal democratic founding
values’.
It is not difficult to make the case that
Israel’s actions in the West Bank amount to
apartheid. Israelis and Palestinians in the same
territory are subject to two different legal
systems. They are tried in different courts, one
military, one civilian, for the same crime
committed on the same street. Jews in the West
Bank, both Israeli citizens and non-citizens who
are eligible as Jews to immigrate, enjoy most of
the same rights and protections as Israelis in
the rest of the country. Palestinians are
subject to military rule and are denied freedom
of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of
movement and even the right not to be detained
indefinitely without trial. The discrimination
is not just national – by Israelis against
Palestinians who lack citizenship – but ethnic,
by Jews against Palestinian subjects and
citizens alike. While Jews in the West Bank,
citizens or not, are tried in Israeli civil
courts, Israeli citizens who are Palestinian can
be sent to military courts. A 2014 report by the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the
largest and oldest human rights group in the
country, noted that ‘since the 1980s, all
Israeli citizens brought to trial before the
military courts were Arab citizens or residents
of Israel ... no judgment was found in which the
request of an Arab citizen to transfer his case
from a military court to a court in Israel was
accepted.’
After the 1967 war, Israel applied military law
to all of the occupied territories it didn’t
formally annex. Israeli Jews who moved to
government-planned settlements in the West Bank
were placed under Israeli civil law, separating
them from the legal regime governing the
Palestinians on whose lands they resided. Israel
couldn’t apply civil law to its citizens in the
West Bank on a territorial basis without further
and egregiously violating the international
legal prohibition on annexation, so the Knesset
amended its laws and regulations to apply to
settlers as individuals, extra-territorially. In
this way Israel extended to Jews in the West
Bank most of the same rights as Israelis in the
rest of the country regarding health insurance,
national insurance, consumer protection, taxes
(income, property and valued-added), higher
education, entry to Israel, population
registration, traffic ordinance and voting,
making settlers the only Israeli citizens, aside
from the small number stationed abroad,
permitted to vote in a place of residence
outside the official territory of the state. On
election days, the Palestinians living alongside
them are put under closure, further restricting
their movement.
The application of Israeli law to settlers as
individuals still left some gaps, particularly
regarding land, building and planning. In order
to close them, the Israeli military issued
ordinances that distinguished the municipal
areas of settlements – local councils and
regional councils – from the rest of the
occupied territory, so that Israel could use one
set of regulations (copied and pasted from
municipal legislation in pre-1967 Israel) to
expand Jewish communities and another to
constrict Palestinian ones. Over the past two
decades, Israel has built tens of thousands of
housing units for Israeli Jews in the West Bank
while rejecting more than 96 per cent of
Palestinian building applications and
demolishing thousands of Palestinian homes. Of
the public land that Israel has designated for
any kind of use, 99.76 per cent went to Jewish
settlements. Palestinians are forbidden from
entering settlement areas except with special
permits, usually given to day labourers.
Similarly, in the so-called Seam Zone – the West
Bank areas that were severed from the rest of
the territory by Israel’s separation barrier –
Palestinians can’t enter without permits, even
to farm their own land, while the same area can
be accessed freely by any tourist or ‘Israeli’,
defined as a citizen, a permanent resident or a
Jew entitled to immigrate to Israel.
The fact that some Israeli laws that apply to
territory in the West Bank were introduced via
military order – in most cases, by replicating
Israeli legislation – has allowed Jewish
organisations that consider themselves
progressive to argue that there are two separate
regimes in the area under Israel’s control: a
military regime in the unannexed West Bank and a
civil regime in annexed East Jerusalem and
pre-1967 Israel. According to this theory, West
Bank settlers and Palestinians are subjects of
the same oppressive military administration,
while Israeli citizens and residents in pre-1967
Israel and annexed East Jerusalem are governed
by a democratic civil regime.
Neither Israeli settlers nor Palestinians
experience life in the West Bank this way. In
fact, the opposite is closer to the truth: it is
not Israeli citizens in the West Bank and those
within the pre-1967 lines who live under
separate regimes, but Israeli settlers and the
Palestinians living alongside them. Israelis
from all over the country drive on major
highways that cut in and out of the West Bank:
no signs indicate that they have left Israel.
New Jewish immigrants can move straight from
London or Los Angeles to a West Bank settlement
just as they would move to Tel Aviv, with the
same financial benefits, language instruction
and low-interest mortgages. Israelis living
inside the pre-1967 lines work in settlement
factories, study at a settlement university
accredited by the Israeli Council of Higher
Education, shop at settlement malls and visit
national parks in the West Bank. The Israeli
government is not separate from its institutions
in the occupied territory. The Knesset has
passed legislation applying specifically to the
West Bank, and amended laws to apply
specifically to Jews and Israeli citizens
residing there. Israeli ministries spend
hundreds of millions of dollars a year on West
Bank settlements and infrastructure. An
executive branch ministerial committee approves
the establishment of West Bank settlements. A
legislative branch subcommittee is devoted to
advancing their infrastructure and development.
The state comptroller supervises government
policy in the West Bank, overseeing everything
from wastewater pollution to road safety. The
attorney general enforces guidelines that direct
the legislature to explain the applicability of
every bill to the settlements. Israel’s High
Court of Justice is the court of final appeal
for all Israeli citizens and Palestinian
subjects in the entire territory under Israel’s
control. Officers of Israel’s national police
force hand out traffic tickets to both
Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank.
Israel’s absorption of the West Bank is a joint
undertaking of every branch of government –
legislative, executive and judicial.
Whereas Israelis travel freely across Israel and
its West Bank settlements, Palestinians within
the occupied territory live under separate
jurisdictions, requiring Israeli permits to
cross from the unannexed parts of the West Bank
to annexed Jerusalem, Gaza or the more than 30
per cent of the West Bank that is off limits to
Palestinians: the Seam Zone, the jurisdictional
areas of settlements, and so-called military
training areas, more than three-quarters of
which, the Israeli NGO Kerem Navot has found,
are not actually used for military training but
for such purposes as preventing Palestinian
development and retaining Israeli control. A
Palestinian in Ramallah ostensibly lives in one
of the 165 Palestinian Authority-governed
enclaves that together make up less than 40 per
cent of the West Bank. But she, too, is subject
to a single Israeli authority, not a separate
West Bank regime. If she is a member of one of
more than four hundred illegal organisations –
the list is constantly expanding, and contains
every major Palestinian political party,
including Fatah – she can be arrested by Israeli
forces in an autonomous Palestinian area, as
happened in 2019 to the politician Khalida
Jarrar, a high-ranking member of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was
taken by Israeli forces from her home near
Ramallah at 3 a.m.. Palestinian powers of
autonomy are so limited that Israel controls all
the roads leading in and out of PA-governed
areas, invades homes within them every day and
night and is permitted to enter even for reasons
that have nothing to do with the security of
Israeli citizens, such as arresting car thieves.
Among those who make the arrests are members of
Yamas and Yamam, two units of Israel’s national
police.
The arrested Ramallah resident might be taken
from her home to the Russian Compound in West
Jerusalem and interrogated by members of the
Israel Security Agency, which is headquartered
in Tel Aviv but operates throughout the areas
under Israel’s control. She could be held for
six months without trial or charge, and her
detention repeatedly extended, for another six
months at a time, in perpetuity. If she is
finally offered a trial, she might cross from
the supposedly separate regime in West Jerusalem
to the Ofer military court near Ramallah.
Because almost everyone who appears
before Israeli military courts is convicted, she
would almost certainly go to prison. That prison
would be one of 29 run by the Israel Prison
Service, which operates across all
Israeli-controlled territories. Without permits
to visit prisons within the pre-1967 lines, her
family would not be able to visit her. She might
try to appeal against her conviction at the
Israeli High Court but the odds are not good:
the court has approved nearly every
internationally prohibited policy Israel has
carried out in the occupied territory, including
deportations, assassinations, imprisonment
without trial, demolitions, land confiscation,
pillage of natural resources and collective
punishments such as mass curfews, school
closures and withholding electricity for an
entire region. For her appeal, she might hire an
Israeli human rights lawyer, who would argue her
case against an attorney from the Ministry of
Justice before a panel of High Court justices,
two of whom live in the West Bank. According to
the ‘separate regimes’ analysis, she and the two
Israeli justices are not so different from one
another. They are all subjects of a separate
West Bank military regime.
The insistence on separate regimes derives from
political rather than legal considerations. By
asserting the existence of two regimes, liberal
Zionist groups like J Street can tell donors,
legislators and university students that they
are ‘pro-Israel’, while criticising an
occupation that allegedly exists somewhere
beyond the state. But the attempt to separate
Israel from the criticisms, and consequences, of
its policies in the West Bank also leads to
absurd and false assertions, such as J Street’s
recent claim that ‘Israeli settlers’ are
‘demolishing [Palestinian] homes’. In fact, it
is not ‘the settlers’ – one in ten Israeli Jews
– but the government of Israel, which J Street
supports, that destroys Palestinian homes in the
West Bank. The government does so at the behest
of elected ministers and legislators.
The fiction of separate regimes allows liberal
Zionists to promote a politically correct
two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines,
while avoiding the more equitable remedy
demanded by the recognition that the Israeli
state extends to all the land under its control.
Such a remedy would require not only an end to
occupation but also to ethnic discrimination
throughout the territory. The Zionist left
doesn’t call for Jewish and Palestinian citizens
of Israel to have full equality within pre-1967
Israel. Instead, leading liberal Zionist
organisations seek to ensure Israel remains a
Jewish-majority state that can continue to
provide to its Jewish citizens land and
immigration rights that are denied to citizens
from the indigenous Palestinian minority. The
only way for the Zionist left to oppose ethnic
domination in the West Bank while preserving
ethnic privilege in pre-1967 Israel is to assert
that there is an ‘apartheid regime’ in the West
Bank separate from the Israeli state. For
pre-1967 Israel to be part of an apartheid state
would therefore require formal annexation of the
West Bank, ‘amalgamating’ the two regimes. But
this is a misunderstanding of the crime of
apartheid as described in international law.
Like torture, apartheid does not need to be
applied uniformly or everywhere in a country to
be criminal: in international law there is no
such thing as an ‘apartheid regime’, just as
there is no such thing as a ‘torture regime’.
The word ‘regime’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the
original 1973 International Convention on the
Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid. And, although the 1998 Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court does use the
word ‘regime’ in its definition (it was added to
satisfy the US delegation, which was concerned
about the possible prosecution of US citizens
belonging to white supremacist groups), it was
clearly not inserted to allow apartheid to be
restricted to regions or units of a state.
Yet the notion that only formal annexation can
turn Israel into an apartheid state has become
intrinsic to left-wing Zionist ideology. In June
last year, more than five hundred scholars of
Jewish studies, many of them prominent
supporters of Israel, such as the American
Jewish philosopher Michael Walzer, signed a
letter stating that ‘annexation of Palestinian
territories will cement into place an
anti-democratic system of separate and unequal
law and systemic discrimination against the
Palestinian population. Such discrimination on
the basis of racial, ethnic, religious or
national background is defined as “conditions of
apartheid” and a “crime against humanity”.’
The same month, Zulat, a new think tank headed
by the former chair of the liberal Zionist
Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On, published a report
entitled ‘Whitewashing Apartheid’. In a section
on the consequences of de jure annexation it
performed a whitewash of its own, arguing that
apartheid in the West Bank is currently
practised not by Israel but by a separate
regime: ‘Even if we annex only one square metre,
the state of Israel will be relinquishing its
democratic pretensions and abandoning its
53-year declared intention to end the conflict,
reach an agreed settlement with the Palestinians
and cease ruling over them.’ Even annexation,
however, ‘does not necessarily make Israel an
apartheid state but rather preserves it as a
state operating a regime with apartheid
characteristics in the occupied territories’. By
this standard, apartheid South Africa was a
democracy – like all democracies, an imperfect
one – operating a regime with apartheid
characteristics in the townships and Bantustans.
Those Bantustans, incidentally, had their own
flags, anthems, civil servants, parliaments,
elections and a limited degree of autonomy not
unlike that of the Palestinian Authority.
Perhaps no organisation has promoted the idea of
separate regimes more forcefully than Yesh Din,
a human rights organisation that has conducted
important legal advocacy on behalf of
Palestinians subjected to settler violence,
unlawful killing and destruction of property by
Israeli security forces, Israeli land
confiscation and Israeli restrictions on access
to farmland. Last year, Yesh Din became the
first Israeli organisation to publish a
significant report accusing government officials
of apartheid. At the same time, it is one of the
staunchest defenders of the separate regimes
theory. Yesh Din’s shifting, inconsistent
answers to the question of at which point Israel
would cease to be a democracy have been
emblematic of the broader weaknesses in the
separate regimes argument. The night Likud
signed its coalition agreement with Blue and
White, Yesh Din published a position paper on
the potential impact of annexation. ‘The coming
annexation,’ it concluded,
will pull the rug from under the argument,
currently prevalent in many circles, that while
apartheid, or at least an apartheid-like regime,
is currently practised in the West Bank, the
sovereign state of Israel is a democracy.
Applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank
would be tantamount to a declaration that there
is one regime, rather than separate
administrations. Annexation without full
citizenship and equal rights for Palestinian
residents of the annexed area would produce a
veritable apartheid regime Israel would have
difficulty denying. Such a regime would
perpetuate human rights abuses against
Palestinians, leaving them forever deprived of
liberty and equality.
Israel could by this reasoning annex only the
Jewish-inhabited areas of the West Bank,
maintain its occupation of millions of
Palestinians in the adjacent non-annexed areas,
and remain democratic. Perhaps aware of the
deficiencies of this argument, Yesh Din later
amended the paper. The new version, issued
without explanation or correction, stated that
after annexation Israel would be an apartheid
state unless it gave full and equal rights to
Palestinians, not in ‘the annexed area’, as the
original version had it, but in ‘the entire West
Bank’.
This formulation still allows Israel to remain a
democracy, at least in the eyes of Yesh Din and
like-minded groups, even as it holds two million
Palestinians in Gaza, the largest of its ethnic
enclaves, without clean drinking water,
functioning sewage, regular electricity or the
right to enter and leave freely. Though Israel
claims that it ended its occupation of Gaza in
2005, it still controls exports, imports, sea
and airspace, and even the population registry,
giving a unique ID number to all Palestinians in
the territory, without which they may not exit,
even across the border with Egypt. Conspicuously
absent, too, from Yesh Din’s paper was any
suggestion that Israel must grant full and equal
rights to Palestinians in the areas formally
annexed in 1967: East Jerusalem and 28
surrounding West Bank villages. Palestinian
residents of these areas still do not have ‘full
citizenship and equal rights’. Nor was any
attempt made to explain why a partial West Bank
annexation in 2020 would make Israel an
apartheid state but the annexations of 1967 had
not already done so.
In July, Yesh Din published a fifty-page legal
opinion, written by the human rights lawyer
Michael Sfard, which found Israeli officials
guilty of apartheid, defined by the 1973
convention as ‘inhuman acts committed for the
purpose of establishing and maintaining
domination by one racial group of persons over
any other racial group of persons and
systematically oppressing them’. Racial groups
are recognised in international criminal law as
social rather than biological: in the
International Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination, invoked in
the preamble of the 1973 Apartheid Convention,
‘racial discrimination’ is defined as ‘any
distinction, exclusion, restriction or
preference based on race, colour, descent or
national or ethnic origin’. Decades later, the
International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and
for the former Yugoslavia held that the
definition of a persecuted group was not a
matter of heredity but stigmatisation and the
subjective perceptions of the persecutors.
International criminal law applies to
individuals, not states, so it is not the
Israeli government but its officials who could
be prosecuted for committing apartheid. The
human rights organisations B’Tselem and Adalah
are the only major groups in Israel that have
called on the ICC to launch an investigation
into war crimes committed by Israeli officials.
When B’Tselem’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad,
spoke against the settlements at the UN Security
Council in 2016, he was condemned by centrist
and centre-left Israeli lawmakers. The coalition
chairman from Likud threatened to strip him of
his citizenship and a Labor Party activist filed
a police complaint alleging he had committed
treason.
Yesh Din’s legal opinion focused solely on
whether apartheid is being committed, ‘not who
is committing it’, and limited its scope to the
unannexed areas of the West Bank (Yesh Din’s
primary area of expertise), leaving out not only
Gaza and Israel within its pre-1967 lines but
also the lands annexed in 1967. This wasn’t
because it was invalid to examine the
subjugation of Palestinians in the entire
territory under Israel’s control, Sfard claimed,
but because it was still possible, despite
‘creeping legal annexation’, to look at the West
Bank as governed by a separate ‘regime’ or at
least a ‘subsidiary’ regime of Israel. One
‘difficulty’ in treating the West Bank as a
separate regime, he acknowledged, is that part
of the West Bank has already been formally
annexed. The annexed area of East Jerusalem and
its surrounding villages
shares many commonalities with the West Bank:
its Palestinian residents are not Israeli
citizens, and as such, do not vote and have no
political representation. Additionally, Israel
has implemented a number of policies in East
Jerusalem that are analogous, and sometimes
identical, to those it employs in the West Bank:
massive colonisation through Israel-focused
development, incentivising tens of thousands of
Israeli citizens to settle in the area, mass
expropriation and dispossession of Palestinian
land and property, prevention of Palestinian
development and diversion of resources to
benefit Israelis who move to the city. All of
these, and, chiefly, the unlawful annexation
that must not be recognised, justify treating
East Jerusalem and the West Bank as a single
unit.
Yet Yesh Din’s legal opinion didn’t do so. Nor
did it examine discriminatory policies within
Israel, where tens of thousands of Palestinian
citizens live in villages that Israel refuses to
recognise or connect to water and electricity,
and where hundreds of Jewish-only towns have
admission committees that are permitted by law
to reject Palestinians on the pretext of ‘social
suitability’, thereby excluding applicants who
haven’t served in the Israeli army, aren’t
Zionist or don’t plan to send their children to
Hebrew-language schools. Israel has seized more
than three-quarters of the land of its
Palestinian citizens. This expropriation is a
continuous project, particularly in the Negev
and Galilee, but most of it took place, as in
the West Bank today, while Palestinians were
under military rule. In the seven decades of
Israel’s existence, there have been only six
months, in 1966-67, when it did not place
members of one ethnic group under military
government while it confiscated their land. As
the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has
pointed out, ‘these six months, less than one
per cent of Israel’s existence, are the point of
reference for the whole discussion of Israel as
a “Jewish democratic state”.’ And yet ‘the
exception ... becomes the rule, while the rule –
the occupation – is presented as the exception.’
Apartheid couldn’t have been sustained for
decades without many outside funders, protectors
and co-conspirators. Foremost among them is
the US, which has granted more than $110 billion
to the occupying military force and spent
hundreds of millions on upgrading the
infrastructure of apartheid, refurbishing
checkpoints and paving West Bank roads.
The EU is the chief financier of the Palestinian
autonomy cantons and a leading importer of
settlement products. Together the US and its
European allies have tirelessly attempted to
stop the UN Security Council and the
International Criminal Court from holding Israel
to account.
Even those who present themselves as champions
of Palestinian freedom and human rights lend
support to the status quo. The EU foreign policy
chief, Josep Borrell, said of the Trump plan
that ‘we recognise [its] merit’ and ‘it is maybe
a starting point for negotiations.’ The office
of the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle
East Peace Process regularly neglects the UN’s
core mandates of protecting human rights and
upholding international law, preferring to be a
bit player in the US-led peace process. In
October, after Israel advanced plans for nearly
five thousand new houses in West Bank
settlements, the outgoing UN envoy, Nickolay
Mladenov, issued a typically bland statement,
noting that most of the houses were in ‘outlying
locations deep inside the occupied West Bank’
and that the ‘significant number and location of
advancements is of great concern’ because they
‘undermine the prospect of achieving a viable
two-state solution’. Is it the role of
the UN envoy to distinguish between illegal
settlements deep in the West Bank and illegal
settlements closer to the pre-1967 lines? With
the aid of the ‘peacemakers’, the definition of
what constitutes ‘outlying’ pushes steadily
eastward. The UN, like the US, Europe and
liberal Zionist groups, has subordinated
international law and human rights to the
sanctification of a two-state solution, which it
treats not as one possible means of achieving
what should be the primary goal – ending the
oppression of millions of people on the basis of
their ethnicity – but as the goal itself.
Diplomats and well-meaning anti-occupation
groups greet every new act of Israeli expansion
with dire warnings that it will be a ‘fatal
blow’ to the two-state solution, that ‘the
window is closing’ for Palestinian statehood and
that now, on the eve of this latest takeover, it
is ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the prospect
of peace. Countless alarms of this kind have
been rung during the past two decades. Each was
supposed to convince Israel, the US, Europe and
the rest of the world of the need to stop or at
least slow Israel’s de facto annexation. But
they have had the opposite effect: demonstrating
that it will always be five minutes to midnight.
European and American policymakers, together
with the liberal Zionist groups that lobby them,
can thus maintain that the two-state solution
isn’t dead but merely embattled – and,
therefore, permanently ‘alive’. In the meantime,
millions of Palestinians continue to be deprived
of basic civil rights and subjected to military
rule. With the exception of those six months in
1966-67, this has been the reality for the
majority of Palestinians living under Israeli
control for the entire history of the state.
South Africa’s apartheid lasted 46 years.
Israel’s is at 72, and counting.
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