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MAIL AND GUARDIAN ARTICLE: 15 MARCH 2004
APARTHEID WALL NO WAY TO PEACE
By Ronnie Kasrils & Max Ozinsky
In order to justify the Wall of Shame that it is building on what remain of Palestinian land, the Israeli government and publicists say it is trying to stop terrorism.
They focus on the huge impact terrorism has had on Israelis. They never reflect on the impact of triple the number of Israeli killings of Palestinians – who are a smaller nation than the Israelis and have been driven into one-fifth of the space. Once the Wall has been completed that space will be 12% of historic Palestine.
It is argued that “If Palestinian terror would stop, there would be no need for the fence”. If the Israeli Government had granted Palestine independence and withdrawn from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there would be no Intifada. It is not true that Arafat broke-off negotiations after Barak’s so-called “generous offer” was spurned. The Taba talks followed Camp David and there was progress with Palestinian negotiators winning a better deal from the Israelis. That deal was scuppered because Likud was soon voted into power and its leaders were determined to destroy Rabin’s Oslo legacy, just as they had helped destroy him. Whilst Sharon’s provocative appearance at the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem was the catalyst for the second Intifada, the root cause of the problem has always been the violation of Palestinian national and human rights and annexation of land. That is what motivates resistance and as we in South Africa experienced, repression of a just cause only fuels more intensive struggle.
As to the real motives of the Sharon Government it needs to be noted that plans for an apartheid-style, de facto annexation of around 45% of what remains of the West Bank, long predate the current Palestinian uprising for independence. Ariel Sharon consistently urged such annexation, to be followed by confiscations for settler colonization, from the mid-1970s.
This Apartheid Wall systematically severs Palestinian fields from farmers, destroys precious olive and citrus groves, isolates schools, hospitals, villages and towns, and cruelly separates families and communities. It interlocks with other policies that sever Palestinian villages from their water rights. It replicates in the West Bank the 1950s polices inside Israel of “closed areas” that starved out Muslims and Christians from farming their small-holdings. The other jaw of this legal trap sprang shut when Israeli “military governors” decreed the farms “abandoned property” that needed to be cultivated by Jewish settlers - sometimes in front of the eyes of their dispossessed owners – now cynically called “Present Absentees”.
Our South African delegation saw with our own eyes how the Apartheid Wall suddenly departs from a straight line in order to demolish a Palestinian family-owned hotel, and to ensure prime hillside real estate overlooking Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock is available for Israeli property developers. This type of wanton destruction and land grab is taking place along hundreds of kilometers of wall and fence.
If this history, now repeated in front of our eyes in the West Bank, is not condemned by religious ethics, are those ethics not being degraded? Yet we are told that criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-semitism.
This would consign half the population of Israel, and thousands of Jews around the world into such a category. It is as absurd as saying that Americans who opposed the invasion of Iraq are anti-American and so on. And where and when have we heard that kind of accusation demanding blind loyalty before?
One of the most frequent criticisms of mid-twentieth century communists was that they justified whatever were the current policies of the Soviet government. Their twenty-first century Zionist critics fall into the same trap – knee-jerk defences of anything Israeli governments do – because it was done by an Israeli Government.
Last December the senior researcher of the Board of Deputies, and others, published newspaper articles and letters arguing for a two-state solution, and against a one-state solution, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they are now energetically justifying an Apartheid Wall, which “creates facts on the ground” for the one state “solution.” A solution that imprisons the Palestinians behind ghetto walls and concentration camp fencing-in bantustan-style poverty and pain.
One political consequence of this is that Hamas and other rivals of the PLO/Palestine Authority ridicule it as “sell-outs” and “collaborators” for formally and publicly recognizing the State of Israel at Oslo in 1993 and allowing themselves to be deceived by various Israeli governments. They are derided for not getting an independent State of Palestine in exchange. What continued was the seizure of lands and seizure of water instead.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad gained support because the PLO could not win independence. This has led to renewed terrorism and the suicide bombing strategy. Extremists will only be marginalized when the pro-peace party, the PLO, can win the overdue independent State of Palestine, which is the maturation of the Oslo Accord. Until then hatred will remain.
South Africa witnessed how Afrikaner Nationalism distorted, some would say hi-jacked, Calvinism into legitimising a “Christelike-Nasionale” apartheid regime. The longer Israeli governments and settler organizations persist in manipulating Judaism to legitimate further colonialism and land confiscations, the more they damage, deform and distort the moral fabric of Israel and Judaism itself for a political and colonial project.
The Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza Strip replicates in mirror-image the Tsarist Pale of Settlements, where Jews were confined under stringent control. This time, it is Muslims and Christians who must cringe, permits and passes in hand, at all check-points. It is Palestinians who are told that troops “cannot protect them” when they are stoned by settler militant mobs just as Jews saw Czarist police stand aside during the pogroms.
We urge the Jewish community to say not in our name. We urge all South Africans to call for this Apartheid Wall to be torn down, an end to the military occupation and resumption of negotiations. A meaningful negotiated process is the only way to achieve a settlement that will bring peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That would enable the even-handed support by governments and people of goodwill all over the world that Israel is craving for. The Wall will imprison the Palestinians but it will isolate Israel even further and only bring grief, suffering and more bloodshed.
Ronnie Kasrils is Minister of Water Affairs & Forestry.
Max Ozinsky is an MPL for the ANC, Western Cape.