'A short history of apartheid' [View All]

[Aidoneus]

I ordinarily try to avoid posting editorials down here, sticking mostly to events.. but I'll make an exception.

A short history of apartheid
Land is at the heart of the drama unfolding in Palestine. But it is not the only thing, argues Azmi Beshara

Rhetoric about demography so dominates Israel's political discourse that one might be tempted to assume that Israel has abandoned its preferred designation as the Jewish democratic state in favour of the Jewish demographic state. The condition has reached the stage where it might be diagnosed as an advanced case of demographomania. The mania, of course, is rooted in Zionist principles, in the need to maintain a Jewish majority capable of implementing a democracy that will absorb the Diaspora, accommodate pioneer settlement and the assumption of a common history, and that allows for the fetishisation of military service. For without any of the above Israel would have to practice government by the minority, which inevitably leads to apartheid or racial segregation, to government by a national minority that sees the state as the embodiment of its legitimacy. Such practices demand dual sets of legality.

Because a state with a Jewish minority in Palestine was never on the cards displacement always lay at the core of the Zionist project for a Jewish state located in a country with an Arab majority and in the midst of an Arab region. It is no coincidence that the portion of land that was initially supposed to host the Jewish state was "ethnically cleansed" early. Along the once flourishing Palestinian coast only two Arab villages remain today.

The first task, then, was to cleanse the areas of the Jewish state -- as defined in the partition resolution -- of Arab inhabitants. This was followed by the displacement of Arabs from the Galilee and other parts of the presumed Arab state. The result: a large Jewish majority made it possible to impose the democratic sovereignty of the Jews, albeit in a non-liberal manner and with military and settler values. Thus did Jewish democracy turn religious commitment into a tool of national formation while it pillaged the Arab Palestinian people. The uprooting of Palestinians in 1948 was an exercise in demographic separation through displacement.

Today's plans for demographic separation -- now called peace initiatives -- invariably acknowledge the impossibility of repeating that particular process. That much, at least, was acknowledged by Igal Allon in the Allon plan following the 1967 War. He then suggested that populated areas be returned to Jordan. Ehud Olmert spoke in similar vein in defending his recent initiative on separation, or unilateral disengagement. "Transfer is no longer possible. It is neither morally defendable, nor realistic to start with."

So long as transfer is impossible, then, it becomes necessary to find another model of segregation. Which is why Israel's Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has no qualms describing the current phase as "the second half of 1948".

--snip--

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/672/op10.htm