'Separate but Unequal'. That’s the title of Human Rights Watch's latest report on Israel's occupation in the West Bank. Of the main human rights organisations dealing with the topic, HRW is consistently the most conservative, which is to say that it consistently errs on the side of apologising for Israeli crimes. The fact that the title of a HRW report links the Israeli occupation so explicitly to the 'Jim Crow' system of white supremacy in the U.S., and to the apartheid system in South Africa, can therefore be read as an indication of how bad things have become.
The report itself documents how Israel "operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank":
“Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits…
While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp - not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.”
The report shows that Israeli policy in the West Bank continues to conform to the contours outlined by Moshe Dayan, who suggested that Palestinians should be forced to “live like dogs” and that “whoever wishes may leave”. Thus Israel’s discriminatory policies render Palestinian communities “virtually uninhabitable”, frequently “forcing residents to leave”. While arguments rage about ethnic cleansing in 1948, it continues on the ground today. To give one example: the centre of Hebron, once a thriving commercial area, has been turned into a “ghost town” through a policy of “quiet transfer” based on economic strangulation and violence by settlers and the military. According to a household survey conducted last year, in East Jerusalem and the 60% of the West Bank under direct Israeli control, “some 31 percent of Palestinian residents had been displaced since 2000”. This is part of a broader attempt to “[transform] the geographical reality of the West Bank and Jerusalem” towards “a more permanent territorial fragmentation” by progressively confining Palestinians to a series of isolated cantons, surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements and military infrastructure.
When Israel massacres Palestinian civilians, or systematically withholds food and medicine from Palestinian children, or bombs essential Palestinian infrastructure, its apologists reflexively appeal to ‘security’ for justification. In this case, even by these standards that would be absurd. There is no coherent way to explain policies designed to “promote and encourage Jewish settlements to expand” while simultaneously “withholding basic services, punishing growth, and imposing harsh conditions on Palestinian communities” in terms of security. The only way such policies are intelligible is in the context of an aggressive program of colonisation and annexation. One response is to try and blame it on the extremist settlers, but that bears scrutiny only if the phrase is understood to refer to the bulk of Israeli society. As HRW reports, “[t]he Israeli government grants numerous incentives to settlers, including funding for housing, education, and infrastructure, such as special roads”, and it is these “incentives” that “have led to the consistent and rapid expansion of settlements”.
It is clear that Israel has no intention of withdrawing from the West Bank, for reasons discussed by Israeli economist Shir Hever and others. Obama’s ‘peace process’ is exhausted, and veteran diplomatic observers Robert Malley and Hussein Agha report that we are at “the end of a road.” As the UN special rapporteur on the conflict has concluded, the cumulative effect of Israeli policies has been to “convert the conditions of de jure ‘occupation’ into a set of circumstances better understood as de facto ‘annexation’”. If we follow this analysis and view the occupation as a permanent system deeply enmeshed with the Israeli state itself, then it is worth being clear about what kind of system, and what kind of state, it is. As HRW makes clear, Palestinians under Israeli control live under what Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem describes as a “separation cum discrimination regime” with “two systems of laws”, in which “a person’s rights are based on his or her national origin”. “This regime”, B’Tselem continues, “is the only one of its kind in the world”, and is reminiscent of “dark regimes of the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.” One of Israel’s leading military historians Martin van Creveld, no pro-Palestinian dove, puts it more bluntly: Israel is “fast becoming… an apartheid state” whose control rests increasingly on “repressive secret police actions”.
What should we do about it? This HRW report is unusual in that it explicitly calls on the US to significantly reduce military aid to Israel because of the latter’s “blatantly discriminatory” practices. It also calls on the EU to stop offering incentives for settlement exports. This is very weak stuff, but again, given the source, it’s significant (Amnesty International has demanded a complete arms embargo on Israel). Earlier this year the OECD unanimously approved Israeli membership, over the objections of human rights organisations, and the EU continues to grant preferential access to Israeli exports (for a full account of EU complicity in the occupation, see David Cronin). The British government itself has played an integral part in supporting the collective punishment of Gaza, boycotting Hamas and strangling those who voted for it even as it continues to sell arms to Israel.
If we want our government to be complicit in “systematic discrimination” against and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, then none of this should worry us. If not, then when David Cameron boasts about pushing for “closer trade links” with Israel, we should demand that he explain how his government’s commitment to “fairness” is compatible with support for an increasingly vicious racial supremacy. In 2006 Cameron was forced to apologise for the Thatcher government’s support for South African apartheid. In this case, as in many others, the government's distance from Thatcherism is one of rhetoric only.
(On the same topic, see also my article in Varsity earlier this year).
Cross-posted at New Left Project