Wednesday
May062009
Against Israeli Apartheid
Issandr El Amrani
Friend of the blog Ethan Heitner, a comics artist, has drawn this wonderful strip based on Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina's classic 2002 article "Against Israeli Apartheid," illustrating these lines:
Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
Download the whole four-page strip here. [PDF 8MB]
Reader Comments (7)
The problem with talking about Israeli Apartheid is that people are unwilling to take the next logical step. Apartheid did not end with the partition of South Africa to two or three states according to race. In the same way, you cannot address the system of discrimination and exclusion through the partition of Israel/Palestine. If this is Apartheid, then we should be calling for democratisation and equality first, and national determination second.
Well actually people are willing to call for a one-state solution - but I don't think a two-state solution is incompatible with describing the current situation as apartheid, using all of the tools of apartheid.
I think that on some level it is. The two state solution suggests that by making two nation-states you solve this problem; that is, the problem is essentially a conflict between two nations that can be (more or less) geographically separated from each other. This is clearly not the case. Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians are more intermingled geographically than the two communities of Belguim. And the same logic of discrimination is applied within Israel against Arabs, albeit in different means. Before even talking about refugees and Jerusalem, you have the issue of control over land and water... these things will not be adequately addressed through partition.
If anything, the experience from post-Apartheid south Africa tells us that it is a formidable task to amend through peaceful means a situation of sharp imbalance and power-relations between two communities in the same country, even within one state. Partition of Israel/Palestine will only perpetuate and entrench these power relations and imbalances. Under the current political conditions a Palestinian state cannot be much more than a Bantustan.
I see what you mean in terms that a Palestinian state will have to be demilitarized, there will be economic imbalances etc. I was speaking in terms of the manner the Pals are treated being similar to Apartheid. In terms of how to resolve the conflict, the two-state solution does not solve anything, but then again there are possible one-state solutions that don't either and would also recreate or entrench power imbalances, or simply fail to resolve the conflict if many people on either side do not accept the one-state concept.
I totally agree - the "one state" is far from a panacea. It potentially has better chance to address the issues I'm talking about, but really the South African experience should remind us how difficult that would be (land ownership is still overwhelmingly in the hands of the white minority, etc etc).
The Apartheid State of Israel: a Jew is sentenced to death for selling land to the Palestinians and the world is silent.
http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/apartheid-state-of-israel.html" target="_blank">http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/apartheid-state-of-israel.html" target="_blank">http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/...
The Apartheid State of Israel: a Jew is sentenced to death for selling land to the Palestinians and the world is silent.
http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/apartheid-state-of-israel.html" target="_blank">http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/apartheid-state-of-israel.html" target="_blank">http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2009/05/...