Israeli Apartheid Structures

Links to articles recommended by CanPalNet members

They just wanted to go home together

“R. had a work meeting in Ramallah. She planned to return home, to East Jerusalem, with M., her partner, who works in Ramallah. They reached the Hizma checkpoint, east of the Pisgat Ze'ev settlement, where there is a permanent Israel Defense Forces post that checks all travelers heading to Jerusalem. You are forbidden to take this route, said the soldiers. Only your husband is allowed. Take the Qalandiyah checkpoint route...”

Clearing the Jordan Valley of Palestinians

Down the Explusion Highway

“Someone who apparently had an especially sarcastic sense of humor decided to officially name the Jordan Valley Road, Route 90, the ‘Gandhi Road.’ The reference is not to Mahatma Gandhi, but to Rehavam Ze’evi, who advocated ‘transfer’ — the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land. Perhaps he understood that this was indeed the appropriate name for the eastern road. For not only on this road, but throughout the enormous and beautiful expanse of the Jordan Valley and the eastern slopes of the hills, there is an oppressive sense of absence, loss, and emptiness.

The Palestinians have disappeared from the valley, aside from a few thousand who live there plus some to whom Israel agrees to give daily entrance permits for various reasons. It is not even possible to include the approximately 35,000 residents of Jericho among those remaining, because the Israel Defense Forces forbids them to travel northward of Area A, where they live...”

Israel unveils plan to encircle Palestinian state

• Olmert says he will keep control of Jordan valley
• Pullouts likely as acting PM follows Sharon's vision

“The acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday that he plans to annex the Jordan Valley and major Jewish settlement blocks to Israel in drawing new borders, according to a television station that recorded an interview with him yesterday.

In Mr Olmert's first policy statement since he succeeded Ariel Sharon last month, Channel 2 television said that he made clear he intends to carry through his predecessor's vision of creating an emasculated Palestinian state on Israel's terms.

If the Jewish state were to annex all of the Jordan Valley, which is dotted with small settlements, it would leave a future Palestinian state on the West Bank entirely surrounded by Israel and without a direct link to neighbouring countries...”

Olmert: We must separate from Palestinians, draw final borders

“In his first interview since becoming Acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert on Tuesday revealed the core of his political agenda as the country’s leader, stressing that Israel must separate itself from the Palestinians within an agreement that would draw its permanent borders.

Speaking with Nissim Mishal on Channel 2 TV, Olmert said ‘reality today obliges us to separate ourselves from the Palestinians and to remodel the borders of the State of Israel and this is what I will do after the elections.’

When asked what concessions Israel would be prepared to make, Olmert said ‘we will separate from the majority of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank. This will force us to evacuate territories currently held by the State of Israel.’

‘We will hold on to the major settlement blocs (in the West Bank). We will keep Jerusalem united,’ he said...”

Worlds apart

Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid. After four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from Johannesburg before that, the Guardian’s award-winning Middle East correspondent Chris McGreal is exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive comparison. Here we publish the first part of his two-day special report.

“Said Rhateb was born in 1972, five years after Israeli soldiers fought their way through East Jerusalem and claimed his family’s dry, rock-strewn plot as part of what the Jewish state proclaimed its ‘eternal and indivisible capital’. The bureaucrats followed in the army’s footsteps, registering and measuring Israel’s largest annexation of territory since its victory over the Arab armies in the 1948 war of independence. They cast an eye over the Rhateb family’s village of Beit Hanina and its lands, a short drive from the biblical city on the hill, and decided the outer limits of this new Jerusalem. The Israelis drew a line on a map - a new city boundary - between Beit Hanina’s lands and most of its homes. The olive groves and orchards were to be part of Jerusalem; the village was to remain in the West Bank...

Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel’s system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary...

If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an ‘absentee’ who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. ‘They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state,’ he says. ‘Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That’s what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn’t bear the harassment.’

There are few places in the world where governments construct a web of nationality and residency laws designed for use by one section of the population against another. Apartheid South Africa was one. So is Israel...”

Brothers in arms - Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria

• Read the first part of Chris McGreal’s report

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology.

“Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.

Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived...”