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Old March 17th, 2017 #1
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Post Israel and the A-Word

The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’

Verwoerd was able to make this diagnosis without needing to live to see the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israel’s apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised.

Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.

This week, a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) has concluded that ‘Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’. According to the report, the Israeli regime governing Palestinians is a racial regime of institutionalised domination – the essence of the international legal definition of apartheid. The maintenance of Israel’s exclusionary constitutional character as the state of the Jewish people has entailed a “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people”. It has involved expulsion of Palestinian refugees into exile, discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel as second-class citizens, oppression of Palestinians under occupation; all through a concerted array of law, policy and practice that forges ‘a comprehensive policy of apartheid’.

This finding breaks new ground in the context of UN analysis on Israel/Palestine. Specialised UN bodies – such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine – have in recent years categorised Israeli law and policy in terms of racial segregation and apartheid. This framing has been geographically limited to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however – as distinct from inside Israel itself, or Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people writ large.

This was a somewhat necessary distinction, given the UN practice of analysing the occupied Palesti

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read full article at source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/...nd-the-a-word/
 
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