“Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories appear so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era, a continent away, and I believe it is very important we in the United Nations use this term,” says Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the current serving president of the United Nations General Assembly. “We must not be afraid to call something for what it is…Today, perhaps we in the United Nations should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations.”
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, initiated by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005, is a growing peaceful campaign demanding that Israel comply with international law by ending its illegal occupation of Palestinian land, grant equal rights to all of its citizens irrespective of race or religion, and allow Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homeland, as stipulated under UN Resolution 194.
This year, Israeli Apartheid Week, organized to further the BDS movement on campuses, is taking place concurrently in over 40 cities worldwide, including campuses in the West Bank, South Africa, and Britain. Complete with lectures, multimedia presentations, cultural performances, art showings, film screenings, and demonstrations, IAW unites the growing chorus of voices identifying Israel as an apartheid state.
Apartheid, meaning “apartness” in Afrikaans, was a term used to describe the legislated racial segregation of pre-1994 South Africa. Under the regime of “grand apartheid,” and especially with the introduction of the 1950 Group Areas Act, white South Africans forced the displacement and denationalization of large numbers of indigenous black South Africans. The subsequent concentration of these black South Africans into a series of cramped, nominally autonomous “Bantustans” led to the creation of a white majority “democracy” within the remaining 87 per cent of the South African state.
This story is all too familiar to Palestinians who, during the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, saw the forced expulsion of 800,000 of their own people and the destruction of over 430 towns and villages. Today, Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories—the West Bank and Gaza—confront a complex network of checkpoints, walls, roadblocks, curfews, Jewish-only roads, and other tools designed to Bantustanize and ghettoize over 3.5 million Palestinians into less than 20 per cent of their historic homeland.
The establishment of this system of grand apartheid in Israel, which mirrors the South African system, has managed to create a Jewish majority in Israel and thereby artificially construct an ethnic “democracy” by displacing the majority indigenous population. The roughly 1.2 million Palestinians who remain nominal “citizens” of Israel face legislated discrimination in land-ownership, family law, and citizenship rights, while over three million Palestinian refugees expelled from historic Palestine continue to be denied the right to return.
Some have argued that the title of apartheid belongs solely to the case of South Africa. However, this is not true as the United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted in 1976, defines apartheid as a universal crime that could be committed by other states as well. Uri Davis’ book Apartheid Israel provides an in-depth analysis of the links between South African and Israeli apartheid. It is very telling that colonial states with surviving indigenous populations—like Israel, Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand—all refused to sign on to the apartheid convention insisting that the crime only applied to South Africa.
Students Against Israeli Apartheid (a working group of OPIRG-Toronto) is encouraging all students to stand against our university’s support for Israeli apartheid and racism in all its forms. To get involved today, and for a full listing of IAW events and speakers, visit www.apartheidweek.org or contact [email protected].
Saron Ghebressellassi and Faraz Vahid Shahidi are both members of Students Against Israeli Apartheid @ UofT, and are volunteers at the Ontario Public Interest Research Group-Toronto.
