New Netanyahu "Peace" Plan Is Straight Out Of Apartheid South Africa
Palestinian citizens of Israel march against home demolitions in Arara, a
town in the Wadi Ara region that Netanyahu wants transferred to a
Palestinian entity, January 2017. Keren Manor ActiveStills
By Ali Abunimah, www.electronicintifada.net
August 3rd, 2017
Above Photo: Palestinian citizens of Israel march against home demolitions
in Arara, a town in the Wadi Ara region that Netanyahu wants transferred to
a Palestinian entity, January 2017. Keren ManorActiveStills
Benjamin Netanyahu is proposing that Palestinian citizens of Israel be
stripped of their citizenship under a "peace" deal that would place them in
a future Palestinian entity.
The Israeli prime minister recently told American officials, according to a
report in Haaretz, that "Israeli-Arab communities could move under
Palestinian control" as part of a final status agreement.
"In exchange," the Tel Aviv newspaper wrote, "Israel would annex some West
Bank settlements."
Commonly referred to as "transfer," this proposal amounts to ethnic
cleansing. It is not a new idea, but Netanyahu's broaching it represents a
further step in the Israeli government formally adopting policies once
considered taboo even by many Israelis.
The area Netanyahu has in mind - at least initially - is Wadi Ara, a region
in the north, including the major town of Umm al-Fahm.
Some 1.5 million Palestinians have citizenship in Israel. They are the
survivors and their descendants of the Nakba, the Zionist ethnic cleansing
of the vast majority of the Palestinian population from what became Israel
before and after it was established in 1948.
The idea that this would be an "exchange" is clearly absurd since none of
what Netanyahu proposes to swap is Israel's to begin with: West Bank
settlers live on land stolen from Palestinians in violation of international
law.
Meanwhile, the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel - who in any such
move would be deprived of the right of determining their own fate on land
that is theirs by birth - are not a gift from Israel, which was established
by force and conquest in their country at their expense.
So-called population exchanges have an ugly history; they were practiced
before the modern era, when it was accepted that rulers treated people like
property.
But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other norms enshrined
after the atrocities of the Second World War vested rights in individuals
and outlawed forced displacement and the arbitrary removal of citizenship
and nationality.
But as I argued in my 2014 book The Battle for Justice in Palestine,
Israel's claim that it has a "right to exist as a Jewish state" cannot be
realized without the massive and constant violation of the most basic
principles of human rights, equality and anti-racism.
Apartheid logic
This can be seen by following the logic of Netanyahu's proposal. He talks
about the transfer as part of a "final status" deal.
But what kind of a "peace" would Netanyahu contemplate? In his first White
House meeting with US President Donald Trump in February, the Israeli leader
would not commit explicitly to any sort of "two-state solution."
He insisted though that in any deal Palestinians must recognize Israel as a
"Jewish state" and Israel "must retain overriding security control over the
entire area west of the Jordan River."
So adding all the elements together, Netanyahu's plan would take
Palestinians in Israel, who currently possess rights as citizens - albeit
limited by law and inferior to Jews - and move them to a situation where
like the rest of the Palestinians under perpetual Israeli military
occupation they would have no rights at all.
In March, a landmark UN report concluded that "Israel has established an
apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole."
"The mission of preserving Israel as a Jewish state has inspired or even
compelled Israel to pursue several general racial policies," the report
states. These include "demographic engineering, in order to establish and
maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel."
Netanyahu's latest proposal precisely fits into this mold, and therefore is
further confirmation that Israel practices apartheid.
The UN report also noted that while Israel maintains a formal democratic
system for citizens of the state, it prohibits anyone from using that system
to challenge the regime's fundamentally racist set-up: "Israeli law bans
organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal
and even seditious."
Netanyahu would do away with the merest threat of Palestinian citizens of
Israel using their votes to challenge this domination by stripping them of
their citizenship.
Bantustans
The UN report, quickly suppressed by the UN secretary-general on American
orders, stresses that it does not directly compare Israel to apartheid South
Africa.
Rather, it measures Israel against the definition of the crime of apartheid
in international law, which is includedin the founding statute of the
International Criminal Court.
Netanyahu's proposal does nonetheless indeed follow closely the precedent
set by apartheid South Africa.
As that racist regime came under increasing pressure to end white
supremacist rule in the late 20th century, it created a system of
"bantustans" - nominally independent Black-ruled states.
If Black people wanted to vote, the apartheid government said, they were
welcome to take citizenship in one of the bantustans - impoverished strips
of land stretched across remote areas of South Africa.
But the "independence" of these states - not recognized by any country - was
a total sham. They were tin-pot dictatorships run by collaborators with the
white racist regime.
The bantustans were a mechanism to remove Black people physically - by
encouraging or forcing migration to them - and politically from South
Africa, while providing no real rights.
It is difficult to find any difference with what Netanyahu - who has made
clear his aversion to seeing Palestinian citizens of Israel vote - is
proposing.
There is one key difference: unlike with apartheid South Africa whose
bantustans met universal rejection, many in the so-called international
community, including Barack Obama when he was president, have eagerly
adopted Israel's racist and segregationist conception under the slogan of
"two states for two peoples."
Guaranteeing supremacy
The idea of racial gerrymandering has found favor with some of Israel's most
ardent admirers.
Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who has a long list of war
crimes on his record including the killing of millions of people in
Southeast Asia, advised Israel in 2004 to "transfer territory with
significant Arab populations from the northern part of Israel to improve the
demographic balance."
In recent years, there have been two main Israeli proponents of the idea of
further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, marketed as "land swaps."
Avigdor Lieberman, the West Bank settler who is currently Israel's defense
minister, has long advocated this approach.
A decade ago Lieberman said he would support a "two-state solution" as long
as it provided for real segregation by getting rid of Palestinian citizens
of Israel.
"The guiding principle must be an exchange of territory and of populations,"
he said. "It's not that we're against the solution of two states for two
peoples," Lieberman added. "On the contrary, we support it: two states for
two peoples, not a state and a half for one people and half a state for the
other."
In Lieberman's view, the risk of a two-state solution without transfer was
that Israel would end up as "half a state" - meaning that Jews could not
guarantee their domination in an entity with more than 1.5 million
non-Jewish citizens who expect equal democratic and civil rights.
Lieberman recently reaffirmed in a posting on Facebook that the Jewish state
should eventually be ethnically cleansed of virtually all Palestinians.
"There is no reason why Sheikh Raed Salah, Ayman Odeh, Basel Ghattas or
Haneen Zoabi should continue to be Israeli citizens," he said in reference
to prominent Palestinian politicians, three of them at the time members of
Israel's parliament, the Knesset.
Third Nakba?
The other key proponent is Tzipi Livni, the ostensibly "dovish" former
foreign minister who is sought for questioning in war crimes inquiries by
prosecutors in several countries.
In 2007, Livni said: "The Palestinian state to be established will not be a
solution just for the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria [the West
Bank]. It is designed to provide a comprehensive national solution - for
those living in Judea and Samaria, and the refugees camps, and even for the
[Arab] citizens of Israel."
As part of the government of Ehud Olmert the same year, Livni formally
raised the idea of transfer with Palestinian negotiators, explaining: "Our
idea is to refer to two states for two peoples. Or two nation states,
Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace and security with each
state constituting the homeland for its people and the fulfillment of their
national aspirations and self determination."
Since no Israeli leader has ever seriously proposed giving a Palestinian
state the same rights and sovereignty Israel claims for itself, these
declarations are barely disguised calls for a continuation of Zionism's
historic process of dispossessing Palestinians and calling it "peace."
A few days ago, senior Israeli minister Tzachi Hanegbi even threatened
Palestinians with a "third Nakba" - a reference to Israel's ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.
One wonders if Netanyahu's latest proposal is what he meant.