New apartheid exists in Gaza, West Bank

By Fadi Nazeeh Kiblawi

The crash through the roof woke the young baby. Before she could
let out a cry, the weight of the one-ton bomb fell upon her.
Two-month-old Dania was saved from a life full of curfews,
checkpoints, roadblocks, house demolitions, torture, imprisonment,
degradation and desperation. In that context, perhaps Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon was ironically right when he deemed the
pre-dawn bombing of the densest district of the densest area of the
world, taking 10 children, three women and two men from the
captivity of life under occupation to the grave, a
“success.”

After 20 months of tit-for-tat violence by Palestinians and
Israelis ““ marred by innumerable massacres committed by both
sides ““ I have become immune to the emotional symptoms that
should accompany death and destruction. It has come to the point
where you just have to ask, what is the cause of all this?

From the Israeli viewpoint, the problem is Palestinian violence
and terrorism. Apparently, Palestinians have this unexplainable
desire to kill Jews, driven by nothing but an innate tendency
towards terror.

This argument reeks of racism, and rests on the assumption
Palestinians have a special “terrorist” gene.
Apparently, the ethnic cleansing, expropriation of land, refusal of
free movement, and constant degradation of occupation has nothing
to do with their violence.

I guess when a Palestinian suicide bomber massacres Israelis,
his displacement and subsequent imprisonment under an inherently
violent occupation is not the cause of his acts. I guess when Nat
Turner in 1828 slaughtered white families, men, women and children
alike, his subjugation under slavery was not the cause of his acts,
either. I guess when members of Nelson Mandela’s African
National Congress planted bombs in bars, restaurants and busses,
maiming white civilians, apartheid was again not the cause there,
either. The list goes on.

It should not surprise us when congressmen, such as Henry Waxman
and Tom Lantos, blindly support Israel. They subscribe to the
Israeli philosophy and Zionist ideology by which it is justifiable
for one religious group to reign superior inside a state’s
borders; thus it is natural for them to support the Jewish-only
state.

This approach, wherein full blame is placed on the historic
victims (the Palestinians) and the racist nature of the aggressor
is ignored, is not a new one. If you recall, when it was South
African apartheid descending on us, Congress and our administration
sponsored and legitimized the white, racist government and placed
the burden of peace on the struggling indigenous black
population.

A second and more severe degree of apartheid is seen in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza, which Israeli governmental maps
include within Israel’s borders. In an attempt to steal the
Palestinian political identity through a systematic expropriation
of land, construction of Jewish-only roads and settlements, and
imposition of draconian measures, Israel isolates the 3.6 million
non-voting Palestinian natives into 13 cantons, exhibiting an
uncanny resemblance to the Bantustans of South Africa under
apartheid. This has accelerated during the past year under the
guise of a “war on terrorism”.

The nominal self-determination the Palestinians were given in
1993, and then prospectively extended at Camp David, shadows South
Africa’s system of disconnected, yet self-determined
“homelands.”

The two greatest factors in ending South African apartheid were
the amount of international pressure amassed against it and the
emergence of a leader of the colonizing party who made sacrifices
against the wishes of his class in the interest of justice and
equality. The latter could not have existed without the former,
thus highlighting the importance of the international
community’s role.

In the United States, the most tangible anti-apartheid movement
was the divestment campaign that hit college campuses from coast to
coast. The role of the movement cannot be underestimated. It was
this 100-plus campus campaign in the 1980s that persuaded Congress,
after nearly 40 years of recognizing and complying with the
apartheid government, to pass the anti-apartheid bill that cut ties
to South Africa and paved the way for a political revolution.

This same course of action must be taken against Israeli
apartheid. Our government has been hijacked by ideologically
backward racists, resulting in a confused, yet wholly complicit,
foreign policy.

In the words of Archbishop Tutu, “If apartheid ended, so
can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure
will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort
is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that
direction.”