Apartheid

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democracy – amazingly similar to the South African model – has been construed with the aid
of ethnic cleansing, making Jews an 80 per cent majority in the state of Israel, while almost
twice as many Palestinians are scattered around the world or locked inside ‘autonomous areas’
under Israeli military occupation and emergency rule, with no possibility of voting against the
‘security forces’ which are, most of the time, involved in a variety of activities that are
apparently aimed at decimating the number of Palestinians in Palestine on a daily basis. Only
an exceptionally high Palestinian birthrate is providing an antidote at this moment in time.
Jewish settlers in those same areas, however, do have the vote as well as a whole range of
rights and privileges – including their being supplied with weapons and ammunition by the
Israeli army – on account of their ethnicity alone. All of these rights and privileges are denied
Palestinians, who have lived there much longer.
The illusion of a functioning and even dynamic democracy is further enhanced by
Israel’s frequent changes of government between cabinets led by the mainstream Labor and
Likud parties. On the surface, these parties resemble a western-style couple of liberal/social
democrat and conservative parties, yet they are crucially united, not only in coalition
governments, but more importantly in their central and overall Zionist policy of continued
apartheid, of continued, systematic gross human rights violations. 22 The addition of the
Kadima party to the fold of ‘mainstream’ parties in 2006 changed nothing in this regard.
Kadima, formed by the former Likud prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has situated itself between
Likud and Labor, especially with regard to policies directed against the Palestinians, in
territorial terms: somewhere between the ambitions of a Greater Israel and a Much Greater
Israel.
South Africa, on the other hand, was ruled by a single party throughout its post-1948
apartheid period. The National Party was, however, also the winner of periodic, ‘democratic’
elections. In South Africa, all Blacks, up to three quarters of the total population, were
excluded from such elections. They were not allowed to vote or run for public office at all.
Indians and Coloureds were only given an inferior vote to their own separate parliamentary
chamber in 1983. Similarly, a minority of Palestinians have been given the vote in Israel,
namely those who are still, and despite continued discrimination and oppression, residents in
the land conquered (and received from the ‘West’ and its reluctant servant, the ‘United
Nations’) before 1967. Members of the Palestinian 19 per cent of the Israeli electorate are
allowed to vote, to run for office and even to form political parties. They are barred, however,
from forming political parties that ‘do not support the Jewish character of the state of Israel’.
In effect, this rule may be used for charging people with calling for the introduction of
democracy (in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories). Arab Israelis are also forced to
carry identity cards that identify them as ‘Arabs’, they are practically unable to marry Jews or
Palestinians from the territories occupied in 1967, they are excluded from practicing a whole
range of professions (see Chapter II.5.3, below), and face many additional kinds of
discrimination and oppressive segregation.
22 Hass: In Afrikaans, Separation is Called ‘Apartheid’, 2000. ‘[T]he Likud and the Labor governments…have
different views only as regards the size of the Palestinian enclaves and the territorial continuity between them.’
(25) Amira Hass is the first and so far only Jewish journalist to live permanently in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. She has lived in Gaza and in Ramallah on the West Bank. Her courageous and insightful reporting
earned her among other things the distinction of becoming an International Press Institute ‘Press Freedom Hero’
in 2000, and of receiving the UNESCO/Guillermo Camo World Press Freedom Prize for 2003. See further
Kudlak: IPI Report, 50 Press Freedom Heroes, 2000. On the essentially indistinguishable ethnicist and Zionist
ideologies of Labor and Likud, see also N.N.: Interview With Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How To End The
War Of 1948, November 8, 2002, and Levy: Tell the Truth, Shimon, 2002, in which the author, a former aide of
Nobel Peace laureate Shimon Peres’, accuses his former boss, at that time Labor Party foreign minister in prime
minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud-led coalition government, of hypocrisy and legal complicity in war crimes and
terrorist activities perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians. On the armament of settlers by the
Israeli army, see N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements on Middle East Road Map, June 9, 2003, which cites the
Israeli anti-settlement organizations, Peace Now and B’Tselem.