The Fight For Life: Realities of the Israeli Apartheid

Fiscal Hafizh Rafif (21?475172SP/30138)

On the 19th of June, five Palestinians were shot and killed in a raid conducted by the
Israeli army, after the Israeli finance minister publicly called for “a large-scale operation across
the West Bank” according to Al Jazeera (2023). The raid was one of the largest ever conducted
by the Israeli government in nearly twenty years, which included the use of helicopter gunships.
However violence is no new thing to the Palestinian people living within occupied territories,
violence and oppression have existed for decades and have been part of everyday life for Israelis
and Palestinians. As a direct result of decades of occupation by the Israeli government into
Palestinian territories, Palestinians have endured decades of human rights abuses as well as
segregated policies that limit their habitat, movement, and thought. The Israeli occupation and
their superior firepower alongside state apparatus has implemented and enforced discriminatory
policies against the Palestinian population as early as 1948. Today many have pulled similarities
between the Israeli government and that of South Africa during the apartheid era. These
similarities highlight the tactics and policies used by the South African government and the
Israeli government in limiting the exercise of rights by marginalized groups. These instances
pose the question, is the Israeli government considered an apartheid regime? This paper aims to
analyze the history and conditions of the Israel-Palestine conflict in order to answer the question
posed by the concerning similarities of the Israeli government and apartheid South Africa.
The term apartheid is a loaded term that brings us images of a horrible and tumultuous
time within South Africa’s history, one that is rooted in racism, oppression, discrimination, and
brutality (Dugard & Reynolds, 2013). Or as Greenstein (2020) would describe it, Apartheid was
a South African system of social and political domination between 1948 and 1994. During that
time period government policies imposed conceptual, legal, and geographical distinctions
between people on the basis of race. South African apartheid was characterized by seven main
principles: (i) Stark legal definition of races; (ii) Exclusive white participation in and control of
central political institutions; (iii) Separate institutions and territories for black African people;
(iv) Spatial segregation in town and countryside; (v) Control of the movement of African people
into the cities; (vi) Tight division in the labor market; (vii) Segregation of amenities and facilities
of all kind (Beinart, 2001). Today apartheid rule and definitions of apartheid as stated by article
7 within the 2002 Rome Statute, is defined as “inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an
institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any
other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”
(Greenstein, 2020), as per its definition the current political practices of the Israeli government is
eerily similar to that of a very dark and controversial time in world history. The implementation
of its governance mimics that of the apartheid era, with one distinction, instead of race the Israeli
government enforces apartheid through ethnic distinctions.
 Since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Israel has pursued explicit policies in
order to establish and maintain a jewish majority demographic, maximizing their benefits, while
minimizing the number of Palestinians by restricting their rights and their ability to challenge the
status quo. In the course of establishing the Jewish state the Israeli regime has committed mass
expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian villages in
what amounted to ethnic cleansing, coercing the Palestinian population into enclaves within the
state of Israel (Amnesty International, 2022). The Israeli efforts to gain demographic hegemony
manifest itself in the the form of dispossession of land and property, the Israeli state has enforced
massive and cruel land seizures to dispose and exclude Palestinians from their lands. These
efforts are part of the state's Judaization policy, which seeks to maximize Jewish control over
land by moving the Palestinian populations into separate, and densely populated enclaves.
Furthermore these attempts were implemented through manipulation of the legal system in order
to serve the needs of the Israeli government, three main legislation makes up the core of the
Israeli land monopoly: the Absentees property law of 1950, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953,
and the British Land Ordinance of 1943. These laws, to this day, play an important role in
expropriating and acquiring Palestinian land and property to revert ownership to the Israeli state
and Jewish National Institutions. An additional feature of Israel’s apartheid lies in its deployment
of physical infrastructure as another weapon of segregation and ethnic cleansing – most
prominently the separation wall and a segregated road network (Penny Green & Amelia Smith,
2016). The wall renders the palestinian population invisible, and at the same time perpetuates the
annexation of Palestinian territories by protecting the illegal Jewish settlements within the West
Bank. As a result of the wall, Israel has already seized another twelve percent of the Palestinian
West Bank territory, and moved in another 211,000 illegal Jewish settlements living in illegally
confiscated land.
However the regime has gone beyond destroying and removing Palestinian land to
uphold their apartheid rule, in addition to forced removals of the Palestinian population and
annexation of Palestinian territories, Israel has also limited the political freedom of the
Palestinian in order to control dissent. While Israel identifies itself as a democratic state, its
fragmentation of the palestinian people ensures that Israel’s version of democracy
overwhelmingly privileges political participation by Jewish Israelis (Amnesty International ,
2022). Over the years the Israeli Supreme Court has in general overturn attempts by the Central
Election Committee to ban Palestinian parties, however under the Israeli Basic Law or the
Knesset of 1958, the Central Election Committee can disqualify a party or candidate from
participating in elections if their actions negates the definition of Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state, as a result preventing Palestinian lawmakers from challenging laws that codify
Jewish Israel domination over the Palestinian minority. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, on the
other hand, are neither able to participate in political life in Israel nor in the West Bank, forcing
the population to rely on peaceful protest to voice their dissent and challenge their oppressors.
Albeit so, in protest the Palestinians are often met with excessive force and unlawful force by the
Israeli Defense Forces, which can result in arbitrary arrest, prosecution in military courts and
undue restrictions on freedom of movement. Israel has used the military to impose many of its
policies, including the forceful removal of Palestinians from their homes and lands, mass
surveillance of Palestinian communities, as well as limiting the movement of Palestinians to
travel beyond their territories, including to seek medical care and jobs (Amnesty International ,
2022). Despite the establishment of Palestinian authority Israeli military orders continue to
control and restrict all aspects of palestinian lives, subjecting them to military legislation and the
military justice system, a system that is far from the international standards of fair trial. Though
disbanded in 2005 retroactive laws still exist, mainly to limit movement of the people as well as
goods in and out of OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory), which includes access to territorial
waters.
The acts described above falls into the in all or partially into the seven core principle of
apartheid, as described by Beinart, or the Rome statute. These acts committed by the Israeli
government stands in violation of several provisions from multiple charters regarding human
rights. For example their use of the military as an apparatus to instill domination and oppression
of the Palestinian people through arbitrary arrest and denial of a fair trial is in violation of Article
9 of the ICCPR, to which it states “everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No
one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention” (International Covenant on Civil And
Political Rights, 1976). Further example of Israel’s perpetuating attempt to instill an apartheid
rule over the Palestinian rule is apparent in its attempts to remove Palestinians from their homes
and land through illegal means of acquisition, that disregards their rights for protection against
forced eviction, which contains their entitlement for security of tenure that could guarantee legal
protection against forced eviction, in which the Palestinian right is stated both within the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights. Instead the Israeli government has failed their responsibility as duty
bearers to provide the Palestinians, as the right bearer, their rights, by actively restricting access
to them, while simultaneously subjecting them to retroactive laws that heavily discriminate
against the Palestinian population, stripping them from one of the four non-derogable rights. An
additional result to this paper, it clearly shows the Israeli government's policies similarities to
that of apartheid era South Africa with only one distinction, when the white South Africans
segregated and oppressed by race against the black South Africans, Israel does so through
ethnicity against the Palestinians, to which in both case stand in stark violation of both
international law and international covenants on human rights.
 References

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