Additional material on apartheid and racism in Israel and Occupied Palestine

This is supplementary material for this article.

1. Apartheid in the West Bank

There is indeed a vicious\xc2\xa0apartheid\xc2\xa0in the occupied territories.¹ The population of the West Bank is made up of approximately 2.5m Palestinians and 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers. Despite living there illegally, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, these settlers benefit from Apartheid road networks, and separate water reticulation.

In Israeli settlements daily per person water consumption is 242l. But in Tulkarm it is 40l, in Nablus 30l and in Palestinian Hebron 26l.²

Last week Israel launched two Palestinians-only bus lines in the occupied West Bank.³

Most importantly, Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank live under two completely separate legal systems. A Palestinian and an Israeli who commit the same crime on the same day will be charged and treated as if they were living on opposite ends of the world. The Israeli will be charged under Israeli civil law, and be subject to the protections of a modern legal system. The Palestinian will be subject to military law. The whims of military law govern every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.

2. Discrimination and creeping apartheid in Israel

There is a different but nevertheless deep racism⁴ and real discrimination against the Arab minority within Israel. A creeping Apartheid.

Arabs of Israel can vote and stand for election. However this is under threat. The Knesset voted to ban Arab MK Haneen Zoabi from the 22 January elections because she was aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010. The Supreme Court needed to overturn this.⁵ There is now a bill \xe2\x80\x93 the Zoabi Bill \xe2\x80\x93 which seeks to prevent the Court from overturning such a ban in future.⁶ There is an Arab judge on the Supreme Court, but there are moves to remove him because he refused to stand for Hatikvah.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens, but their ID cards identify them as Arab. On an Israeli Jew's ID card it will identify them as Jewish. There is no Israeli national identity. Israel is one of the very few countries in the world like that.

Palestinians who live inside Israel find it very difficult to lease land because the land is controlled by the Israeli Land Authority, which is itself controlled by the Jewish National Fund, or the Israeli Land Authority which is effectively controlled by the JNF.⁷

There is a growing list of laws targeting Israel's Arab citizens. The word “Nakba” was banned, in 2009, from Israeli textbooks.⁸ This is the word that Palestinians call the events in 1948 which resulted in the creation of the State of Israel, and the dispossession of 700,000 people that became refugees. Another law passed in 2011 takes funding away from municipalities and organisations that mark the Nakba in any way.⁹

The Admissions Law allows communities to reject potential residents if they are “not right for social life in the community”.¹⁰ In other words Jewish communities are rejecting would-be members because they are Arab, and this is specifically permitted in law.¹¹

The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law makes inhabitants of\xc2\xa0the\xc2\xa0West Bank\xc2\xa0and\xc2\xa0Gaza Strip¹²\xc2\xa0ineligible for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits that is usually available through marriage to an Israeli citizen. A South African Jew can become an Israeli citizen just by moving there. An Italian Catholic can become an Israeli citizen simply by marrying an Israeli. But a West Bank Palestinian is denied this right. And more to the point, whereas the Israeli spouse of the Italian Catholic has the benefit of seeing their partner granted citizenship the Israeli citizen who marries a Palestinian does not get this benefit. The West Bank Palestinian cannot even move to Israel to live with his Israeli spouse \xe2\x80\x93 if they want to live together the Israeli citizen must leave Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court recently approved this law.¹³

Although Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel are taxed equally, they do not receive equal benefit of government spending. In education, according to official state data published in 2004, the state provides three times as much funding to Jewish pupils compared to Arab pupils.¹⁴

There is general discrimination in access to jobs¹⁵, funding of municipalities¹⁶, treatment at airports¹⁷ etc\xe2\x80\xa6

3. Erosion of democracy in Israel

There is a wider erosion of even the internal democracy that Jews enjoy in Israel.¹⁸

Freedom of speech is threatened by the Boycott Law which stipulates that every Israeli who publicly calls for a boycott against the state of Israel, even one confined to the Occupied Territories, is liable to pay punitive damages \xe2\x80\x93 “independent of the actual damage caused.”¹⁹

Freedom of Association is threatened by a new law which requires NGOs receiving funding from foreign state entities to report to the government four times a year.²⁰

The Infiltration Law stipulates a three-year minimum imprisonment for anyone entering Israel without permission. This is aimed mainly at African refugees and migrants.²¹ A recent Knesset amendment to this law has restored the measure by which migrant workers are bound to a single employer, notwithstanding that this arrangement was previously deemed illegal by the Supreme Court,\xc2\xa0which went so far as to call it “a modern form of slavery.”²²

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Footnotes

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