Apartheid Stalks the Palestinians

There is no issue that angers Palestinians these days more than the issue of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The decision to build new Jewish settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and the Netanyahu government’s new directive to create financial incentives for Jewish settlers in the West Bank have added oil to a Palestinian population burning with anger.

What makes the settlement issue so volatile is that it represents for Palestinians an existential danger: It cuts right into areas that Palestinians are expecting to be their independent state. Every additional Jewish settler and every settlement home built will weigh 10 times its physical size in obstructing even a remotely fair peace agreement based on the concept of two states--a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.

Many Palestinians today feel that the current government in Israel wants to do what a former Likud prime minister admitted after leaving office: to drag the negotiations for 10 years or more without resolution. No wonder almost the entire Israeli Cabinet attended the funeral earlier this month of the two settlers killed while driving along a bypass road in the West Bank. It was as if this act of terrorism was exactly what the government was waiting for. And instead of vowing not to reward those Palestinians opposed to the peace process, the government pledged financial incentives in order to entice more Jews to settle in the Palestinian areas and thus add fuel to the cycle of violence.

What is also very frustrating to the Palestinian people is the clear and obvious apartheid situation that is developing in the West Bank and Gaza. Major roads, with expensive tunnels and bridges, are created for the exclusive use of a few thousand Jews in the Hebron area to get to Jerusalem. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are not even allowed to drive into Jerusalem and are left with a dangerous road connecting the northern part of the West Bank with its southern part.

The apartheid system also is very clear in the differences in cost of water and electricity as well as in the tremendous asymmetry in the services the settlers get compared with those of Palestinians living in the same areas.

This apartheid system is even in evidence in the punishments levied against Palestinians and Israelis. When a Palestinian kills a Jew, his family home is demolished and an entire region is collectively punished. Last week 100,000 Palestinians in the Ramallah area were in effect imprisoned, with no one allowed in or out.

Jews settling in Palestinian territory claim that these areas are God-given exclusively to the Jewish people. It is futile to argue with such people, but one can only deal with temporal issues and signed agreements. In this regard the existence, development and expansion of these settlements cut right into the issue of the final status of the Palestinian territories. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can claim as much as he wants that he is only supporting the “natural” growth of settlements. But the fact is that the state of Israel signed a binding international agreement with Palestinians that specifically states that the issue of settlements will be discussed during final status talks.

Both the explicit and the implicit meaning of the agreements signed in Washington is that no action should be carried out by any party that would prejudice the final status of that issue. This is exactly what the Israelis have been doing regarding Jerusalem. They have forbidden the Palestinian Authority to set up even a symbolic office, citing the fact that such a move would constitute an action that attempts to predetermine the outcome of the negotiations.

The settlement issue looms even larger when the ideology and the attitude of the present right-wing Israeli government is taken into consideration. This government has no concept for the final status of the Palestinian territories. If it did, things would be much easier. The Netanyahu administration is completely opposed to an independent Palestinian state and at the same time it is unwilling to annex the Palestinian territories and give the Palestinians living there equal political rights within what would become a binational state. Anything short of either solution would not only be discriminatory to the rights of people to self-determination but will be a formula for violence and instability.

Jewish settlements not only are illegal according to international law; they also constitute a growing apartheid situation. Whatever will be the final status of these settlements, no one claiming to want peace in the Middle East can accept the expansion of these cancerous communities whose aim is precisely to block a solution that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians badly want.