'Commentary: What Are the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East?
By Matthew Taylor
By Matthew Taylor
With President Jimmy Carter coming to town Wednesday to speak to UC Berkeley students about his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, it’s an appropriate time for us to reflect on the current prospects for justice and peace in the Middle East.
As Carter accurately states in his book, a system of enforced apartheid reigns in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. It is systemic Israeli policy and practice to demolish Palestinian homes, uproot millions of olive trees, build roads that only Israeli colonizers are allowed to access, implant Israeli colonies on Palestinian soil in violation of international law, use an illegal wall to steal Palestinian land, and enforce two entirely different sets of legal standards for Israeli colonizers and the indigenous Palestinian population. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is both apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and is the further enactment of a long-standing desire for territorial expansion that has permeated Zionist politics since before the 1948 war.
At this past weekend’s Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Oakland, several speakers demonstrated that the situation is getting worse all the time. According to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), Israel has managed to confine Palestinians who live inside the illegally-occupied West Bank to 72 disconnected ghettoes within only 42 percent of the West Bank area, leaving the rest to Israel’s illegal colonization as well as military installations and hundreds of movement barriers—a “matrix of control.” When Israel’s current colonies and land grabs are taken into account, the future contours of the so-called Palestinian “state” does not look like the map of a country, but a piece of Swiss cheese.
Readers of Carter’s book are largely aware of the above challenges. However, what Carter’s book never reveals is that Apartheid can be said to prevail even inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Professor George Bisharat of the Hastings College of Law reports that over 100,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live inside villages that are officially ‘unrecognized,’ appear on no maps, and are denied basic services such as electricity and garbage collection (www.assoc40.org). Israel has demolished the homes of tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs in order to create Jewish-exclusive housing. Israel insists that its Palestinian citizens relate to Israel as a “Jewish state”—in other words, an ethnocracy that privileges one ethnic group over another in both blatant and subtle ways.
And then, there’s the elephant in the room: the refugees. Millions of would-be citizens of the state of Israel—the Palestinians who were forcefully exiled in 1948, as well as their children—are denied the ability to return to their homes in peace, despite international guarantees and repeated U.N. resolutions affirming their right to do so. (Meanwhile, as an upper-class American Jew in Berkeley I have the unrestricted right not only to move to Israel, but to purchase a home that once belonged to a refugee.) Apartheid, at its core, is about “apartness” or “separation,” as well as the domination of one group by another. What could be a more extreme act of separation and oppression than forceful expulsion coupled with the denial of a people’s right to return to their homes?'
As Carter accurately states in his book, a system of enforced apartheid reigns in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. It is systemic Israeli policy and practice to demolish Palestinian homes, uproot millions of olive trees, build roads that only Israeli colonizers are allowed to access, implant Israeli colonies on Palestinian soil in violation of international law, use an illegal wall to steal Palestinian land, and enforce two entirely different sets of legal standards for Israeli colonizers and the indigenous Palestinian population. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is both apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and is the further enactment of a long-standing desire for territorial expansion that has permeated Zionist politics since before the 1948 war.
At this past weekend’s Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Oakland, several speakers demonstrated that the situation is getting worse all the time. According to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), Israel has managed to confine Palestinians who live inside the illegally-occupied West Bank to 72 disconnected ghettoes within only 42 percent of the West Bank area, leaving the rest to Israel’s illegal colonization as well as military installations and hundreds of movement barriers—a “matrix of control.” When Israel’s current colonies and land grabs are taken into account, the future contours of the so-called Palestinian “state” does not look like the map of a country, but a piece of Swiss cheese.
Readers of Carter’s book are largely aware of the above challenges. However, what Carter’s book never reveals is that Apartheid can be said to prevail even inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Professor George Bisharat of the Hastings College of Law reports that over 100,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live inside villages that are officially ‘unrecognized,’ appear on no maps, and are denied basic services such as electricity and garbage collection (www.assoc40.org). Israel has demolished the homes of tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs in order to create Jewish-exclusive housing. Israel insists that its Palestinian citizens relate to Israel as a “Jewish state”—in other words, an ethnocracy that privileges one ethnic group over another in both blatant and subtle ways.
And then, there’s the elephant in the room: the refugees. Millions of would-be citizens of the state of Israel—the Palestinians who were forcefully exiled in 1948, as well as their children—are denied the ability to return to their homes in peace, despite international guarantees and repeated U.N. resolutions affirming their right to do so. (Meanwhile, as an upper-class American Jew in Berkeley I have the unrestricted right not only to move to Israel, but to purchase a home that once belonged to a refugee.) Apartheid, at its core, is about “apartness” or “separation,” as well as the domination of one group by another. What could be a more extreme act of separation and oppression than forceful expulsion coupled with the denial of a people’s right to return to their homes?'
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