Carter is hardly saying anything new using the word apartheid to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinans. Many well educated people have used the term for years and many Israelis who refuse to not play games with the obvious. Kissinger once advised that the Palestinians be dealt with "a la South Africa". Israel was very friendly with South Africa while the much of the international community was into divestment. I think this article puts things in perspective. It's a bit long. " Matrix reloaded -- yet again"
Israel may one day create some sort of severely circumscribed state for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. The question is what kind of a nation will be left to enjoy its limited fruits. Jonathan Cook poses the question
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Israeli academic Jeff Halper has coined the phrase "the matrix of control" to describe the system of settlements, outposts, bypass roads, confiscated land masquerading as national parks, military zones, checkpoints and now hundreds of kilometres of a "separation wall" that together effectively entrap the Palestinian population in ghettoes across the West Bank and Gaza.
Halper's point is to explain how Israel uses non-military tools -- planning laws, architecture and geography -- as well as military hardware to herd Palestinians into the spaces it allocates them: the "Bantustan" homelands familiar from apartheid South Africa.
The pretext may be security but the goal is to stunt the growth of a popular Palestinian leadership and emasculate resistance to the occupation. Meanwhile Israel can continue its colonial theft of vital resources like land and water. Halper and others on the extreme Israeli left have begun to understand that, despite the recent "concessions" of Israel's mainstream left in signing the Geneva Accord, there is now no hope of a two-state solution.
Israeli leaders are committed to a one-state solution, one in which it controls everything. The government is already starting to create a series of isolated Palestinian enclaves which it will duplicitously label a Palestinian state.
This will give the appearance of two states without its substance. The powerless Palestinian entity will be run by the inheritors of the Palestinian Authority, cronies taking their orders from West Jerusalem.
This dismal prospect has in fact been more than obvious for some time. The problem was that foreign observers and Israel's own tiny group of independent-minded thinkers have been stubbornly focussed on the land-for-peace formulas of Oslo and the Israeli-backed enforcement mechanism of the Palestinian Authority as salvation for the Palestinian people. The reality is dawning on them only very belatedly.
To understand why Israel was never pursuing a real Palestinian state, with sovereignty and autonomy, one needs only turn one's eyes a little from Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin to look at what Israel has been doing with its original Palestinians -- the unwelcome population it was left with after it terrorised 80 per cent of Palestinians from their land and into refugee camps across the Middle East.
The refugees are sometimes referred to as the forgotten Palestinians, but in fact the remnants of the Palestinian people who stayed on their lands in Jaffa, Nazareth, Sakhnin, Umm Al- Fahm, the Negev and elsewhere and became Israeli citizens have been at least as overlooked. Theirs is the forgotten story of Palestine.
The historic treatment of this minority -- today numbering some one million people, or nearly 20 per cent of Israel's population -- sheds illuminating light on the Jewish state's current intentions towards the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. What happened to Nazareth tells us much about Ramallah's intended fate, and what happened to Sakhnin may hint at what Israel has in store for Jenin.
What connects all these places is that they are the shadow cast by a Palestinian homeland that predates Israel. They are the surviving evidence of the original war crime that gave birth to Israel: not the 1967 War that led to the occupation, and which is the lightning rod for world attention, but the war of 1948, which has largely been exorcised from our memories. As such Palestinians who continue to live on their land, whether in Jaffa or Bethlehem, Acre or Hebron, pose the same threat and must be neutered in much the same kinds of way.
This insight has been understood by all Israeli prime ministers, from the first, David Ben Gurion, to the most recent, Ariel Sharon. And none, not even the most beatified, Yitzhak Rabin, has been diverted from the following guiding vision: Israel's primary goal must be the eradication of the national consciousness of the Palestinian people, through their division into separate identities (West Bankers, Gazans, refugees, East Jerusalemites and Israeli Arabs), and the endless partitioning of their territory into ever smaller geographical units.
Israel's military leadership believes that combined these two policies can incapacitate Palestinian resistance, by diminishing the possibility of collective action and by shrinking the space, psychological and physical, in which Palestinians -- all Palestinians -- can manoeuvre against the occupation.
The international community's growing acceptance of the Israeli position that only West Bankers and Gazans are Palestinian -- in the sense that only they have the right to some sort of statehood -- is signal enough of Israel's success. The recent Geneva Accord,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/664/op40.htm
