This is the beautiful land of Israel and Palestine.
The world's three most prominent religions.
Islam, Christianity and Judaism, consider it holy land.
Each year, millions of people from around the world.
Come here to pray for peace and prosperity.
Yet this land is also a major center
of conflict in the world today.
For Jewish Israelis, the conflict
centers on protecting a homeland.
Created for the Jewish people in 1948.
For Palestinians, it is about
resisting decades of colonialism,
expulsion, occupation, and apartheid.
Most people identify apartheid with the
grotesque system of control that existed
in South Africa from 1948 to 1994,
in which the white minority
ruled over the black majority, stole their
land, and deprived them of basic rights.
It was a system reviled by the whole world,
and it eventually crumbled under the
combined pressure of internal
resistance and international sanctions.
Today the word is back, and with it too
is a growing global movement to end the
Israeli form of apartheid.
Time, October, 1948. A new leadership.
It denies the morality of economic free
for all. Its slogan: “To each his own.”
Its belief: Parallel development,
separate identity. Apartheid.
The word Apartheid, is an Afrikaans word,
Which simply means separateness, Being apart.
So we had the wonderful term called separate
development, but it was never intended to be equal.
One could talk about the petty Apartheid. That
was about the fact that almost from birth
your life was separated from people of other races.
You'd have to stand if the bus was
full. If you went to the beach,
there were some beaches you could not walk on.
Those were the sorts of petty manifestations.
But you had the real Apartheid, which for me was about
the structural systems and policies of Apartheid,
the way in which land was taken away from people.
In the first post-war election, the
white electorate voted into power
a group of men dedicated to the complete
separation of the races in South Africa.
The vision was to create a demographic
white majority, at least of citizens,
even though you were going to have the others in your midst.
The entire nationalistic existence was
at stake. It was going to be swamped
by the black majority, so they
evolved the concept of Apartheid.
Ultimately the driving force behind it all
was to create the white Afrikaner-led
nation so that Afrikanerdom could sustain its
permanent existence as a national entity.
Now united, the folk would decide South Africa's destiny.
The years of division, of second-class citizenship,
had conditioned Afrikaners to thinking
of themselves as a people besieged.
Afrikaner history formed a sort
of self-contained moral universe.
Whereas the rest of the world saw them as
oppressors, as colonizers, as racists,
they saw themselves primarily as victims, settlers
who were escaping religious persecution in Europe.
They saw themselves as fighting for self-determination.
In 1836, in an extraordinary gesture
of self-reliance and courage,
2,000 Afrikaners crossed the Orange River into the
wilderness, out of the bondage of British rule.
The first time in history that the
term concentration camp appears,
is in Afrikaner history. About 10% of the
population died in British concentration camps.
So for them, Apartheid was about survival,
about self-determination, about redemption,
about preserving a way of life. You see
a very similar pattern in Zionism.
Despite that Palestinians experienced it as
a very aggressive colonizing movement that
has dispossessed them Israelis are capable of
seeing themselves as victims, as survivors
of drawing on Jewish history in
order to justify their status quo.
It's important to address that. It's
important to address them with empathy
and to say, “I don't accept what you do,
but I understand what the motivation is”,
and to be able to talk about that.
We feel that the concept of Apartheid
is really crucial for understanding
what's happening here, and where Israel
is going, because it's the only term
that accurately defines the system
that Israel is trying to develop.
It isn't just a policy. It's not just discrimination.
It's the way the system is structured.
It's separation of populations in which one
group permanently and institutionatally
dominates another group.
It's getting to the point where there
isn't going to be a Jewish majority.
If you take the entirety of Israel and
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
we're at the point now where it's roughly 50/50.
And that's before any Palestinian refugees return.
Palestinians are broadly categorized
into three main groups.
The majority of Palestinians are refugees
who were forced out of the land that became
Israel in 1948. Today they number over 6
million people and still live in refugee camps
in places like Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
A second group are the Palestinians
who managed to stay inside Israel
during the 1948 war and became Israeli citizens.
And lastly, there are the 5 million Palestinians
living in the occupied territories:
The West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
This territory is defined by what is known as the green line.
This is land that Israel occupied in the
1967 war, and still controls to this day.
Palestinians in these areas do not have Israeli
citizenship, nor do they have a state of their own.
What you have in the West Bank is two entirely
separate and unequal geographies that are
super-imposed on each other, but exist separately.
You have the Palestinians who are cut off
into dozens of ghettos, literally surrounded
by walls and physical barriers, with
little access to work, to education.
Even the basic means of survival; Food
and water is often difficult to come by.
And then super-imposed on that you have the settlers,
who live in what look like American-style
suburbs, very spacious, very luxurious homes
with swimming pools, with access to water.
Immediately after the 1967 occupation, Israel
began building Jewish-only settlements
in the occupied territories and started
moving its population into these settlements,
a practice that is illegal under international law.
There are approximately 220 Jewish-only
settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.
Their territorial jurisdiction includes not only
the Palestinian land upon which they're built,
but often the land that surrounds the settlements
which is reserved for their so-called natural growth.
Each of those settlements, every single one of
them, is only allocated to Jewish Israelis.
Roughly 60% of the West Bank is allocated to,
or controlled by the settlements, or the
military installations.
What we see in the last 40 years is
vast Israeli government efforts and vast amounts of public money
spent and poured into allocating land in the territories,
building settlements on it, and encouraging Israelis to move out
of Israel and into these settlements.
Gilo is, I think, a neighborhood where everybody is living.
Because if you can't afford to live in the center
of the city, you move out to the new neighborhoods,
and you're going to find you have everybody
living over here, religious and not religious;
More people to the left, people to the right,
because most people look at Gilo as part of Jerusalem.
This is Gilo settlement, which was
annexed in the '80s and early '90s.
They started building it in the mid-'80s,
and they started bringing in caravans, then it started being
built up and built up until it became
a very big neighborhood of Jerusalem,
accommodating thousands of settlers' families.
On Palestinian land. The people there
didn't sell the land. They stole it.
There was a decision taken by Israel in 1967
that Jerusalem should be reunited as one city
and part of that political agenda was to build and
establish on the hills surrounding Jerusalem,
new Jewish neighborhoods in a way
that would make it very difficult
to, again, divide the city into two parts.
The settlements were not built for security.
They were built out of a proactive claim to the country.
The words mislead.
They're not a couple of little trailers on the hillside.
These are cities of 40, 50, 60, 70,000 people.
They're built over water aquifers.
They're built at key junctions.
They're built on certain hilltops.
They're built to control movement.
They're built to control the border.
Every settlement has its rationale.
We can see from here the village
extended toward the settlement of Ariel,
which is located above the hill over there.
Ariel, located in the heart of the West Bank,
25 kilometers to the east of the green line.
There's a very important aquifer located underground,
under this area, which the Israelis are
stealing. They are enjoying the water.
They are irrigating their gardens, washing their cars
and playing with their dogs with water, and
here we are suffering a shortage of water.
Per capita Israelis use about six
or seven times the amount of water
that Palestinians use, and many times in the
summer months Palestinians do not get water,
even though it's their water that's being pumped
out by the Israelis and sold back to them,
they don't get sufficient supplies.
They cut off water in summer, meaning that we will be
without water for three or four months of the year,
so we try to compensate for that by collecting the rain
in the cisterns and the wells, which is not healthy.
But we are forced to use this
water, which causes many diseases
for the children and for the inhabitants in the village.
And my daughter was one case of
that; She got a very bad infection
because of the water, and she got kidney failure.
Apartheid was the attempt to separate people
and allow resources and privilege and rights
to flow to people on the basis of the separate
groups in which they were categorized.
And so the settlements are very
strategic; It's not just real estate.
They were built out of aproactive claim to the country.
Nowhere is the government's separation
principal shown so starkly as in the city
of Hebron, a city deep in the heart
of the West Bank with a population
of about 160,000 Palestinians.
In the middle of Hebron, in Palestinian
homes, often vacated under severe
pressure, live 600 Jewish settlers
cordoned off and protected by thousands of soldiers.
Although neighbors, these two populations live
under two separate and unequal sets of laws.
Jewish settlers in the West Bank live under Israeli civil law,
while Palestinians live under Israeli military law.
The settler population in the West Bank
is roughly 500,000. The Palestinian
population in that same area is roughly 2.5 million.
So we have a classic situation of an ethnic minority claiming
the entire country, a large territory,
and then, now, what do with the natives?
What do you do with the non-whoever
you are? In this case, the non-Jews.
In South Africa, the architecture was
amazing. First, you give people an identity.
Then, of course, you give people pass laws,
so you define how they can move freely,
and you construct blockages for the movement of people.
Control was exerted through a complicated
pass system that determined when and where
an African could move. These passes
became one of the most detested
symbols of apartheid.
The issue of the pass was much more than a
question of identity or an identity document.
It was a mechanism to ensure the control over
people's movement and where people lived.
Today in occupied Palestine,
Palestinians must carry IDs at all times
that essentially dictate where they can live, work and move.
A complex system of movement restrictions
requires special permits to enter certain areas.
There are over 600 manned checkpoints and
physical roadblocks in the West Bank
that restrict the freedom of movement of
Palestinians. Only 36 of these separate
Israel and the West Bank.
The rest separate Palestinian towns
from other Palestinian towns.
Abuse, beatings, humiliation at the checkpoints
is a routine part of the experience.
It's part of the systematic disempowerment of Palestinians,
placing an entire population at the mercy of
18, 19-year-old soldiers who have absolute
power over the lives of Palestinians.
How many? Is it over 60 women who have
given birth at checkpoints because some
silly kid won't let them through, or taking
20 minutes to let an ambulance through?
I have been able to visit Israel and
Palestine, on more than two occasions.
And what I experienced there was such a crude reminder of a
painful past in Apartheid South Africa.
We were largely controlled in the same way.
The continuous checking at the roadblocks,
and to see these young men and young
women standing at the roadblock,
having to perform the duties of a military junta.
These parallels with Israel pained me severely while
I was travelling through that lovely country.
The settlements are linked by modern
superhighways, which are Jewish-only roads.
Palestinians are not allowed to use them,
and these super highways crisscross
across Palestinian land, linking the settlements together,
and linking them with Israeli cities inside the 1948 borders.
The separate roads that you find, that
kind of settlement infrastructure
that you find in the West Bank, you know, in.
South Africa, we didn't dream that we'd have
roads that would be only for whites.
In 2008 there were 800 kilometers of
Jewish-only roads in the West Bank,
or as the Israeli military prefers
to call them, "Sterile roads".
Settlers are issued yellow license plates
so that the military can distinguish
them from Palestinian drivers.
The other part of this system is the.
Palestinian roads, which is linking the.
Palestinian villages and cities
together, but with tunnels and bridges
under the main network of roads that
they are creating for themselves.
And these bridges and tunnels have gates,
and the gates have locks, and the keys
are in the hands of the soldiers.
So if they want to impose a curfew all over the West Bank,
they can do it in two hours.
The Jewish-only roads serving the settlement of Avne Hefez,
are but one of the many examples of the segregated road
system in the West Bank. Because of the settlement,
Israel declared the roads between the.
Palestinian towns of Shufa and Izbat Shufa
a sterile road for Jews only, erecting
dirt roadblocks for Palestinians at every
exit of the town.
Recently, Israel allowed Palestinian pedestrian
but not vehicular traffic on the road.
Due to these conditions, one out of
every four families has left Shufa.
A deeply religious people, the white.
Afrikaners of South Africa believed they
had a god-given right to a land that
they considered mostly uninhabited.
In what is known as the great trek, what.
Afrikaners consider their equivalent of the Exodus
thousands trekked into the wilderness
in search of the Promised Land.
The Afrikaners pushed into land the Africans
considered theirs, and many battles ensued.
Armed with guns and protected by a circle
of covered wagons, known as a “laager”,
the Afrikaners easily beat back the
indigenous masses that outnumbered them.
This image of the heroic settlers in their
“laager” fending off the savage masses
became the dominant mythology in Afrikaner history, morphing into
the philosophy of Apartheid in 1948.
Under apartheid law, the one standard
against which everything was judged
was the security of the state, and the
state meant the Afrikaner people.
With every law enacted, the freedoms
of the majority were whittled away
in order to protect the privileges of a white minority.
In Pretoria today stands a monument to the Great.
Trek, a shrine to this history and philosophy.
A concrete "laager"; That iconic image of
the Afrikaners' military defense tactic,
completely surrounds the monument.
A physical representation of a state of mind
that sees enemies everywhere and will
do anything to protect against them.
What I experienced there was made even
more painful by the existence of the wall
of separation, what we from South Africa
prefer to call the Apartheid wall.
We didn't have that type of division in South Africa.
In 2002, under the guise of a temporary
security measure, Israel began construction
of the separation barrier to completely
seal off the West Bank from Israel.
In urban areas it is a concrete wall eight meters tall.
In rural areas it is a “smart” fence
averaging 60 meters wide, with motion,
heat and vibration sensors, cameras,
trenches, patrol roads, and razor wire.
To many however, the wall is not about security.
Its snake-like route through the.
West Bank annexes large Jewish-only
settlements, agricultural land and
important water resources, clearly marking
it as a tool for massive land grabs.
Only 15% of the wall follows the green line.
Instead, the wall twists and turns deep
into the West Bank, making it more than
twice as long as the green line itself.
It separates Palestinian villages from
neighboring Palestinian villages,
farmers from their land and income, parents from children,
and severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement.
It encircles many towns from all sides
creating isolated ghettos surrounded
by walls, checkpoints and Israeli-only roads.
When you put people behind the wall, in
all of these ghettos, because almost
everywhere it is creating ghetto communities with one road or one
checkpoint or one tunnel with a gate on it.
Then at a certain point there is going
to be, when there's not enough work
and not enough food, more and more pressure built up.
Obviously a lot of people will leave, and
I think that's part of the intention.
Now in the South African context, the
attempt by the Apartheid government
was to take away citizenship from more
than 80% of the South African population,
and then give them new citizenship
in some kind of a fantasy entity:
Bophuthatswana, Transkei, etc. So
the South African state could say,
“You have no claims here. You're a citizen of Bophuthatswana.
Social benefits, etcetera, are what
you should be looking for there.”
The godfather of the system was Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.
"In South Africa you can only achieve
peace by separating the nations."
And he spelled out the whole Bantustan concept.
He said: “The black people have got
to be given their own countries.”
They embarked upon this remarkable
experiment of trying to cut up the country
into Bantustans, and these were created,
at least on paper, ten of them, and the
move began to advance them towards independence.
My government would like to continue as we
are, an autonomous and independent country,
preferably with extended borders,
continued friendly and cordial
relations with our neighbors and, if
possible, international recognition.
Most of them were stooges and really
puppets of the Apartheid state.
To give some veneer of reality to the fantasy
of the Bantustans, the Afrikaner government
threw money at them, built elaborate
parliaments, housing for ministers,
built airports, sports stadiums.
It was to create separate states.
It was not so much a two-state
solution as a multi-state solution.
When I look at Israel, when I traveled through the West Bank,
I was looking at Bantustans, totally
unviable, impossible states.
In many respects, it struck me as being
significantly worse than Apartheid.
Bantustans, as much as we abhorred them in.
South Africa, Bantustan leaders actually
had more power and more control
than the Palestinian Authority has.
What the Oslo did was create an
authority, which allowed Israel to still
control the occupied Palestinian territory, but
control it through a Palestinian authority.
Ostensibly, there's some kind of Palestinian
authority that's controlling, that's in power
of the occupied territory. But in
fact, Israel controls the borders.
Israel controls taxes. Israel controls all kinds
of things, access in and out of that area.
To me, the big analogy was that South
Africa, in taking these two choices
where you've got two or more nationalisms
laying claim to the same country,
you've either got to find a way to live together,
or you've got to have a fair partition.
The big similarity between Apartheid.
South Africa and the Israeli/Palestinian
situation is that both decided to have a
partition solution, and, in both cases,
it was a grotesquely unfair partition.
And this is why Israel says, “Well, Gaza is not our problem,
Gaza is a foreign country. It's not a state.
It's not part of any other country. It's just not us.”
Just like South Africa, it's the same
logic. We need a Palestinian state,
because we can't digest the Palestinians.
We can't give them citizenship,
because then it wouldn't be a Jewish state.
We have to create a Palestinian state,
because that's the only way we can
get them off our hands, but it has
to be a minimized state on as little
territory as possible that leaves us
in control of the entire country.
In South Africa, they left 13% of.
South Africa for the non-whites.
In cantons, locking them inside cantons.
Here, when you look at the map, what
they have created is leaving to the
Palestinians about 12% of our historical land.
This is the ghetto state, ghetto system
that they are creating, and it's totally
disconnected from each other. We have
one, two, three, and the fourth is Gaza.
Since 2006, Israel has imposed a deadly
siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting
most goods and people from entering or leaving the enclave.
The siege has caused an economic standstill in.
Gaza. The unemployment rate hovers around 40%.
On the more ridiculous end of spectrum of goods not
allowed into Gaza are things like pasta and chocolate.
Recently obtained Israeli government documents
show this to be a deliberate policy.
Mathematic formulas were created which defined
the minimum caloric needs of the 1.5 million
people in Gaza. As well as the upper limit, so
that food items cannot become too plentiful.
In 2009 Israel bombed Gaza's sewage
treatment facilities and electricity plants
and now won't allow the necessary
parts in to repair them.
Restrictions on fuel imports further limit the
ability of critical infrastructure to function.
While also causing daily, prolonged blackouts.
Blackouts can be deadly for patients in hospitals.
But more so is the lack of medicine,
specialized care, and clean water.
In the worst times of Apartheid in.
South Africa, we never had in any of
our townships helicopter gunships
flying overhead or F-16 type bombers
flying over townships and firing
or dropping bombs into a township.
It didn't happen.
The problem is we don't have other examples to look at now.
You could look at perhaps the Warsaw
ghetto as one example of that kind of
walled-in and then attacking a walled-in community like that.
Maybe a better example is hundreds and
hundreds of years ago where you had
walled city-states that were completely besieged by armies
where no one could get out and food was
denied, and if there wasn't a spring within
the city, no one had water, and people died.
Just like in Gaza, people died from
insufficient access to medicine,
to insufficient water, all those
reasons, as well as by air strikes.
There are a number of people and some governments who claim that
because Israel withdrew its settlers
and soldiers from the Gaza Strip
unilaterally in 2005, that it's no longer
the occupying power, but that is actually
not the case. In international law,
occupation refers to the control
of territory by another government,
not the indigenous government there.
That's precisely what exists with
Israel and the Gaza Strip right now.
Israel still controls the land of
the Gaza Strip, which, many people
don't know, is completely surrounded by a
wall very similar to the wall that snakes
through the West Bank. It is completely surrounded.
The Israeli Navy controls the seas off the coast of Gaza.
The airspace is controlled by Israel,
which has prohibited the Palestinians
from reopening their airport.
So Gaza is completely under the control of the Israelis.
The Palestinian Authority can't issue
identity documents, passports, permission
for people to come and go, independent
of the Israeli Interior Ministry.
If you don't exist in the Israeli Interior.
Ministry database, you don't exist period.
If you look at a blueprint of a prison,
it looks like the prisoners own the place.
They have 95% of the territory, right?
They have the living areas, they have the exercise yard,
they have the cafeteria, they have the work
areas. It all belongs to the prisoners.
All the prison authorities have is maybe 5%. And you know what?
If it's a minimal security prison, maybe
they have 1%. That's all you need.
You need the walls around, cell bars,
you have some corridors, you have
a few locked doors, and that's it. With 1% of the territory,
you can absolutely control the inmates,
and that helps you make the switch.
The issue here isn't how much territory the prisoners have.
The issue is, can they get out of the prison?
When the majority of world leaders
and people who have the power
to change things talk about a two-state solution, nowadays
what they talk about is a Palestinian
state that is made of Bantustans
separated from each other, a state that has
no sovereignty, no independent policies,
and has a very much similar economic
infrastructure to the ones that the.
Bantustans had in South Africa.
The main thing for the world and for
the Israelis is to get this issue off
the plate, and that's where Israel
thinks it can get away with a.
Bantustan in the way that South Africa
couldn't. You know, you can push a
two-state solution that's Apartheid.
If it doesn't have borders, it doesn't
have water, doesn't have access to its
greater economic resource, which is Jerusalem.
It's carved into little islands. There's no freedom of movement
there's no freedom of commerce. It's a prison state.
Therefore, the essential idea of a two-state solution
has to be not only the state itself, but a viable state.
The Israelis have rendered the West Bank
and Gaza unviable, hopelessly unviable.
I'm saying Israel no longer has that solution as an option.
It has made a two-state solution impossible.
Physically, morally impossible.
It is time for us to go ahead and move forward
on a two-state solution, so thank you very much.
You hear all this talk about the two-state
solution. You see opinion polls that say a
majority of Israelis are willing to accept it,
and a majority of Palestinians are willing to
accept it, but that consensus disappears the
moment you try to actually flesh it out in detail.
That's why all the two-state solution
proposals are extremely vague,
because Palestinians say, “The West Bank and.
Gaza are only a fifth of historic Palestine.
Why should we give up anymore?” Israelis
say, “Well, there's 450,000 settlers
in those areas, several generations.
Why should they leave?”
The only thing more difficult than trying to live together,
would be trying to force a separation.
Israel's overall goal has been to create
a Jewish state. In 1948, 75% of the
population, the non-Jewish population,
Christians and Muslims, were expelled
from their homeland and never allowed to return.
For one reason, and only one reason,
which is that they're not Jewish.
The 5 to 6 million refugees living in Lebanon
and Syria and Jordan, etc. Those are people
that should be Israeli citizens, that Israel
has kicked out and refused citizenship.
Over a million Palestinians became
refugees in the 1948 and 1967 wars.
By natural population growth, they
now number over 5 million people
who still await their right to return.
Some Palestinians managed to stay
inside what became Israel in 1948,
and today make up 20% of Israeli citizens.
So in the Israeli state, what kind of rights
and privileges and resources are allocated
to you are entirely dependent on
which ethnic group you come from.
You're either Jewish or you're Palestinian,
or Arab, as they prefer to call them.
And so you have a situation where welfare
benefits for people, for example,
are dependent on whether they're Jewish or not.
You have a situation where a Jew can't marry a
non-Jew in Israel. For us South Africans, we
remember the Mixed Marriages Act, for
example. You have a situation where people
from one ethnic group, Palestinians, are not
able to freely live in areas that are majority
Jewish, similar to old Group Areas Act.
Now one of the criticisms people make when
you start accusing Israel of being an.
Apartheid state inside its own borders is that they'll say,
“Well, Palestinians can sit next to Jews
inside restaurants. They sit on the same
buses. They go to the same cinemas,” and that's true,
but that's not really the significance of Apartheid.
The idea of Apartheid isn't really about
the fact that people can't sit on the same
park bench. It was about controlling
resources, making sure that one ethnic
group had control of resources and the other didn't.
And, in that sense, Israel has been
very, very effective at doing this,
what we might call grand Apartheid
rather than petty Apartheid.
In the key areas of people's lives, their
education, their employment, owning land,
Palestinian citizens are treated entirely
differently from Jewish citizens,
and I think that's one of the reasons why
this Apartheid comparison can be made.
By far, the most fundamental element of.
Apartheid with both South Africa and Israel
is control of the land. In apartheid South
Africa, a slew of laws were enacted
that designated 87% of the land for whites only.
This introduced the oxymoronic term.
"Foreign Natives" into the language
of parliament to describe blacks given
permission to live in white areas.
Israel's complex and creative web of
apartheid laws introduced equally
oxymoronic terms such as "Present Absentee"
into its parliamentary language.
This was used to describe Palestinians
who are actually present inside Israel,
but legally declared absent in order to confiscate their land.
Through these colonial and apartheid style
laws, over 90% of the land of Israel
is effectively reserved for Jews only.
Aside from the few mixed cities like Haifa
and Akko, most of Israel's communities are
segregated along ethnic lines. Israel's
1.3 million Palestinian citizens are
restricted to 120 communities that existed
before the creation of Israel in 1948,
and which have been unable to expand since.
By contrast, Israel has created and
developed more than 700 exclusively
Jewish towns since 1948, but not one
new town for Palestinian citizens.
Land laws in Israel are very clearly.
Apartheid kind of laws. You can belong
in the state of Israel, you can be a.
Palestinian, or you can be a Jew, but
if you want to have rights in the state,
really you need to be a Jew to have rights.
I have no doubt it's a Jewish state, but
I do question very strongly whether
it's a democratic state. If we talked
about an Afrikaner and democratic state,
I think most of us would find that
rather an oxymoronic phrase to use.
So why is Jewish and democratic not equally troubling to us?
There are more than a million Palestinians
inside Israel today, and that's a major
concern for Israel. It's very concerned about
the demographic growth, as it calls it,
the demographic time bomb, of the Palestinians inside Israel.
I came to realize that when they talk
about the elimination of Israel,
it's a demographic thing.
That Israel will cease to exist when
it no longer has a Jewish majority.
In other words, your nationhood depends
upon your having either an ethnic or
a specifically religious majority,
permanently entrenched.
Because of the experience I've gone
through in this country, where I saw
terrible injustice committed in the name
of the Afrikaners' need to survive,
I became ashamed of my country, grievously ashamed of it.
The reason Israel has a Jewish majority
is through entirely artificial means.
The whole framework of Israeli law is designed to
prevent the growth of the non-Jewish population
and maintain Jewish numerical and political
supremacy, and that's the framework in which
we can understand everything we see inside
Israel, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.
In Occupied East Jerusalem, the battle for control
of territory is happening on a house-by-house basis.
Israel goes to incredible lengths
to manipulate demography,
as can be seen in the stark but complicated
case of the city of Jerusalem.
East Jerusalem differs from the rest of
occupied Palestinian territory in that Israel
unilaterally declared it a part of the state of
Israel after the 1967 occupation of the city.
No country in the world has ever recognized
that annexation, and it is still considered
occupied territory by the Palestinians
and by international law.
But by building the wall and the
vast settlement blocks around it,
Israel has illegally severed it from the.
West Bank. Over 250,000 Palestinians
now find themselves on the Israel side of the wall.
Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not
citizens of the country, cannot vote
in national elections and cannot live in Jewish West Jerusalem.
A Palestinian can have lived in Jerusalem
all his life, been born here, his father,
grandfather, and generations
before, but he will be a resident.
A Jew from Russia can come today to Israel,
not even knowing one word of Hebrew,
and in the same day, he becomes a citizen.
There are many, many conditions to
be a resident. If you, for example,
live in Jerusalem but you work in Ramallah,
Bethlehem or elsewhere in the occupied
terriroties they say the center of your
life is there, and we can take your ID.
This is one of the strategies to make
the number of Palestinians smaller.
This is an official booklet, from the municipality
of Jerusalem, from the Department of Planning.
I mean, from the first point here, They
say: "Is to keep the ratio between
Jews and Palestinians as it was in 1967 at..." Look
at this: "70 to 30" As the government decided.
You must understand, if in any democratic
country in the world, someone says that
the Jews will be no more than 40 percent of the population,
we would say that this is anti-Semitism.
It's clear that it would be anti-Semitism.
So why is it anti-Semitism in Europe
or America if someone does this,
and in Israel, it's permitted. Why?
The politicians are hysterical over
this issue, and they try to implement
a policy of segregation, in order to make
the lives of the Palestinians so bad,
that they will decide to voluntarily leave the city.
One of the harshest methods used to
force Palestinians to leave Jerusalem
is Israel's house demolition policy.
This policy affects all Palestinians
living within Israel's stated borders,
and even within the rest of the West.
Bank, but it is starkest in Jerusalem.
House demolitions are part of a system
of discrimination that does not enable
Palestinians to actually build legally.
It's fair to say that it's virtually
impossible to receive a building permit,
a legal permit to build a house
in East Jerusalem if you're a Palestinian.
Wednesday, July 22nd 1962, The.
Afrikaners are breaking down our house.
Two bulldozers, and of course the
house crumbled. I felt the pain.
It was my blood, my bones, our
flesh that was being broken down.
No book can describe, no poem can describe
the horror, because our houses were not
houses, they were human beings.
I saw bone and blood and veins and brains.
And, of course, when the demolition
finally happens, I can't even begin to
convey to you the trauma, you know,
and the home is your sacred space;
Your whole intimate sphere is in the house.
Men, women, and children react very
differently. To the men it's humiliating;
They can't protect their families.
It's an entire financial loss.
For women, most Palestinian women
don't work outside the house.
Domestic space is their world, so when a woman loses that,
I've seen women go into states of
mourning. The trauma is tremendous.
The demolition of a home is really
the demolition of the family.
We estimate that in East Jerusalem
there are at least 10,000
demolition orders outstanding. Houses
that can be demolished at any time.
That doesn't include thousands that
have been demolished inside Israel.
Inside Israel there's still a campaign of demolition.
There are about 40,000 homes of Israeli citizens
who are Arabs that are slated for demolition
in the next few years, and this is on the
background of 1948 when more than
half the villages of Palestine,
more than 400 villages, were systematically destroyed.
After the state was created, Israel
continued to forcibly remove thousands
of its Palestinian citizens off of their
lands onto small concentrated areas.
Their villages were bulldozed to make way for Jewish-only towns.
This policy still continues inside Israel
today, with over 45 Palestinian villages
that the government refuses to recognize,
and which are slated to be forcibly
removed in order to construct new Jewish-only towns.
The Apartheid authorities had what they
called “black spots”. Incidents where
black people were occupying land where the
white people actually wanted to occupy.
And what they, therefore, did was to
send in the police, send in the military
with heavy trucks to demolish people's
homes, and then would remove families
that have been staying on land for decades
and remove them, and just dump them.
It was nice in Sophiatown until the.
Afrikaners started harassing us.
They said we are staying too near to town. We are blacks.
We are not supposed to stay there, so
they started moving us to Meadowlands.
Because they said we couldn't stay near the
white people, so they must separate us;
We mustn't be together. So they take the
place, and they give it to the whites.
They gave us only one day's notice.
“Tomorrow you are moving.”
The truck will wait outside, and then the
soldiers will go into the house, and remove
the furniture into the truck.
Then take the children and put you in
the truck, and the mother and father.
They just bulldoze it to the ground.
They take the family out and the bulldozer comes.
Land is more than just a possession.
Land is something integrally bound with
your identity. It's about your ancestors.
It's about a sense of knowing who and
where you are from, and in South Africa
that's where the biggest damage has been done.
The removal of people off the land
and they're put in these god forsaken places with nothing,
and they have to start all over again.
You can shave off my hair. New hair will grow.
You can spit in my face. I will find water to wash it.
You can take away my clothes and leave
me naked. I will find a blanket.
But if you take away my house, and
my dignity, where can I go? Where?
There is no pain quite like being
unloved, unwanted in one's own land among
one's own kind. The Jewish people
come from that experience.
Jews will always have the right, and I would support that right
for memory and perpetuation, but now
I feel it for the Palestinians.
I feel it for them, because they are
stateless, homeless, vanquished, exiled.
You take away my house; You take away my dignity.
You take away my love, and you replace
it with bitterness, anger, and revenge.
There have been at least 100,000 Palestinians, if not more, that
have gone through house demolitions.
There's a psychologist in Gaza in the.
Palestinian mental health center
who's done research that says that 55% of the suicide bombers
are kids whose houses have been demolished.
The house demolition issue is one of the
most painful parts of the occupation.
If you deny Palestinians a home, and
connected to that is a concept of homeland,
on two levels you're denying them a home, on
the individual level and the collective level.
The term we use in Hebrew for our
form of Apartheid is "nishul".
Nishul means displacement or dispossession.
That's the Israeli form of Apartheid.
The escalation of Israeli measures in how
they treated the Palestinians before the
first Intifada, make it difficult for
the people to accept oppression.
In 1987, as the occupation rolled into its third decade,
the first Intifada - or uprising - erupted.
People protested, went on strike,
threw stones, organized themselves
into groups, and challenged the
Israeli occupation in different ways.
Things came from the ground up in
the first Intifada where everyone,
no matter who you are, man or woman, young or old,
you are connected to certain
groups, working in this Intifada.
It was amazing how the people were organized.
The people took a stand. They had a slogan:
No taxation without representation.
The Israeli occupation closed down
all the education institutions
from the universities to the
kindergartens for two and a half years.
They were very strong in their reaction.
The number of the people that were
killed, children, youth, women,
thousands of people were killed. This was the Israeli reaction.
If you visit any family in Palestine,
West Bank, and Gaza Strip,
you will find at least one person
that experienced jail. To go to jail,
I don't want to say it's normal, but just being.
Palestinian is reason enough to be put in jail.
It's part of daily life in Palestine.
Over 700,000 Palestinians have experienced jail since 1967.
Proportionately there are more political
prisoners there than existed in South Africa.
In South Africa we had a campaign
against child detainees.
In Palestine you have over 350
children who are political prisoners.
They would take very many of our
children away from parents and try
to use that to coerce parents to
appear at police stations to deport.
I remember in 1988 you see prisoners coming
in like crazy. In a few months we became
6,000 political prisoners in one jail. And 95%
of them were under administrative detention.
Administrative detention is the detention of
people, usually for six months, but you can
extend it, based on no legal procedure aside
from issuing an administrative order.
People are arrested without knowing what they are
in for. They've never been charged with anything.
The way it's been done by Israel is absolutely
in contravention of international law.
I remember a famous Palestinian political
prisoner in the '70s. He spent around
seven years under administrative
detention. It's really scary, because
you don't know anything, and they
use it as part of the torture.
For example it's the day after six months or
one year in jail, and this is your last day,
the day you are released. They come to the jail,
they call your name. You collect all your stuff.
You are released. You say bye-bye to
the prisoners, and you move outside,
and the officer comes, “Sorry, another
six months” and you go back to jail.
Administrative detention, very similar to the
detention without trial in South Africa.
When you are about to be released,
they will release you and let you walk
a few steps and re-arrest you. Which is,
by the way, is another form of torture,
because you never actually are sure as
to whether you will be totally released.
I was arrested in 1985, and there was nothing
illegal about what it was that I was doing,
and they knew that they could, therefore, not take me to court
and charge me with anything. They basically
detained us because they could do it.
Why did Mandela become the hero
of the political prisoners issue?
He spent 27 years in the Apartheid
system jail. Right now we have prisoners
that have spent more than 30 years
in jail, more than Mandela.
Why doesn't the international community pay attention to that?
Within one year of each other, both Israel and.
South Africa launched “Operation Iron Fist”,
brutal and overwhelming campaigns to crush
opposition to their respective polices.
With the “Iron Fist” policy, they used
to open the handcuffs and take people's
arms like this and break the bone in this way.
I still remember the sound of my friend when they broke his arm.
The sound is still in my ear. I will never ever forget that.
They went as far as killing very many of our comrades brutally,
acts that you can never imagine.
The South African Defense Forces, as they
were called, their army and navy was almost
totally outfitted by Israel, because South
Africa couldn't get weapons from other
countries. Israel was one of the only
countries willing to break the arms embargo.
Well, the alliance started in earnest
in 1973. By 1979, 35% of Israel's arms
exports were going to South Africa, so they
became a crucial client, and a crucial
source for export revenue that Israel couldn't give up easily.
It involved everything from tanks to
aircraft to ammunition and you name it.
After 1977 there's a mandatory U.N.
arms embargo. Israel violated the.
U.N. arms embargo openly, and many Israeli
officials are happy to admit that.
If you talk to South African defense
officials, especially people from the
air force, they tell you that
Israel was an absolutely vital link
and was a lifeline for them during the 1980s.
After 1977, the ideological component becomes much stronger.
The top brass of the two militaries really
felt that they were in a similar predicament
and that they faced a common enemy. They also
had a very similar conception of minority
survival. They felt that Afrikaner
nationalists were similar to Israelis,
beleaguered minorities surrounded
by a hostile majority.
If you look at the documents from the South
African defense archive, you see dozens of.
South Africans were going to Israel on a
regular basis to attend a variety of courses
that involved submarine operation, anti-tank
technology, counterinsurgency techniques,
you name it. They really see the PLO
and the ANC as one in the same.
The reaction of the government ordering a general mobilization,
arming the white community, arresting
tens of thousands of Africans,
a show of force throughout the country,
closed a chapter as far as our methods
of political struggle are concerned.
There are many people who feel that it
is useless and futile for us to continue
talking peace and nonviolence against
a government whose reply is only
savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people.
"Bombs have exploded almost daily
in the run-up to Wednesday's poll,
the latest a huge car bomb, which
devastated shops in the central town
of Witbank. The blasts have been officially
blamed on the African National Congress...
After decades of non-violent struggle,
Nelson Mandela formed the armed wing
of the African National Congress.
They turned first to sabotage, then
to civilian bombings in order to have
their political aspirations recognized.
"If this was the work of the ANC, it's their
boldest attack to date, and demonstrates the
organization's determination to carry the guerilla
war to South Africa's major city centers."
"The explosion tore apart the bus
in the very heart of Jerusalem,
killing many of those on board. It was the
mirror image of last week's suicide bomb."
I am pained when I read the story of a
65-year-old Palestinian woman who became
the carrier of a suicide bomb, and in a
note she indicated that she had to do that
because she was trying to save her
grandchildren from being killed,
and we're saying what unfair choices to put before people.
Security and terrorism are important issues,
but they're symptoms. They're not independent
variables. Israel is the strong party. Once
you bring the occupation into the picture,
there isn't any more symmetry. There's no
more both sides-us and them-the balance
that everybody loves. Palestinians
aren't occupying Tel Aviv.
We are pleading that we do not
wait for more people to be killed.
It is quite apparent that the political
authorities will on their own not act.
We need to pressurize them.
Despite all this repressive machinery,
there's a general kind of agreement that
it was the international dimension and the
internal resistance, the South African.
Intifada, if you like, that really
brought an end to Apartheid.
You had a mass of people, people's
movements, and resistance organizations etc.
That were in terms of numbers of people
quite large, but weak, taking on very
sophisticated structures of repression.
So, a really powerful opponent on
one hand, and a weak one on the other.
It was the international isolation campaign
that brought a sense of balance between the two.
At that point, the South Africans actually
seek out advice from the Israelis
on how to sell themselves in the.
West and how to improve their image.
The South Africans looked to Israel as a
sort of beacon, and they didn't understand
why Israel had managed to withstand
criticism for decades and survive,
and why South Africa was failing.
A lot of Israelis fear that they may one
day be delegitimized in the same way.
South Africa was.
What we would like is for the public
to realize that they actually have a
real positive role to play. They
can actually boycott these goods,
and we're only individuals, but
together when we act holistically
such as the protest today, and even
on an individual day-to-day basis,
we can have a real impact in challenging
the occupation on a long-term level.
The global call came in 2005 from Palestinian
civil society organizations, and the idea
was to craft a strategy that would be a
non-violent means of pressuring Israel
to abide by international law using economic pressure.
These campaigns are taking root. They're
gaining new supporters every day.
The churches have taken the lead in saying,
“We want socially responsible investment,
and that means we want to be sure that
none of the companies we invest in
are profiting from occupation.”
There are many, many, many initiatives going
around the world for boycotting Israeli goods
boycotting Israeli institutions and so on,
so it's growing, in the cultural, academic,
medical, even trade unions. In South
Africa COSATU, the main trade union
body in South Africa, which has about 2
million members, supported the boycott.
There are so many. They're mushrooming
really in the last two years.
This is happening more and more. In North.
America you have the Canadian union
of postal workers. Prior to that, the
Canadian union of public employees.
The incredible growing movement, I mean, I've
traveled to literally dozens of campuses
around the United States, and there
are active divestment groups.
There are church divestment movements that
are starting and really gaining strength,
and facing incredible resistance, but
they're not being deterred by it.
As our South African comrades and
colleagues remind us, their first call for
boycott was issued in the late 1950s.
Europe and the West started listening
in the '70s, early '80s, so it took them
30 years to get anybody to listen to them.
So we're doing much better they tell us.
You're going much faster than we did.
The idea of a one-state solution begins with the notion that
no matter how they got there, no matter
the competing historical narratives,
the country belongs to all who live in it.
Let 100% of the people live in 100% of the land,
Since nobody can agree on how to divide it.
Israel's going to have to stop being a
Jewish state. It can't be an ethnocracy,
and it has to become a democracy, whether
it's a one-state or a confederation,
or whatever the arrangement is, that's
what's going to have to happen.
And it doesn't mean, I try to tell
Israelis, that everything's lost.
In South Africa, people still talk Afrikaans.
They still have an Afrikaner university.
You know, nobody's going to stop speaking Hebrew here.
You're restructuring. It'll be in a
different, healthier environment.
That's the challange, That's why I like this one-state idea.
You know, it wasn't only blacks who
were freed when Apartheid ended.
I was freed. We all were freed. We were
liberated from this terrible corrosive
vision of trying to build an ethnically pure state.
And decades of Apartheid regime propaganda, like decades of.
Zionist propaganda, said to the people: “If
you give up control, you will be devoured.
You will be thrown into the sea. You will be killed.”
And so it was very important for the
anti-Apartheid movement to offer to
ordinary white citizens a credible alternative
message. To say: “You will not be devoured.
You give up the system, and you will have a place in the future,
and it's an inclusive future.”
There's already a one-state. It's already
one state, but it's a one-state living
under Apartheid. It's how to transform it
from Apartheid to democracy where people
get equal rights based on citizenship, not on
ethnicity, religion, gender, or any other identity.
In South Africa saying that the country
belongs to all who live in it doesn't
magically solve the problems. There are
still massive political struggles in South
Africa over resource allocation, over
the speed of land reform, the speed of
economic reform, over affirmative action.
Those struggles for social justice
continue, but they have to start
from the premise that everyone is entitled to equal rights.
But you know the world doesn't stand still.
There are people I meet today in South Africa
who don't understand what Apartheid
was about. They've come into a
whole new world, so it's not impossible
to think of other generations.
We must have the ability to think beyond our
own generation, to think into the future.
What does it matter if a man is white
or black? What does it matter if he's
a Jew or he's an Arab? It is possible.
Israel, it is possible.
It is possible to have peace with Jews and Arabs
if the heart is ready, if the soul is ready,
if we can transcend these petty foibles of power and pomposity,
and we say to this world: “It is possible.”
It is possible.