Mapping Apartheid

The Washington Post actually published this Btselem map of Israel's Apartheid Wall and the matrix of control formed by other Israeli mechanisms. I commend the paper for including on the map the Israeli-only bypass roads, represented by the grey lines. When you take the Israeli-controlled areas and the settlements into account, you quickly see why I and many others claim Israel is creating a series of Palestinian bantustans, disconnected patches of Palestinian areas Israel controls from every angle.

The Post ran a story on the wall as well. The first paragraph describes the wall's chief planner , a"retired army colonel," as a "leading actor in Israel's modern story of statehood, conquest and the volatile task of erecting a boundary that divides Arab from Jew." Without much surprise, he also happens to be a settler -- a modern-day colonizer who thinks the Jews are entitled to more land that happens to be under the Palestinians.

It is deeply troubling how much this sort of language of separation replicates the logic of segregation and apartheid, which the separated people fought in great civil rights struggles. What is even more disturbing is how such logic can be repeated by American journalists and academics without even a pause nor awareness of the obvious analogue.

The Supreme Court of the United States recognized that the formula of "separate but equal" was a fallacious one. Yet, it is the basis for the mainstream view of what "peace" entails in Israel-Palestine. How foolish it is for American thinkers -- people who should know better -- to fail to apply their own history to a conflict their country has a central role in maintaining. The idea of separating Palestinians and Israelis has only amounted to further oppression of the Palestinians.

Nonsense, many Zionuts and other ignoramuses, will declare. They will charge that there was never such bloodshed and violence between blacks and whites in America or South Africa. If they counted all the slaves that dies in the trade of humans, the lynching, the outcome of an evil criminal justice system that for decades punished excessively any black it could (and still disproportionately punishes them), then they would see that the violence between Palestinians and Israelis is actually tame in comparison.

The biggest obstacle to peace is simply the fact that those in power would rather sacrifice rights and equality for continuing a history of dispossession, control, and systematic violence. By "those in power," I mean the US government and Israel of course. The ones with the power and weapons control the terms of the conflict -- not the dispossessed, the refugees, and the downtrodden. Thinking that such an imposing and grotesque wall keeping a people divided and suffering will bring about progress is a flight of ahistorical fantasy.

[tarboush tip: Yasser]