Apartheid and Settler-colonialism: A look at South Africa to Palestine

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n recent years, human rights organizations and legal experts have increasingly labeled Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians as apartheid, fueling a long-running controversy over whether this is a fair approach to define the country’s actions toward the Palestinians.

In 1973, the United Nations General Assembly passed the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA). ICSPCA defines apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.

The policy of apartheid, originating in South Africa, mandated that non-white South Africans, who constituted the majority of the population, reside in separate areas from White South Africans and utilize separate public facilities. Additionally, contact between the different racial groups was heavily restricted. This policy resulted in the physical separation of individuals based on their race, affecting various aspects of their lives, including their residential locations, access to public amenities, and social interactions. The sole focus of apartheid was to elevate one racial group over another in order to perpetuate the dominant group’s hegemony.

Notable apartheid laws in South Africa:

The Glen Grey Act 1894: (Established the Foundation of Apartheid prior to the National Party’s election in 1948). It was dubbed “a Bill for Africa” by then Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes to further disenfranchise Black South Africans and limit their economic opportunities.

The Population Registration Act of 1950:  The registering of every South African based on their racial traits. In which the group to which an individual belonged significantly determined their social rights, political rights, educational prospects, and economic standing.

The Separate Amenities Act 1953: The Act made racial segregation in public places, transportation, and services permissible. The Act only applied to public highways and streets.

Exploring the parallels in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

On November 2, 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, famously wrote a letter, coined as the Balfour Declaration to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. This subsequently fostered the British government’s commitment for the Zionist movement to allow the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The establishment of a Jewish state in a primarily non-Jewish land became a crucial pillar of apartheid. Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, consequently, became the oppressed majority in their own land.

According to Amnesty International, the comprehensive report titled, ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’, explains how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, severe movement restrictions, and the denial of Palestinian nationality and citizenship are all components of a system that amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is sustained through violations which Amnesty International determined to be a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.

In a statement, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard, said, “Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act”.

Apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive administrations have enacted and enforced a system of laws, policies, and practices aimed at oppressing and dominating Palestinians. This system manifests itself in many ways throughout the various sectors where Israel exercises control over Palestinian rights, but the goal is always the same: to favor Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

The Israeli government achieved this through three basic strategies:

Maintaining control and dominance over the non-Jewish population. In 2018, the Knesset enacted a bill with constitutional authority confirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” asserting that the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people” within that area, and defining “Jewish settlement” as a national value.

Various Israeli administrations have enacted laws and policies to ensure the continued fragmentation of the Palestinian population. Palestinians are limited to enclaves in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and refugee camps, where they face separate legal and administrative systems. This has contributed to the erosion of social, and political alliances amongst Palestinian groups, as well as stifling prolonged resistance against the apartheid system.

In March 2019, Netanyahu stated, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them”.

Settler colonialism and economic impoverishment

In the occupied West Bank, Israel forcibly relocated Palestinians and demolished their homes to make room for illegal Jewish-only settlements, which the international community condemns as illegitimate.

In Israel’s Negev desert, where Bedouin Palestinians are now confined in townships, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, slammed Israel’s plan for coordinated ethnic cleansing as a “Strategy of Judaization that “excludes, discriminates against and displaces minorities, particularly affecting Palestinian communities, side by side with the accelerated development of predominantly Jewish settlements”.

According to the 2019 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Assistance to the Palestinian people (UNCTAD), “Forced dependence on employment in Israel and settlements impairs exports and weakening long-term growth”. The report notes that “The depression-level unemployment rate in the Occupied Palestinian Territory continued to climb in 2018, reaching 31 per cent; 52 per cent in Gaza and 18 per cent in the West Bank. As in previous years, women and youth were disproportionately impacted”.