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South Africanization in Palestine

29 May 2002

Welcome to the new Qalandia checkpoint.  Hundreds of Palestinians line up, seeking passage to and from Ramallah and Jerusalem.  Concrete barriers separate men and women, each in their respective long lines.  Razor wire is strewn everywhere to contain the masses and separate them from the Israeli soldiers; the latter stand behind concrete blocks and sandbags as they check ID’s, one by one.  The situation is slow and tense today as in recent days, as Israel is beset by numerous warnings of possible attacks.  Almost every Palestinian trying to get to Jerusalem is turned back.  Those entering Ramallah are obviously worried that they won’t be able to get back to Jerusalem.

Traffic at Qalandia Checkpoint Photo courtesy of International Checkpoint Watch Click to enlarge

The new Qalandia isn’t just a beefed up checkpoint-turned-border between Israel and Palestinian areas.  It’s a model for separating Israel from the future Palestinian state; or, more appropriately, the eight future Palestinian “statelets” in the West Bank.  Looking past the rhetoric of Israel’s new tactic to force reform and new leadership upon the Palestinian Authority as yet another prerequisite to political negotiations, Ariel Sharon’s government and military are planting new and ominous facts on the rocky Palestinian land.

In real terms, Sharon’s vision is to divide the West Bank into eight self-governing Palestinian cantons, each marginally autonomous but disconnected by the growing network of settlements, bypass roads, and military installations.  Checkpoints such as Qalandia would become permanent border crossings between Palestinian populated areas.  With no control over their land or natural growth expansion, these statelets would become strikingly similar to the Bantustans that the white government in South Africa attempted to establish for the majority blacks as a unilateral solution to Apartheid.  By divulging the oppressed majority into “autonomous” zones, the minority can exhale its heavy burden of oppression.  The result is urban incarceration of a population economically addicted to the controlling power and third party benevolence, and a canton system that is easily tempered at the whim of Israel's military might.

The Israeli authorities have begun a policy of requiring new special permits, which must be obtained from Israeli military offices, before Palestinians can cross from one major West Bank zone to another.  These freedom-of-movement certificates must be renewed every month, are only valid when the checkpoint is open (i.e. sun-up to sun-down), and by no means guarantee a person safe and unmolested access from one side to the other.  Israel’s rationale, according to government spokespersons, is that these major checkpoints will reduce the need for smaller, isolated checkpoints.  But in fact, the military is shifting towards a more permanent status for its heavy occupation. 

What does this mean for Palestine and Palestinians, besides an infinitely perpetuated system of control by an occupying army?  The Palestinian economy, which depends greatly on movement of resources and labor between cities, villages, and rural areas, will become wholly dependent on the policies of the Israeli army for viability.  Families with members in different Palestinian areas will be cut off from each other.  School and University students will have no freedom of movement for education.  The ability of medical and emergency services to meet the needs of the population will be severely hindered.  Private and non-governmental development will be stifled by the need to constantly apply to the Israeli military authorities for permits.  Businesses, individuals, and ambulances must utilize a “back-to-back” method, whereby individuals or commercial goods may travel freely until they reach the checkpoint, and then they must be transferred on foot across the checkpoint zone and loaded again on the other side.

Small villages will be the hardest hit.  Every day more Palestinian agricultural land is expropriated the Israeli soldiers or settlers.  Villages depend heavily on towns for most supplies, education, and especially medical care.  Today most villages in the West Bank located near settlements or bypass roads have their own access roads barricaded, cutting off contact even with other neighboring villages.  More than three-fourths of all villages are under some form of closure or curfew, which imposes travel restrictions on villagers and prevents medicines and other required materials from getting into the villages.  Armed Israeli soldiers, who often shoot in the air and lob tear gas and sound grenades towards civilian villagers, enforce these measures.  And in the aftermath of the month-long Israeli invasion of Palestinian areas, the Israeli army now freely enters each and any village, town, or city at will, negating any lingering likeness of Palestinian “authority.”

This reality is, unfortunately, not at all hypothetical.  Freedom of movement is noticeably more contained and denied at checkpoints.  Palestinian medical relief organizations are swamped with futile efforts to deliver supplies and doctors to villages and maintain local clinics.  Palestinians who work in towns other than where they live must find new accommodation in order to earn a living.  Many students wake up each morning not knowing if they will make it to class that day.  The Israeli army is already constructing trenches and barbed wire fences around Palestinian towns, most notably Bethlehem and Beit Jala where the fence cuts through Palestinian farmland in the valley below the settlement of Gilo, which borders Jerusalem.

While imposing new and grandiose conditions on a Palestinian government it doesn’t even consider worthwhile to seek a just solution that could end the twenty-month conflict, the Israeli government is subverting its own lace-lined rhetoric and creating a final status in Palestine that will have no hope of finality in terms of resistance to occupation.  The defective logic of Israel’s policy du jour is as transparent as the expected (and indeed ongoing) results of the implementation of such policy vis-à-vis Israel’s security interests.    

Occupation is the mark on the despondent face of each Palestinian at a checkpoint, each villager who goes without Insulin or kidney dialysis, each child turned away from the classroom, each refugee looking once again for a home.  Occupation is an entire nation of people with hardly any civil or democratic rights, and whose basic human rights are violated daily by a stronger neighboring nation.  Israel proves it is an occupier by the very means by which it is trying to rid itself of occupation.  Israelis see Apartheid on the horizon; a Palestinian majority staring down the guns of an Israeli minority, which is not more than a few generations away.  The prevailing Israeli approach is to cram three million Palestinians into Bantustans and let the occupied people call it what they want.  But as in South Africa, there won’t be enough fencing to cage a national movement for freedom.

Richard Johnson
Copyright (c) 2002 canadazone.com