Posted on: 2005
By Leila Farsakh
The Palestinian state remains an internationally endorsed project, yet an increasingly difficult one to implement. By analyzing the territorial, legal, and demographic developments that took place in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over the past ten years, this article assesses the extent to which the prospective Palestinian state has become unattainable. 
A comparison between the South African apartheid experience and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is made to shed light on the ways in which the Palestinian territories are becoming analogous to Bantustans. While historical comparisons are never exact or prescriptive, they raise interesting parallels whose implications need to be considered, if not altered, in any attempt to materialize the project of a viable Palestinian Independence.
The idea of the Palestinian state as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a new one. Yet, it is still far from being realised. It received its clearest endorsement by the international community with the publication of the US backed Road Map in May 2003. This plan called for the establishment of an “independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian State living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors,” as envisaged by UNSC resolution 1397 and the Saudi Initiative of March 2002.1 However after four years of the al-Aqsa Intifada that resulted in the killing of over 3,500 Palestinians and 989 Israelis,2 the economic and social resources of the Palestinians was severely damaged,3 and the infrastructure of the Palestinian authority destroyed; the prospects of a viable Palestinian state could not be more remote. The Israeli government’s decision in June 2004 to “disengage” unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and to continue the construction of a separation wall in the West Bank gave another blow to the project of a viable contiguous sovereign Palestinian entity in the Occupied Territories.
International scholars, as well as Palestinian NGOs, have long argued that the Oslo process and the Intifada did not bring the Palestinians closer to statehood, but rather confirmed an Israeli “apartheid” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS).4 Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister since 2001, had long contended that the Bantustan model, so central to the apartheid system, is the most appropriate to the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict.5 Others, by contrast, have maintained that the Palestinian territories have been transformed into cantons whose final status is still to be determined. 6 The difference in terminology between cantons and Bantustans is not arbitrary though. The former suggests a neutral territorial concept whose political implications and contours are left to be determined. The latter indicates a structural development with economic and political implications that put in jeopardy the prospects for any meaningfully sovereign viable Palestinian state. It makes the prospects for a binational state seem inevitable, if most threatening to the notion of ethnic nationalism.
The aim of this article is to analyze the demise of a potential Palestinian state by drawing on the South African apartheid paradigm. Although the comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and apartheid South Africa is not new, 7 it has not always been fully explained or accepted. This article seeks to fill this gap by exploring how the South African and the Zionist colonial experiences converged despite their significant historical differences. By carefully exploring the South African apartheid edifice, particularly the Bantustans, and comparing it with the structural developments set in place in the Palestinian territory since the Oslo process, it shows how the West Bank and Gaza Strip have moved towards a process of “Bantustanization” rather than of sovereign independence. This is a process by which Palestinian territories have been transformed into de facto population reserves out of which Palestinians cannot exit without the possession of a permit issued by Israeli military authorities. These “reserves” have remained dependent on the Israeli economy, but at the same time have been unable to gain access to it, nor capable of evolving into a sovereign independent entity. Whether by default or design, the Israeli response to the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Road Map have simply consolidated this process.
Source:
http://works.bepress.com
