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The so-called Peace Process (11)
Posted on: February 27, 2014
By IMEU
New settlements contruction & theft of Palestinian land
- In the approximately seven months since negotiations restarted between Palestinians and
Talking Peace While Making War: Benjamin Netanyahu and the Peace Process
Israelis in late July 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has approved plans for11,700 new settlement units to be built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law. As each unit represents one house or apartment, most if not all of which will likely be home to more than one person, this means once these plans have been realized the settler population will increase by well over 20,000 people.
- Additionally, Israeli authorities have moved ahead with several other construction projects intended to confiscate Palestinian land, restrict the growth of Palestinian population centers, and cement Israeli control over parts of the occupied territories, including through the creation of dubious “national parks” and archeological digs on occupied Palestinian land.
Provocative military raids & killings of Palestinians
- Since the restart of negotiations in late July, Israeli forces have killed approximately 30 Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, including an 85-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy who was shot in the back with live ammunition. Most of these killings took place during aggressive raids carried out by the Israeli army into Palestinian towns, cities, and refugee camps.
- On February 26, 2014, Amnesty International released a report entitled “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank,” which documented “mounting bloodshed and human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as a result of the Israeli forces’ use of unnecessary, arbitrary and brutal force against Palestinians since January 2011.” The report found that “Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity.” It noted that Israeli forces killed more Palestinians in the West Bank last year than were killed in 2011 and 2012 combined. The director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, Philip Luther, concluded:
The frequency and persistence of arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and police officers – and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators – suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy.”
Destruction of Palestinian homes & structures
- Since talks restarted in late July, Israel has destroyed approximately 400 Palestinian homes and other structures in the occupied territories. In the process, approximately 800 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, including approximately 350 children. According to the UN, in January 2014 alone, 100 Palestinian-owned structures were demolished in the occupied territories, displacing more than 180 people, including almost 100 children. Most of the Palestinian homes and other structures targeted for destruction by Israel are located in occupied East Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, areas that Israel has been attempting to squeeze the Palestinian population out of in order to cement its control. Israel normally destroys Palestinian structures on the pretext that they were built without permission from Israeli authorities, however such permission is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain.
- During this period, numerous human rights and humanitarian organizations, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, and the United Nations, have issued reports and statements,individually and in conjunction with other groups, condemning Israel’s policy of destroying Palestinian homes. On January 31, UN Humanitarian Coordinator James W. Rawley condemned a recent wave of Israeli demolitions, stating:
I am deeply concerned about the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in Area C [the 60% of the West Bank under total and direct Israeli control], particularly along the Jordan Valley where the number of structures demolished more than doubled in the last year. This activity not only deprives Palestinians of access to shelter and basic services, it also runs counter to international law.”
On February 7, a group of 25 humanitarian organizations working in the occupied territoriesissued a statement expressing grave concern over the steep increase in Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes and other structures. The statement noted that the number of demolitions carried out by Israel between July 2013, when talks restarted, and December 2013 increased by almost half over the same period in 2012, and the number of Palestinians displaced increased by almost three quarters.
Adding new demands to negotiations
- Since returning to office for his second and third terms as prime minister, Netanyahu has added at least two new demands to the negotiations that were never formally made by previous Israeli governments: Insisting on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, andinsisting that four so-called settlement “blocs” built on occupied Palestinian land would become part of Israel under any peace deal, rather than the three previously demanded by Israeli negotiators. Settlement blocs encompass a far greater amount of land than the currently existing buildings within them cover, and are strategically located to divide Palestinian population centers from one another and to sever the West Bank into easily controlled cantons. In past negotiations, Israel has insisted on keeping the massive settlement blocs of Ariel, Gush Etzion and Maale Adumim, while Netanyahu reportedly also wants to keep Beit El, which is located near Ramallah in the central West Bank.
Provocative & inflammatory statements
- Since talks restarted, senior members of Netanyahu’s government, including ministers and deputy ministers, have made a steady stream of racist and inflammatory statements, including asserting that Jews are superior to non-Jews; accusing US Secretary of State John Kerry of anti-Semitism and attempting to “terrorize” Israel; claiming that Palestinians are “wolves” who don’t want peace; denying that Israel is in fact militarily occupying Palestinian land; declaring again and again eternal Israeli control over Palestinian East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the whole of the occupied territories; and pledging to fight against the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Netanyahu has failed to demote or punish any of his ministers, despite the fact that they have repeatedly voiced such inflammatory rhetoric that in many instances directly contradicts his alleged support for the two-state solution.
- Netanyahu has made a number of provocative and inflammatory statements himself, including:
- On January 24, 2014, Netanyahu told a press conference in Davos, Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Summit, that he had no intention of removing Jewish settlers from the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, a requirement for the creation of a viable and genuinely independent Palestinian state, telling reporters: “I do not intend to evacuate any settlements or uproot a single Israeli.” Following criticism from right-wing allies who feared Netanyahu intended to leave settlers inside a Palestinian state, Netanyahu’s office replied by explaining that his statement was merely a ploy “designed to expose the true face of the Palestinian Authority” as he expected it would reject the idea of having settlers inside a Palestinian state.
- On December 19, 2013, Netanyahu promised members of his Likud party that he would never stop building settlements, declaring: “We will not stop, even for a moment, building our country and becoming stronger, and developing … the settlement enterprise.”
- On November 13, Netanyahu blamed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and alleged PA “incitement” for the killing of an Israeli soldier by a young Palestinian man on a bus in northern Israel, despite providing no evidence to back up the claim.
- In October, Netanyahu praised the recently deceased, notoriously racist Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which sat in his two previous coalition governments. Netanyahu declared that Yosef, who preached that non-Jews “were born only to serve us [Jews]” and once called on God to “annihilate” and “exterminate” Arabs, was “one of the great Torah sages of our generation.” (See here for more on Yosef.)
- On October 6, Netanyahu blamed the PA after a nine-year-old girl living in a settlement was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant, despite having no evidence to connect Palestinian leaders to the incident.
Source:
http://imeu.org
Maps 3-7: Five Elements Defining the Palestinian Bantustan
Israel defines its policy of ensuring permanent control over the Occupied Territories as “creating facts on the ground.” 
In this conception, Israeli control must be made immune from any external or internal pressures to remove Israel from the Occupied Territories (which Israel vehemently denies is an occupation at all), as well as to foreclose forever the possibility of a viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state. Nevertheless, even Sharon recognizes that Israel needs a Palestinian state, since it can neither extend citizenship to the Territories’ three and a half million Palestinians nor deny it to them. It also needs a Palestinian state to relieve itself of the necessity of accepting the refugees. A Bantustan, a cantonized Palestinian mini-state controlled by Israel yet possessing a limited independence, thus solves Israel’s fundamental dilemma of how to keep control over the entire country yet “get rid of” its Palestinian population (short of actual “transfer”). The contours of that Bantustan are defined by five elements comprising Israel’s Matrix of Control as illustrated in the following maps: (1) Areas A and B; (2) the closure; (3) the settlement blocs; (4) the infrastructure; and (5) the Separation Barrier/Wall. A full (if complex) picture of the Matrix of Control is depicted in Map 10, and the truncated Palestinian mini-state Israel is creating in Map 11.
Map 3: Defining the Palestinian Bantustan. Element #1:West Bank Areas A, B and C
In the Oslo II agreement of 1995, the West Bank was divided into three Areas: A, under full Palestinian Authority control; B, under Palestinian civil control but joint Israeli-Palestinian security; and C, under full Israeli control. Although Area A was intended to expand until it included all of the West Bank except Israel’s settlements, its military facilities and East Jerusalem – whose status would then be negotiated – in fact the division became a permanent feature. Area A comprises 18% of the West Bank, B another 22%, leaving a full 60%, Area C, including most of Palestinian farmland and water, under exclusive Israeli control. These areas, comprising 64 islands, shape the contours of the “cantons” Sharon proposed as the basis of the future Palestinian state. The emerging Bantustan will thus consist of five truncated cantons: a northern one around Nablus and Jenin; a central one around Ramallah; a southern one around Bethlehem and Hebron; enclaves in East Jerusalem; and Gaza. In this scheme Israel will expand from its present 78% to 85-90%, with the Palestinian state confined to just 10-15% of the country.
Source:
http://www.icahd.org
Posted on: March 21, 2013
By Noura Erakat
A just solution to the conflict—whether it results in one state or two—would dismantle those institutions that privilege any ethnic, religious or national group.
As President Barack Obama embarks on his listening tour in the Middle East, he is likely to witness the impact of two decades of the Oslo peace process. Twenty years, dozens of summits and millions of dollars have brought Palestinians and Israel no closer to establishing a viable peace.
A Palestinian house reflected in an Israeli glass building in Haifa. (Credit: Sherene Seikaly, 2003)
The US-brokered agreement has been associated with a mantra of establishing two states for two peoples, living side by side. In fact, Israel has existed as a state since 1948 and Palestinians have remained internally displaced within that state, exiled from it and occupied by it in adjacent territories. More significantly, Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Palestinians, Israeli citizens and stateless civilians alike, are inextricably populated throughout a single territorial entity under Israeli control. The call for two states is really a call for the separation of two populations based on ethno-national homogeneity. The proposal has failed, not just because of a lack of accountability, but because it is fundamentally flawed. Like prescribing aspirin to deal with cancer, Oslo offered truncated self-rule as a prescription for Jewish-Israeli settler-colonialism and domination.
Much like Marcus Garvey’s proposition in response to the Black Question in the United States, Zionists insisted upon the creation of a Jewish homeland in response to systemic anti-Semitism in Europe. The horror of the European Holocaust catalyzed the Zionist option and has, since then, eclipsed all other responses to institutionalized and ethnic-based bigotry. It has thus been excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible, to critique Jewish-Zionist domination in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) without falling prey to accusations of anti-Semitism. Fundamentally, however, both the opposition to anti-Semitism as well as to Jewish-Israeli privilege is rooted in an anti-domination discourse.
Establishing a Demographic Majority
Due to the insistence upon maintaining a Jewish demographic majority, Israel’s establishment and maintenance has necessitated the ongoing forced displacement of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Well before Israel’s establishment, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s chief architect and two-time prime minister, said that in order to be successful, Jews must comprise 80 percent of the population, hardly a plausible ratio in light of a vibrant Palestinian society in 1948. As put by the Israeli historian Benny Morris during an interview discussing his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,
Ben Gurion…understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst…that has to be clear, it’s impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen there.
And so based on that vision, Zionists demolished 531 Arab villages and expelled some 700,000 Palestinians from what is today Israel proper. The “problem,” so to speak, is that Zionist forces did not expel allPalestinians. Instead, the 100,000 Palestinians remaining within Israel at the conclusion of the 1948 war today constitute a 1.2 million-person population, approximately 20 percent of Israel’s total population.
Had Israel declared its borders along the 1949 armistice line, maintaining an 80 percent demographic balance may have been possible. Israel, however, has never declared any borders and, in accordance with a plan first elaborated by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon immediately after the 1967 war, it has steadily expanded into the rest of Mandate Palestine, home now to 4 million Palestinians.
As of October 2012, the balance of Jews to non-Jews throughout Israel and the OPT was approximately 5.9 million Jewish Israelis, including the settler population, and 6.1 million Palestinians.
At this juncture, Israel could abandon its commitment to a Jewish demographic majority and establish a state for all its citizens without distinction to religion. Its leaders and supporters reject this pluralistic, democratic option outright and equate it with the destruction of Israel.
Alternatively, Israel could annex the territories and impose an apartheid regime, wherein a minority rules over the majority. Israeli leaders reject this option but, notably, a significant majority of Israelis support it, as revealed by an October 2012 poll published in Haaretz. Although Israel refuses to formally acknowledge it, this reality currently exists as a matter of fact.
Perhaps Israel’s best option for preserving a Jewish demographic majority is the establishment of a Palestinian state and the de jure establishment of international borders—the choice it abandoned more than four decades ago. Indeed, this option has received the most fervent support from the international community and the formal Palestinian leadership, represented by the Palestinian Authority, as well as Israel’s most strident supporters.
Nevertheless, Israel has obliterated the two-state option since the signing of Oslo in 1993. It sanctioned, funded and encouraged, as a matter of national policy, the growth of the settler population in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, from 200,000 to nearly 600,000. It built 85 percent of the separation barrier on occupied West Bank land, circumscribing its largest settlement blocs and effectively confiscating 13 percent of the territory. Rather than prepare Area C (62 percent of the West Bank, now under interim Israeli civil and military jurisdiction) for Palestinian control, it has entrenched its settlement-colonial enterprise. Israel’s siege has exacerbated the cultural, social and national distance between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And its intense Judaization campaign in East Jerusalem has accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians there, hardly preparing it to become the independent capital of the future Palestinian state.
For liberal Zionists who believe that the preservation of Israel as a Jewish state and the protection of Palestinian dignity and freedom are compatible, this predicament is especially curious—why would Israel sabotage its best available option? Crudely put, because Israel’s preferred option is the one that it has always pursued: the establishment of absolute control over Palestinians as a fragmented and dispensable underclass, without distinction to their status as citizens of Israel or civilians under occupation.
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Zionists did not historically conceive of Palestinians as a national polity entitled to self-determination; they were not considered a “people” at all. Palestinian self-representation, resistance and international recognition, however, have forced even the most ardent Zionists to reconsider this proposition. Notwithstanding their accepted standing as a people today, Israel continues to deal with Mandate Palestine’s non-Jewish indigenous population as a demographic, national and cultural impediment to its settler-colonial project rather than a constituent or future neighbor.
Ethno-National Domination
Upon its establishment, Israel passed a series of laws that privileged its Jewish inhabitants and further dispossessed and marginalized its non-Jewish indigenous population. Two laws are particularly relevant: the Citizenship Law (1952) bifurcated Jewish nationality from Israeli citizenship and denationalized the Palestinian population. In doing so, the state instantly created a two-tiered system of rights: one available for Jews, who could be both nationals and citizens, and one for non-Jews, who could be citizens only. The Law of Return (1950) extended the right to Israeli citizenship and associated state benefits to any Jewish person, now a Jewish national as well, anywhere in the world.
Together these laws ensured that Jewish persons who lived beyond Israel’s boundaries and had no relationship to it had more rights than the state’s own non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, even when their meager numbers did not constitute one-fifth of Israel’s population, as they do today. Not only was a nascent Israel cementing its Jewish demographic majority, but by instituting a series of similar laws, it also preserved Jewish political, social and economic privilege.
Notwithstanding the significant demographic majority of Jews to non-Jews within Israel proper, Israel has treated its Palestinian citizens as a fifth column. The State Department’s 2005 Annual Human Rights Report notes that there is institutionalized legal and societal discrimination against Israel’s Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens. The government does not provide Israeli Arabs with the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services as Jews.
In addition to their socioeconomic subjugation, Israel has also worked to thwart the national identity of, and social solidarity among, its minority and indigenous Palestinian population.
In furtherance of its demographic priorities, some of these Israeli policies have had the express purpose of reducing the size of its Palestinian population. The Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), better known as the Ban on Family Reunification, for example, prohibits the adjustment of status and acquisition of citizenship among spouses from the Occupied Palestinian Territory and “enemy states,” not coincidentally all the states with a high concentration of Palestinians: Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq. In its January 2012 decision upholding the law, the Israeli High Court of Justice explained, “human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”
But the threat is not just numeric; it is just as much about competing narratives and memory. At stake is the state’s own national mythology.
In 2011, Israel passed the State Budget Law Amendment. Popularly known as the Nakba Law, it penalizes, by revoking state funding, any institution that either challenges Israel’s founding as a Jewish and democratic state or commemorates Israel’s Independence Day as one of mourning or loss. The threat any such commemoration poses is a challenge to Israel’s narrative of righteous conception.
The Prawer Plan, named after its author, former deputy chair of the National Security Council Ehud Prawer, seeks to forcibly displace up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their homes and communities in the Negev Desert to urban townships to make room for Jewish-only settlements and a forest. The plan, approved in September 2011, has no demographic impact, as these Palestinians are already Israeli citizens. It does, however, violently sever these Bedouin communities from their agricultural livelihoods and centuries-long association with that particular land.
Similarly, in 2001 the High Court of Justice rejected an appeal from internally displaced Palestinians to return to the villages of Ikrit and Kafr Bir’im, near the Lebanon border, from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948. Like the Negev-based Palestinians, these Palestinians are Israeli citizens and therefore pose no demographic threat. In fact, they currently live only miles away from their demolished villages. Their return to them only threatens a Zionist narrative that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. To further the erasure, Israel plans on building Jewish settlements where these communities once lived.
Israel’s land and housing planning policies in the Galilee demonstrate that the threat is not just about demographics and memory but the cohesion of Palestinians within the state, and the potential for Palestinian nationalism. In Nazareth, home to 80,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, bidding rights for public building opportunities are reserved for citizens who have completed military service. This excludes nearly all of Nazareth’s Palestinian population, who do not serve in the Israeli military for historical and political reasons. In other Galilee cities, “Admissions Committees” can legally exclude Palestinians from their residential communities for being “socially unsuitable” based on their race or national origin alone. Together with its policy of Jewish settlement expansion within Israel as well as a matrix of similarly discriminatory urban planning laws, Israel forces its Palestinian citizens to live in noncontiguous ghettos throughout the state.
Palestinian refugees fundamentally disrupt these national goals: their return would shatter Israel’s Jewish majority, their presence is a living testament of Palestinian narrative and memory, and their historical claims dislocate the ghettoization of Palestinians within Israel today. The absence of refugees, however, does not reverse Israel’s policies aimed at diminishing the number of Palestinians, concentrating them geographically and separating them from one another.
Abandoning the right of return for refugees in this context is therefore not “pragmatic” at all. Refugees are not the impediment to establishing a viable peace; its most formidable impediment is Israel’s insistence upon Jewish primacy throughout Israel and the OPT.
Inadequate Remedies
A Palestinian state is hardly adequate to remedy these conditions. At best, it responds to Israel’s hegemonic ambitions by establishing an Arab Muslim and Christian corollary where Palestinians can assert their own ethno-national dominance. It disregards the broader Palestinian question, which stems from their forced displacement, exile and occupation. In contrast to the international enthusiasm today for a Palestinian state, in 1976 the UN General Assembly, in response to the establishment of Transkei, a self-governing authority within the South African Republic, passed Resolution 31/6 A, which condemned the establishment of bantustans as designed to consolidate the inhuman policies of apartheid, to destroy the territorial integrity of the country, to perpetuate white minority domination and to dispossess the African people of South Africa of their inalienable rights.
Even a single democratic, secular state without a concomitant anti-domination movement will not suffice to remedy these conditions. Irrespective of the number of states, the goal should be to dismantle those institutions that confer privilege to any particular ethnic, religious or national group. As indicated by the outstanding poverty gaps between blacks and whites in South Africa after the nominal end of apartheid in the early 1990s, this must include more than a simple removal of discriminatory laws. Transitional justice must feature rehabilitative policies as well. Equality under the law alone will do little to alleviate the criminalization of minority, indigenous communities, as indicated in the United States by the striking proportion of incarcerated Native Americans in the states where their numbers are still significant. To adequately remedy institutionalized discrimination and subjugation, reformed state institutions should also be imbued with an ethos of socioeconomic dignity for all its citizens and residents.
Failure to do so in Israel and the OPT will likely result in the de facto ghettoization, systematic impoverishment and criminalization of Palestinians regardless of their pre-existing status as citizens, civilians or refugees. Under such circumstances, in a one-state solution, their condition would be like Native American reservations, and in a two-state solution, they will be like South African bantustans. Both ought to be rejected in favor of a democratic and dignified one-state formula as only the first step.
Source:
http://www.thenation.com
Posted on: 19 August 2013
By Jessica Purkiss
After a long career as a journalist covering the apartheid in South Africa, Allister Sparks travelled Israel and Palestine, shocked by what he witnessed he was compelled to comment, “When I look at Israel, when I traveled through the West Bank, I was looking at Bantustans-totally unviable, impossible states”.
Bantustans were Apartheid South Africa’s answer to the “problem” of the black majority. Under the Bantu Authorities Act, the man behind the vision, Dr. Hendrick Verwoerd, set about cutting little islands in the map of South Africa that were to become “states” exclusively created for the black population.
Under the façade that there would be no peace until the white man had his country and the black man had his, each island was declared an independent state. They had their own governments and infrastructure, but in reality they were merely impoverished puppet states controlled by South Africa and acted as a smokescreen for the continued policies of Apartheid.
In his speech to congress Verwoerd referenced the conflict between the Arabs and Jews as one in which the solution chased was Apartheid. Years later, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have met in Jerusalem to carve the map of peace for Israel and Palestine to the shape of a one state for them, one state for us solution, in the hope of ending the decades long conflict.
But the question remains what will these two states look like in a two state solution, or rather what will Palestinian statehood look under this vision?
Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, said to Memo that he believes Israel had created a situation in which it is impossible to detach any definable territory from Israel. He said, “There’ s one territory under Israeli control from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, with one army, even one electrical system and one water system.”
Shortly after the commencement of talks Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the approval of 1,200 new settlement units to be constructed in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Settlement construction has eaten away at Palestinian land, with the 125 Israeli sanctioned but internationally deemed illegal settlements carving up the diminishing West Bank and increasingly encircling the major cities.
Meanwhile the remaining land of the West Bank is subject to further fracturing. A network of Jewish only roads connect the flourishing settler communities from their homes in the West Bank to Israel proper, a 8 meter high Separation Wall casts a shadow over the Palestinian villages whose land it cuts through, while military checkpoints dot the West Bank.
“Israel doesn’t want a two state solution, it wouldn’t be building settlements if it did, but Israel also can’t accept one state because it wants a Jewish state. Just like South Africa, the only way to control a whole country and exclude Palestinians is apartheid,” said Halper.
Following the announcement, Netanyahu claimed that the building of further settlements would not derail the peace talks because they would be built in the urban blocks he believes will become part of Israel proper in the final agreement. The real issue, the leader said, is creating a de-militarized Palestinian state to finally recognize and accept the one and only Jewish State. Theechoes of Verwoerd can be heard as he stood up and delivered his Senate speech with conviction, “After all, there cannot be domination by Whites over Blacks where there are two neighboring states, the White state and the Black state…A White state, a big and strong White nation, along with various Bantu national units and areas (or states, if you like)”.
The Bantustans were seen by the world as fantasy entities with governments and borders that gave them a veneer of reality. Similarly a de-militarized “state” of Palestine as envisaged by Israel leads one to consider when a state ceases to be a state.
This vision of Palestinian statehood has been set forward since the Oslo Accords and reiterated through years of failed negotiations. Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reportedly said to the Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alemhe that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.
The Oslo Accords divided Palestine into three areas, with a 60% slice of the West bank, called Area C, placed under complete Israeli control, where it still remains today. Memo spoke to Chris McGreal, a journalist who has written extensively on the subject as Guardian correspondent in both Johannesburg in the 90’s and Jerusalem during the second intifada. He said this slice contains only around 2% of the population, corroborating South Africa’s Bantustan model.
“It was about putting people where you want them, about White South Africans keeping as much land while shedding responsibility for of the black population. Take as much land for as little people, that to me is the Bantustan model.”
The Bantustans led to the herding of the majority black population into reserves that made up only 13% the land. Israel extends the Bantustan model past the West Bank, to include Palestinian residents of Israel. Under a similar façade of the protection of rights, Israel is in the process of passing the Prawer Plan. Through policies of displacement and dispossession the plan aims to relocate 70,000 Palestinian Bedouin from 35 unrecognized villages in the Naqab Desert, southern Israel, to government-regulated towns and cities that will condense them into an urban area that occupies only one percent of the land.
The Olso Accords also established the Palestinian Authority, the body that governs the West Bank. According to Na’eem Jeenah, a South African journalist, “What Oslo did was create an authority, which allowed Israel to still control the occupied Palestinian territory, but control it through a Palestinian authority. In fact, Israel controls the borders. Israel controls taxes. Israel controls all kinds of things-access in and out of that area,”
“Israel can’t create a situation of control without a pretend president of a Palestinian Bantustan, that’s Abu Mazen,” said Halper.
When asked at what point a state ceases to be a state, McGreal pointed to the reality that some countries in Africa are so dependent on Western aid, for example, they are effectively neo-colonies. Aside from defining physical borders, he argued there are much more intricate details in establishing a Palestinian state. He pointed to the example of water, a commodity Israel takes from the West Bank and questioned whether they would be willing to give up access to the water.
“The real danger of a Bantustan parallel is that you emerge with a Palestinian leadership that is effectively dependant on Israel, this would be the definition of a Bantustan Palestine. Israel may cede sovereignty but will seek to agree some kind of control,” he said.
The essence of the Bantustans was the creation of a fantasy entity for one race exclusively. The entity was to resemble a state but not to be a state, with sovereignty but dependent, run by a leader that governed the oppressed but who was a puppet for the oppressor. As settlements flourish amid peace talks discussing Palestinian statehood is this that far from the reality Israel has and continues to create today?
Posted on: Jan 4, 2013
By Wayne Madsen
The Israeli government calls them Areas A, B, and C of “Judea and Samaria.” To the rest of the world, the areas are known as Palestine, a nation that has state observer status in the United Nations and is a full member of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Arab League.
Palestinians throw stones toward Israeli troops during clashes in the village of Kafr Qaddum near the West Bank city of Nablus on December 21, 2012
No other country in the world recognizes the existence of “Judea and Samaria” but 142 nations recognize the independence and statehood of Palestine.
Area C of the West Bank of Palestine is under full Israeli political and military control and there are plans underway to annex Area C to Israel. The Israeli military has security control over Area B, largely Palestinian rural land and in danger of being gobbled up by Israeli annexation if the expansionist Israel Home Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and the right-wing of Likud have their way. Area A is under the control of the Palestinian Authority and includes its administrative headquarters city of Ramallah and other Palestinian population centers.
When one looks at a map of the Israeli area boundaries in the West Bank one can only be reminded of the patchwork quilt of majority African “Bantustans” created by apartheid South Africa. In fact, what the Benjamin Netanyahu government has offered to Palestine in the way of independence is for an unarmed and defenseless entity to exist as an unequal part of a greater Israeli zone of influence with Area C being exchanged for Israel’s recognition of Palestine’s faux “independence.” Netanyahu has referred to the co-principality of Andorra as a template for Palestine. Andorra’s actual heads of state are a Spanish Catholic bishop and the French president. Andorra’s actual independence from Spain and France is highly debatable, even though the country is a member of the UN and Council of Europe.
Such contrivances as planned by Israel for Palestine have been seen before in Bantustans with the names of Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana.
And in what should be taught to every African student, Israel was not only a major supporter of apartheid South Africa but it had close trade and security relations with the Bantustans because it saw them as a model for future “Arabstans” in the occupied Palestinian territories. These “Arabstans” now exist in the Gaza Strip and Areas A, B, and C of the West Bank.
Close Israeli-South African relations were capped off by a visit from South African Prime Minister B. J. Vorster to Israel in April 1976, the first by a South African head of government. Israel and South Africa jointly manufactured military hardware and weapons and electronic and signals intelligence systems as a way to bypass UN sanctions imposed on the apartheid state. And the two countries, with the assistance of Taiwan, jointly produced nuclear weapons and the fissionable U-235 uranium isotope, testing an atomic bomb in the South Atlantic near the Prince Edward Islands on September 22, 1979.
Although South Africa’s self-proclaimed Bantustans were only recognized by South Africa, Israel maintained de facto relations with the four entities. Transkei, Ciskei, and Bophuthatswana maintained trade missions in Tel Aviv staffed by Israelis. In fact, these Israelis were using passports from the “republics,” as well as other diplomatic contrivances, to support the illegal side of Mossad and international Jewish lobbying and Israeli influence-peddling operations worldwide.
With Transkei, Israel maintained close intelligence and counter-insurgency ties. Its Prime Minister George Matanzima, a nephew of then-imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, visited Israel in 1984, along with four Transkei Cabinet ministers.
But it was Ciskei, headed by President Lennox Sebe, which provided Israel with its closest Bantustan ally. Sebe traveled to Israel, supported illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, and received Israeli assistance, especially for his brutal police force. Relations were so close between the Bantustan and Israel, the Ciskei capital of Bisho had a sister city relationship with Ariel, an illegal Israeli settlement on the West Bank. A number of Israeli companies, many led by Likud officials, established themselves in Ciskei. Mossad and Israel Defense Force personnel helped Ciskei establish paramilitary units and an intelligence service. Ciskei’s flag shared its light blue and white colors with those of Israel’s flag.
Bophuthatswana resembled Palestine’s Area A and B territories. The Tswana “homeland” consisted of eight non-contiguous enclaves within South Africa. The Bantustan’s Sun City casino not only attracted top Western entertainers who did not want to run afoul of the sanctions on the apartheid regime, but also a fair number of Israeli-South African dual national organized crime figures who ran casino operations and opened up nearby strip clubs and bordellos catering to inter-racial sex.
Bophuthatswana maintained an unofficial embassy in Israel and the Bantustan’s President Lucas Mangope was received by a number of Israeli officials, including the famed General Moshe Dayan. Israel provided Bophuthatswana’s official armed forces with training and equipment and, in 1994, when Mangope was overthrown, he could only rely on the support of the white racist Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB), which was also believed to have received covert support from Israeli trainers and equippers. North West University in the former capital of Bophuthatswana, Mafikeng, honored the late Mangope in 2010. Unsurprisingly, the university also maintains close ties with Ben Gurion University in Israel.
Venda also received security assistance from Israel and its president, Patrick Mphephu, paid an official visit to Israel in 1980. In 1983, Israel hosted a large delegation from the Venda Chamber of Commerce.
Israel showed every intention of supporting other Bantustans after they became fully independent. In 1985, Israel received KwaZulu Bantustan’s Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. There were low-level Israeli links, mostly by Israeli military intelligence operatives in the guises of tourists and backpackers, with the Bantustan governments of Lebowa and Qwa Qwa in South Africa and Kavangoland, Ovamboland, and East Caprivi.
The Bantustans disappeared after the end of apartheid and were incorporated back into South Africa. Today, South Africa has implemented plans to boycott any goods originating from Israeli businesses in the occupied territories. Israel, the second-most ardent supporter of the Bantustans, after apartheid South Africa, has cried foul and is accusing South Africa of anti-Semitism. However, Israel stands guilty of racism and pro-segregation in Africa. It is a shameful history that Israel should not be permitted to run away from.
Source:
http://217.218.67.22/
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
By Ehab Zahriyeh
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 30 made clear his plan for Israeli forces to remain in the West Bank even if a peace deal is reached, a sign that the country’s 47-year occupation of Palestinian territory is likely to continue indefinitely.
“One must understand that in any future arrangement with the Palestinians, Israel must maintain security control of the area up to the Jordan River for a very long time,” Netanyahu said during a speech at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies.
His rhetoric appears to challenge his country’s two-decade commitment to an Oslo peace process in which Israel would hand over the great majority of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Prior to the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel officially began negotiating under a two-state for two peoples paradigm, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were under full Israeli Civil Administration control. The office was tasked with the handling of bureaucratic responsibilities of the occupied territories while the Israeli military was responsible for security.
With the onset of the Oslo process, however, limited autonomy and self-rule was given to the Palestinians in the West Bank (though not in Gaza). The West Bank was divided into the following three administrative divisions, with civil administrative control of some areas transferred to the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA) while Israel maintained civil control over the majority of the territory. Under the terms of the Oslo process, full Palestinian governance was to have been achieved by 1999. But 15 years later, any Israeli transference of sovereignty remains elusive, especially with the presence in the West Bank of more than 300,000 Israeli settlers, more than twice the amount there during the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Area A
Comprising 18 percent of the West Bank, Area A is under PA civil control and security authority. Although it is comprised entirely of Palestinian cities – including Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and some towns and villages that do not border Israeli settlements – they are separated by areas controlled by Israel, including checkpoints, settlements and military outposts.
An exception is found in Hebron, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. While it lie in Area A, less than 1,000 Israeli settlers are living among hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, a state of affairs which prompted Israel to divide the city into two zones in the 1990s: H1, 80 percent of the entire city which is administered by the PA; and H2, 20 percent of the city which is controlled by Israel.
Palestinians from Area A cannot travel to other areas within the West Bank — even other parts of Area A — without crossing Israeli checkpoints. Despite Palestinian civil and security governance, Israel still maintains a de facto veto of final authority, sometimes raiding homes and businesses or detaining and arresting Palestinians.
Area B
Comprising about 22 percent of the West Bank, Area B is under Palestinian civil administration while Israel retains exclusive security control with limited cooperation from the Palestinian police. Area B includes more than 400 villages and farmland. Despite PA civil control, such areas are often threatened by the expansion of Israeli settlements into Palestinian land.
Area C
Under full Israeli civil administration and security control, Area C is the largest division in the West Bank, comprising 60 percent of the territory. The PA only has responsibility for providing education and medical services to the 150,000 Palestinians living there. With the exception of Hebron, all Israeli settlements are in Area C, where Israel has full authority over building permissions and zoning laws. Area C contains most of the West Bank’s natural resources and open areas. More than 70 percent of the Palestinian villages in Area C are not connected to the water network while Israeli settlements are, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Israel’s Civil Administration has planned for Palestinian development in less than 1 percent of Area C, and 99 percent of the area is off limits or heavily restricted for Palestinian construction.
East Jerusalem
Like the West Bank, East Jerusalem has been occupied by Israel since 1967 — which is illegal under international law. But Israel’s method of control over the territory differs. In 1980, Israel unilaterally declared Jerusalem a unified city, effectively consolidating power over Palestinian East Jerusalem, which would be the future capital of an independent Palestine as envisioned under the two-state Oslo process.
Unlike Palestinian residents of West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, Palestinians living in East Jerusalem are given a unique identification card, which — unlike their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank – allows them to travel throughout Israel and the West Bank. However, they are not granted an Israeli passport nor can they vote in Israeli elections.
Israel maintains full civil control in East Jerusalem, where they provide municipal services, health insurance and building permits to the Palestinian residents. Under its control over East Jerusalem, Israel has increased the presence of settlers around Palestinian towns and left other physical barriers separating those towns from the West Bank. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, about 40 percent of the residents in annexed East Jerusalem are Jews living in settlements or previously-owned Palestinian homes.
Source:
http://america.aljazeera.com
Resolutions of the Palestine National Council
July 1-17, 1968
Article 1:
Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Article 2:
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
Article 3:
The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country in accordance with their wishes and entirely of their own accord and will.
Article 4:
The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters, which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.
Article 5:
The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether inside Palestine or outside it – is also a Palestinian.
Article 6:
The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.
Article 7:
That there is a Palestinian community and that it has material, spiritual, and historical connection with Palestine are indisputable facts. It is a national duty to bring up individual Palestinians in an Arab revolutionary manner. All means of information and education must be adopted in order to acquaint the Palestinian with his country in the most profound manner, both spiritual and material, that is possible. He must be prepared for the armed struggle and ready to sacrifice his wealth and his life in order to win back his homeland and bring about its liberation.
Article 8:
The phase in their history, through which the Palestinian people are now living, is that of national (watani) struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Thus the conflicts among the Palestinian national forces are secondary, and should be ended for the sake of the basic conflict that exists between the forces of Zionism and of imperialism on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arab people on the other. On this basis the Palestinian masses, regardless of whether they are residing in the national homeland or in diaspora (mahajir) constitute – both their organizations and the individuals – one national front working for the retrieval of Palestine and its liberation through armed struggle.
Article 9:
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it. They also assert their right to normal life in Palestine and to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty over it.
Article 10:
Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution. It also requires the achieving of unity for the national (watani) struggle among the different groupings of the Palestinian people, and between the Palestinian people and the Arab masses, so as to secure the continuation of the revolution, its escalation, and victory.
Article 11:
The Palestinians will have three mottoes: national (wataniyya) unity, national (qawmiyya) mobilization, and liberation.
Article 12:
The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity. In order to contribute their share toward the attainment of that objective, however, they must, at the present stage of their struggle, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity, and oppose any plan that may dissolve or impair it.
Article 13:
Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine are two complementary objectives, the attainment of either of which facilitates the attainment of the other. Thus, Arab unity leads to the liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity; and work toward the realization of one objective proceeds side by side with work toward the realization of the other.
Article 14:
The destiny of the Arab nation, and indeed Arab existence itself, depend upon the destiny of the Palestine cause. From this interdependence springs the Arab nation’s pursuit of, and striving for, the liberation of Palestine. The people of Palestine play the role of the vanguard in the realization of this sacred (qawmi) goal.
Article 15:
The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation – peoples and governments – with the Arab people of Palestine in the vanguard. Accordingly, the Arab nation must mobilize all its military, human, moral, and spiritual capabilities to participate actively with the Palestinian people in the liberation of Palestine. It must, particularly in the phase of the armed Palestinian revolution, offer and furnish the Palestinian people with all possible help, and material and human support, and make available to them the means and opportunities that will enable them to continue to carry out their leading role in the armed revolution, until they liberate their homeland.
Article 16:
The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual point of view, will provide the Holy Land with an atmosphere of safety and tranquility, which in turn will safeguard the country’s religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion. Accordingly, the people of Palestine look to all spiritual forces in the world for support.
Article 17:
The liberation of Palestine, from a human point of view, will restore to the Palestinian individual his dignity, pride, and freedom. Accordingly the Palestinian Arab people look forward to the support of all those who believe in the dignity of man and his freedom in the world.
Article 18:
The liberation of Palestine, from an international point of view, is a defensive action necessitated by the demands of self-defense. Accordingly the Palestinian people, desirous as they are of the friendship of all people, look to freedom-loving, and peace-loving states for support in order to restore their legitimate rights in Palestine, to re-establish peace and security in the country, and to enable its people to exercise national sovereignty and freedom.
Article 19:
The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, particularly the right to self-determination.
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
Article 21:
The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization.
Article 22:
Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-à-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberal.
Article 23:
The demand of security and peace, as well as the demand of right and justice, require all states to consider Zionism an illegitimate movement, to outlaw its existence, and to ban its operations, in order that friendly relations among peoples may be preserved, and the loyalty of citizens to their respective homelands safeguarded.
Article 24:
The Palestinian people believe in the principles of justice, freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, human dignity, and in the right of all peoples to exercise them.
Article 25:
For the realization of the goals of this Charter and its principles, the Palestine Liberation Organization will perform its role in the liberation of Palestine in accordance with the Constitution of this Organization.
Article 26:
The Palestine Liberation Organization, representative of the Palestinian revolutionary forces, is responsible for the Palestinian Arab people’s movement in its struggle – to retrieve its homeland, liberate and return to it and exercise the right to self-determination in it – in all military, political, and financial fields and also for whatever may be required by the Palestine case on the inter-Arab and international levels.
Article 27:
The Palestine Liberation Organization shall cooperate with all Arab states, each according to its potentialities; and will adopt a neutral policy among them in the light of the requirements of the war of liberation; and on this basis it shall not interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab state.
Article 28:
The Palestinian Arab people assert the genuineness and independence of their national (wataniyya) revolution and reject all forms of intervention, trusteeship, and subordination.
Article 29:
The Palestinian people possess the fundamental and genuine legal right to liberate and retrieve their homeland. The Palestinian people determine their attitude toward all states and forces on the basis of the stands they adopt vis-à-vis to the Palestinian revolution to fulfill the aims of the Palestinian people.
Article 30:
Fighters and carriers of arms in the war of liberation are the nucleus of the popular army, which will be the protective force for the gains of the Palestinian Arab people.
Article 31:
The Organization shall have a flag, an oath of allegiance, and an anthem. All this shall be decided upon in accordance with a special regulation.
Article 32:
Regulations, which shall be known as the Constitution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, shall be annexed to this Charter. It will lay down the manner in which the Organization, and its organs and institutions, shall be constituted; the respective competence of each; and the requirements of its obligation under the Charter.
Article 33:
This Charter shall not be amended save by [vote of] a majority of two-thirds of the total membership of the National Congress of the Palestine Liberation Organization [taken] at a special session convened for that purpose.
* English rendition as published in Basic Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement; Leila S. Kadi (ed.), Palestine Research Centre, Beirut, December 1969, pp.137-141
15-Nov-88
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed and excelled. Thus the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself an everlasting union between itself, its land, and its history.
Resolute throughout that history, the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity, rising even to unimagined levels in its defense, as invasion, the design of others, and the appeal special to Palestine’s ancient and luminous place on the eminence where powers and civilizations are joined. All this intervened thereby to deprive the people of its political independence. Yet the undying connection between Palestine and its people secured for the land its character, and for the people its national genius.
Nourished by an unfolding series of civilizations and cultures, inspired by a heritage rich in variety and kind, the Palestinian Arab people added to its stature by consolidating a union between itself and its patrimonial Land. The call went out from Temple, Church, and Mosque that to praise the Creator, to celebrate compassion and peace was indeed the message of Palestine. And in generation after generation, the Palestinian Arab people gave of itself unsparingly in the valiant battle for liberation and homeland. For what has been the unbroken chain of our people’s rebellions but the heroic embodiment of our will for national independence. And so the people was sustained in the struggle to stay and to prevail.
When in the course of modern times a new order of values was declared with norms and values fair for all, it was the Palestinian Arab people that had been excluded from the destiny of all other peoples by a hostile array of local and foreign powers. Yet again had unaided justice been revealed as insufficient to drive the world’s history along its preferred course.
And it was the Palestinian people, already wounded in its body, that was submitted to yet another type of occupation over which floated that falsehood that “Palestine was a land without people.” This notion was foisted upon some in the world, whereas in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the community of nations had recognized that all the Arab territories, including Palestine, of the formerly Ottoman provinces, were to have granted to them their freedom as provisionally independent nations.
Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination, following upon U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this Resolution that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty.
By stages, the occupation of Palestine and parts of other Arab territories by Israeli forces, the willed dispossession and expulsion from their ancestral homes of the majority of Palestine’s civilian inhabitants, was achieved by organized terror; those Palestinians who remained, as a vestige subjugated in its homeland, were persecuted and forced to endure the destruction of their national life.
Thus were principles of international legitimacy violated. Thus were the Charter of the United Nations and its Resolutions disfigured, for they had recognized the Palestinian Arab people’s national rights, including the right of Return, the right to independence, the right to sovereignty over territory and homeland.
In Palestine and on its perimeters, in exile distant and near, the Palestinian Arab people never faltered and never abandoned its conviction in its rights of Return and independence. Occupation, massacres and dispersion achieved no gain in the unabated Palestinian consciousness of self and political identity, as Palestinians went forward with their destiny, undeterred and unbowed. And from out of the long years of trial in ever-mounting struggle, the Palestinian political identity emerged further consolidated and confirmed. And the collective Palestinian national will forged for itself a political embodiment, the Palestine Liberation Organization, its sole, legitimate representative recognized by the world community as a whole, as well as by related regional and international institutions. Standing on the very rock of conviction in the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights, and on the ground of Arab national consensus and of international legitimacy, the PLO led the campaigns of its great people, molded in.
The massive national uprising, the intifada, now intensifying in cumulative scope and power on occupied Palestinian territories, as well as the unflinching resistance of the refugee camps outside the homeland, have elevated awareness of the Palestinian truth and right into still higher realms of comprehension and actuality. Now at last the curtain has been dropped around a whole epoch of prevarication and negation. The intifada has set siege to the mind of official Israel, which has for too long relied exclusively upon myth and terror to deny Palestinian existence altogether. Because of the intifada and its revolutionary irreversible impulse, the history of Palestine has therefore arrived at a decisive juncture.
Whereas the Palestinian people reaffirms most definitively its inalienable rights in the land of its patrimony:
Now by virtue of natural, historical and legal rights, and the sacrifices of successive generations who gave of themselves in defense of the freedom and independence of their homeland;
In pursuance of Resolutions adopted by Arab Summit Conferences and relying on the authority bestowed by international legitimacy as embodied in the Resolutions of the United Nations Organization since 1947;
And in exercise by the Palestinian Arab people of its rights to self-determination, political independence and sovereignty over its territory,
The Palestine National Council, in the name of God, and in the name of the Palestinian Arab people, hereby proclaims the establishment of the State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem (Al-Quds Ash-Sharif).
The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights. In it will be safeguarded their political and religious convictions and their human dignity by means of a parliamentary democratic system of governance, itself based on freedom of expression and the freedom to form parties. The rights of minorities will duly be respected by the majority, as minorities must abide by decisions of the majority. Governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality and non-discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color or sex, and the aegis of a constitution which ensures the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Thus shall these principles allow no departure from Palestine’s age-old spiritual and civilizational heritage of tolerance and religious coexistence.
The State of Palestine is an Arab state, an integral and indivisible part of the Arab nation, at one with that nation in heritage and civilization, with it also in its aspiration for liberation, progress, democracy and unity. The State of Palestine affirms its obligation to abide by the Charter of the League of Arab States, whereby the coordination of the Arab states with each other shall be strengthened. It calls upon Arab compatriots to consolidate and enhance the emein reality of state, to mobilize potential, and to intensify efforts whose goal is to end Israeli occupation.
The State of Palestine proclaims its commitment to the principles and purposes of the United Nations, and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It proclaims its commitment as well to the principles and policies of the Non-Aligned Movement.
It further announces itself to be a peace-loving State, in adherence to the principles of peaceful co-existence. It will join with all states and peoples in order to assure a permanent peace based upon justice and the respect of rights so that humanity’s potential for well-being may be assured, an earnest competition for excellence may be maintained, and in which confidence in the future will eliminate fear for those who are just and for whom justice is the only recourse.
In the context of its struggle for peace in the land of Love and Peace, the State of Palestine calls upon the United Nations to bear special responsibility for the Palestinian Arab people and its homeland. It calls upon all peace-and freedom-loving peoples and states to assist it in the attainment of its objectives, to provide it with security, to alleviate the tragedy of its people, and to help it terminate Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The State of Palestine herewith declares that it believes in the settlement of regional and international disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with the U.N. Charter and resolutions. With prejudice to its natural right to defend its territorial integrity and independence, it therefore rejects the threat or use of force, violence and terrorism against its territorial integrity or political independence, as it also rejects their use against territorial integrity of other states.
Therefore, on this day unlike all others, November 15, 1988, as we stand at the threshold of a new dawn, in all honor and modesty we humbly bow to the sacred spirits of our fallen ones, Palestinian and Arab, by the purity of whose sacrifice for the homeland our sky has been illuminated and our Land given life. Our hearts are lifted up and irradiated by the light emanating from the much blessed intifada, from those who have endured and have fought the fight of the camps, of dispersion, of exile, from those who have borne the standard for freedom, our children, our aged, our youth, our prisoners, detainees and wounded, all those ties to our sacred soil are confirmed in camp, village, and town. We render special tribute to that brave Palestinian Woman, guardian of sustenance and Life, keeper of our people’s perennial flame. To the souls of our sainted martyrs, the whole of our Palestinian Arab people that our struggle shall be continued until the occupation ends, and the foundation of our sovereignty and indepe.
Therefore, we call upon our great people to rally to the banner of Palestine, to cherish and defend it, so that it may forever be the symbol of our freedom and dignity in that homeland, which is a homeland for the free, now and always.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful:
“Say: ‘O God, Master of the Kingdom,
Thou givest the Kingdom to whom Thou wilt,
and seizes the Kingdom from whom Thou wilt,
Thou exalted whom Thou wilt, and Thou
abasest whom Thou wilt; in Thy hand
is the good; Thou are powerful over everything.”
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