This is the beautiful land of Israel and Palestine.

The world’s three most prominent religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, consider it holy land. Each year, millions of people from around the world come here to pray for peace and prosperity.

Yet this land is also a major center of conflict in the world today.

For Jewish Israelis, the conflict centers on protecting a homeland created for the Jewish people in 1948.

For Palestinians, it is about resisting decades of colonialism, expulsion, occupation, 

Most people identify apartheid with the grotesque system of control that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, in which the white minority ruled over the black majority, stole their land, and deprived them of basic rights.

It was a system reviled by the whole world, and it eventually crumbled under the combined pressure of internal resistance and international sanctions.

Today the word is back, and with it too is a growing global movement to end the Israeli form of apartheid.

Time, October, 1948.  A new leadership.  It denies the morality of economic free for all.  Its slogan:  “To each his own.”  Its belief:  parallel development, separate identity, Apartheid.

Na'eem Jeenah - South African author, journalist

The word Apartheid, of course, is an Afrikaans word, which simply means separateness, being apart.  So we had the wonderful term called separate development, but it was never intended to be equal.

Yasmin Sooka - South African Foundation for Human Rights

One could talk about the petty Apartheid.  That was about the fact that almost from birth your life was separated from people of other races.  You’d have to stand if the bus was full.  If you went to the beach, there were some beaches you could not walk on.  Those were the sorts of petty manifestations.  But you had the real Apartheid, which for me was about the way in which land was taken away from people.

1948

In the first post-war election, the white electorate voted into power a group of men dedicated to the complete separation of the races in South Africa.

Allister Sparks - Veteran Apartheid-era Journalist

The vision was to create a demographic white majority, at least of citizens, even though you were going to have the others in your midst.  The entire nationalistic existence was at stake.  It was going to be swamped by the black majority, so they evolved the concept of Apartheid.  Ultimately the driving force behind it all was to create the white Afrikaner-led nation so that Afrikanerdom could sustain its permanent existence as a national entity.

Now united, the folk would decide South Africa’s destiny.  The years of division, of second-class citizenship, had conditioned Afrikaners to thinking of themselves as a people besieged.

Ali Abunimah - Author of "One Country"

Afrikaner history formed a sort of self-contained moral universe.  Whereas the rest of the world saw them as oppressors, as colonizers, as racists, they saw themselves primarily as victims, settlers who were escaping religious persecution in Europe.  They saw themselves as fighting for self-determination.

In 1836, in an extraordinary gesture of self-reliance and courage, 2,000 Afrikaners crossed the Orange River into the wilderness, out of the bondage of British rule.

The first time in history that the term concentration camp appears, is in Afrikaner history.  About 10% of the population died in British concentration camps.  So for them, Apartheid was about survival, about self-determination, about redemption, about preserving a way of life.  You see a very similar pattern in Zionism.  Despite that Palestinians experienced it as a very aggressive colonizing movement that has dispossessed them, Israelis are capable of seeing themselves as victims, as survivors of drawing on Jewish history in order to justify their status quo. It’s important to address that.  It’s important to address them with empathy and to say, “I don’t accept what you do, but I understand what the motivation is”, and to be able to talk about that.

Warsaw Ghetto 1943

Occupied Palestinian Territories

Jeff Halper - Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

We feel that the concept of Apartheid is really crucial for understanding what’s happening here, and where Israeli is going, because it’s the only term that accurately defines the system that Israel is trying to develop.  It isn’t just a policy.  It’s not just discrimination.  It’s the way the system is structured.  It’s separation of populations in which one group permanently and institutionally dominates another group.

Diana Buttu - Attorney, former legal advisor to the PLO

It’s getting to the point where there isn’t going to be a Jewish majority.  If you take the entirety of Israel and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, we’re at the point now where it’s roughly 50/50.

And that’s before any Palestinian refugees return.

Palestinians are broadly categorized into three main groups.  The majority of Palestinians are refugees that were forced out of the land that became Israel in 1948.  Today they number of 6 million people and still live in refugee camps in places like Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.  A second group are the Palestinians who managed to stay inside Israel during the 1948 war and became Israeli citizens.  And lastly, there are the 5 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories:  the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. This territory is defined by what is known as the green line.  This is land that Israel occupied in the 1967 war, and still controls to this day. Palestinians in these areas do not have Israeli citizenship, nor do they have a state of their own.

Part One                    The West Bank & Gaza Strip

What you have in the West Bank is two entirely separate and unequal geographies that are super-imposed on each other, but exist separately.  You have the Palestinians who are cut off into dozens of ghettos, literally surrounded by walls and physical barriers, with little access to work, to education.  Even the basic means of survival; food and water is often difficult to come by.  And then super-imposed on that you have the settlers, who live in what look like American-style suburbs, very spacious, very luxurious homes with swimming pools, with access to water.

Immediately after the 1967 occupation, Israel began building Jewish-only settlements in the occupied territories and started moving its population to these settlements, a practice that is illegal under international law.  There are approximately 220 Jewish-only settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.  Their territorial jurisdiction includes not only the Palestinian land upon which they’re built, but often the land that surrounds the settlements, which is reserved for their so-called natural growth.

Each of those settlements, every single one of them, is only allocated to Jewish Israelis.  Roughly 60% of the West Bank is allocated to, or controlled by the settlements, or the military installations.

Sarit Michaeli - B'tselem, Israeli Human Rights Group

What we see in the last 40 years is vast Israeli government efforts and vast amounts of public money spent and poured into allocating land in the territories, building settlements on it, and encouraging Israelis to move out of Israel and into these settlements.

Gilo Settlement - On the edge of Jerusalem

Ronny Netzer - Resident of Gilo Settlement

Gilo is, I think, a neighborhood where everybody is living.  Because if you can’t afford to live in the center of the city, you move out to the new neighborhoods, and you’re going to find you have everybody living over here, religious and not religious; more people to the left, people to the right, because most people look at Gilo as part of Jerusalem.

Ghassan Banoura - Resident of Beit Sahour

Now this is Gilo settlement, which was annexed in the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s.  They started building it in the mid-‘80s, and they started bringing in caravans, then it started being built up and built up until it became a very big neighborhood of Jerusalem, accommodating thousands of settlers’ families.  On Palestinian land. The people there didn’t sell the land.  They stole it.

There was a decision taken by Israel in 1967 and part of that political agenda was to build and establish on the hills surrounding Jerusalem, new Jewish neighborhoods in a way that would make it very difficult to, again, divide the city into two parts.

Jeff Halper - Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

The settlements were not built for security.  They were built out of a proactive claim to the country.  The words mislead.  They’re not a couple of little trailers on the hillside.  These are cities of 40, 50, 60, 70,000 people.  They’re built over water aquifers.  They’re built at key junctions.  They’re built on certain hilltops.  They’re built to control movement.  They’re built to control the border.  Every settlement has its rationale.

Qira Village - 25km East of Israeli Border

Fareed Tamallah - Resident of Qira

Ariel Settlement

We can see from here the village extended toward the settlement of Ariel, which is located above the hill over there.  Ariel, located in the heart of the West Bank, 25 kilometers to the east of the green line.  There’s very important aquifer located underground, under this area, which the Israelis are stealing.  They are enjoying the water.  They are irrigating their gardens, washing their cars and playing with their dogs with water, and here we are suffering a shortage of water.

Per capita Israelis use about six or seven times the amount of water that Palestinians use, and many times in the summer months Palestinians do not get water, even though it’s their water that’s being pumped out by the Israelis and sold back to them, they don’t get sufficient supplies.

They cut off water in summer, meaning that we will be without water for three or four months of the year, so we try to compensate for that by collecting the rain in the cisterns and the wells, which is not healthy.  But we are forced to use this water, which causes many diseases for the children and for the inhabitants in the village.  And my daughter was one case of that; she got a very bad infection because of the water, and she got kidney failure.

Apartheid was the attempt to separate people and allow resources and privilege and rights to flow to people on the basis of the separate groups in which they were categorized.

And so the settlements are very strategic; it’s not just real estate.  They were built out of a proactive claim to the country.

This is Hebron Heights.  It's great here. We've got King David's palace, fresh air, olive trees, fruit trees. From my two windows you can see that side of town, the rest of Hebron.  My neighbor calls it "Motivational Windows." You open them in the morning and see what else has to be done.  Until we return there.... Is it Jewish or Arab? This house here is still Arab. Another one here used to be Arab, but today it houses Jews. It will become more and more Jewish.

 “Gas the Arabs”

Nowhere is the government’s separation principal shown so starkly as in the city of Hebron, a city deep in the heart of the West Bank with a population of about 160,000 Palestinians.

In the middle of Hebron, in Palestinian homes, often vacated under severe pressure, live 600 Jewish settlers cordoned off and protected by thousands of soldiers.  Although neighbors, these two populations live under two separate and unequal sets of laws.  Jewish settlers in the West Bank live under Israeli civil law, while Palestinians live under Israeli military law.

She wants to lock us in!

Get in the house.

- No, I won't close the door.   - Yes, you will close it.

- Close the door.  - Stay away from me!

I'm not closing the door!

Sit here, inside your cage.

Whore....

You are a whore and your daughters are too.

Don't you dare open this door!

Don't you dare come here! I will leave my house as I please!

Whore...

Soldier, do you see what she is doing?

The settler population in the West Bank is roughly 500,000.  The Palestinian population in that same area is 2.5 million.

So we have a classic situation of really an ethnic minority claiming the entire country, a large territory, and then, now, what do you do with the natives?  What do you do with the non-whoever you are?  In this case, the non-Jews.

In South Africa, the architecture was amazing.  First, you give people an identity.  Then, of course, you give people pass laws, so you define how they can move freely, and you construct blockages for the movement of people.

Control was exerted through a complicated pass system that determined when and where an African could move. These passes became one of the most detested symbols of apartheid.

Na'eem Jeenah - South African author, journalist

The issue of the pass was much more than a question of identity or an identity document.  It was a mechanism to ensure the control over people’s movement and where people lived.

It's not possible.  Only residents of Beit Hanina are allowed.

Shufat.  You live in Shufat.

I live in Beit Hanina.

Why does it say Shufat?

I once lived in Shufat.

Tomorrow, bring real estate tax papers.

Bring real estate papers that say Beit Hanina.

Listen.  You are over age 55. From tomorrow on, you don't pass through here.

Only through Atarot.

OK?

Today in occupied Palestine, Palestinians must carry IDs at all times that essentially dictate where they can live work and move. A complex system of movement restrictions requires special permits to enter certain areas.

There are over 600 manned checkpoints and physical roadblocks in the West Bank that restrict the freedom of movement of Palestinians.  Only 36 of these separate Israel and the West Bank. The rest separate Palestinian towns from other Palestinian towns.

Abuse, beatings, humiliation at the checkpoints is a routine part of the experience.  It’s part of the systematic disempowerment of Palestinians, placing an entire population at the mercy of 18-, 19-year-old soldiers who have absolute power over the lives of Palestinians.

Angela Godfrey-Goldstein - Grassroots Jerusalem

How many?  Is it over 60 women who have given birth at checkpoints because some silly kid won’t let them through or taking 20 minutes to let an ambulance through?

What was I thinking at the checkpoint as my child was dying?

Daoud & Sana - Kafr Ayn residents

I was scared. I knew my child was dying.

I wanted to scream at the soldiers but I was scared
they would keep us longer,

or detain my husband. I was very afraid of them.

I called him after, maybe, five minutes.

"Please come here and see my child."

"He is dying.  Please come and see him."

He came and he said, "Why are you calling?"

"Why are you calling me?  Don't call us."

"I want to check your IDs, and check the car,"

"After, you can go."

I said to him, "There is nothing in the car.  And we are not going through the Wall."

We are going from our house to the hospital only.

We don't have any weapons.  We don't have any arms.  We don't have anything.

We are only four with the child.

We reached the hospital.

The doctor said to us:

"We can do nothing for him."

"Your child died about 20 minutes ago."

Since my child died, I have so much anger, but what can I do with it?

Can I yell at soldiers? Can I beat them up?

Eddie Makue - South African Council of Churches

I have been able to visit Israel and Palestine, on more than two occasions.  And what I experienced there was such a crude reminder of a painful past in Apartheid South Africa.

We were largely controlled in the same way.  The continuous checking at the roadblocks, and to see these young men and young women standing at the roadblock, having to perform the duties of a military junta.  These parallels with Israel pained me severely while I was traveling through that lovely country.

The settlements are linked by modern super highways, which are Jewish-only roads.  Palestinians are not allowed to use them, and these super highways crisscross across Palestinian land, linking the settlements together, and linking them with Israeli cities inside the 1948 borders.

The separate roads that you find, that kind of settlement infrastructure that you find in the West Bank, you know, in South Africa, we didn’t dream that we’d have roads that would be only for whites.

In 2008, there were 800 kilometers of Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, or as the Israeli military prefers to call them, “Sterile roads”.  Settlers are issued yellow license plates so that the military can distinguish them from Palestinian drivers.

This is route 443 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

It's good if you want to get away from Route One,

ease up traffic a bit.

It's also convenient,

no curves or anything.  It's convenient.

Because it has no....   It's mostly straight,

and it also shortens the trip by seven kilometres.

If you notice, all the exits past the checkpoint are closed.

All the exits are closed.  They have an alternative road.

There are some alternative roads instead of this one.

What's that sound?

Is that the road or your car?

It's something underneath the car.   Maybe the rear axle on the right side.

Our cars are getting really bad because of the roads.

Jamal Juma - Campaign To Stop The Wall

The other part of this system is the Palestinian roads, which is linking the Palestinian villages and cities together, but with tunnels and bridges under the main network of roads that they are creating for themselves.  And these bridges and tunnels have gates, and the gates have locks, and the keys are in the hands of the soldiers.  Sothat if they want to impose a curfew all over the West Bank, they can do it in two hours.

Shufa village

The settlers came to Shufa in 1987.

They banned Palestinians from driving in and around the town.

The Jewish-only roads serving the settlement of Avne Hefez, are but one of the many examples of the segregated road system in the West Bank.

Because of the settlement, Israel declared the roads between the Palestinian towns of Shufa and Izbat Shufa a sterile road for Jews only, erecting dirt roadblocks at every exit of the town.

Recently, Israel allowed Palestinian pedestrian but not vehicular traffic on the road. Due to these conditions, one out of every four families has left Shufa.

They have banned us from using the roads to go directly to Tulkarem.

It's only 7km away by the normal route, but we have to take a 30km detour.

Naeem Saleh - Shufa Resident

The population of Shufa is 2,000, while the population of the settlement is 300.

We are discriminated against and are not allowed to move freely.

But the 300 settlers can come and go as they please.

They stay in the settlement for the weekend,

and spend the rest of their time in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.

We are suffering for their pleasure,

just so they can spend a day or two here.

A deeply religious people, the white Afrikaners of South Africa believed they had a god-given right to a land that they considered mostly uninhabited. In what is known as the great trek, what Afrikaners consider their equivalent of the Exodus, thousands trekked into the wilderness in search of the Promised Land.

The Afrikaners pushed into land the Africans considered theirs, and many battles ensued.  Armed with guns and protected by a circle of covered wagons, known as a “laager”, the Afrikaners easily beat back the indigenous masses that outnumbered them. This image of the heroic settlers in their laager fending off the savage masses became the dominant mythology in Afrikaner history, morphing into the philosophy of Apartheid in 1948.

Under apartheid law, the one standard against which everything was judged was the security of the state, and the state meant the Afrikaner people. With every law enacted, the freedoms of the majority were whittled away in order to protect the privileges of a white minority.

In Pretoria today stands a monument to the Great Trek, a shrine to this history and philosophy. A concrete laager; that iconic image of the Afrikaners’ military defense tactic, completely surrounds the monument.  A physical representation of a state of mind that sees enemies everywhere and will do anything to protect against them.

Eddie Makue - South African Council of Churches

What I experienced there was made even more painful by the existence of the wall of separation, what we from South Africa prefer to call the Apartheid wall.  We didn’t have that type of division in South Africa.

In 2002, under the guise of a temporary security measure, Israel began construction of the separation barrier to completely seal off the West Bank from Israel.

In urban areas it is a concrete wall eight meters tall. In rural areas it is a “smart” fence averaging 60 meters wide, with motion, heat and vibration sensors, cameras, trenches, patrol roads, and razor wire.

To many however, the wall is not about security.

Its’ snake like route through the west bank annexes large Jewish-only settlements, agricultural land and important water resources, clearly marking it as a tool for massive land grabs.

Only 15% of the wall follows the green line. Instead, the wall twists and turns deep into the West Bank, making it more than twice as long as the green line itself.

It separates Palestinian villages from neighboring Palestinian villages, farmers from their land and income, parents from children, and severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement. It encircles many towns from all sides creating isolated ghettos surrounded by walls, checkpoints and Israeli-only roads.

When you put people behind the wall, in all of these ghettos, because almost everywhere it is creating ghetto communities with one road or one checkpoint or one tunnel with a gate on it.  Then at a certain point there is going to be, when there’s not enough work and not enough food, more and more pressure built up.  Obviously a lot of people will leave, and I think that’s part of the intention.

Now in the South African context, the attempt by the Apartheid government was to take away citizenship from more than 80% of the South African population, and then give them new citizenship in some kind of a fantasy entity:  Bophuthatswana, Transkei, etc.  So the South African state could say, “You have no claims here.  You’re a citizen of Bophuthatswana.  Social benefits, etcetera, are what you should be looking for there.”

The godfather of the system was Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

In South Africa you can only achieve peace by separating the nations.

And he spelled out the whole Bantustan concept.  He said:  “The black people have got to be given their own countries.”  They embarked upon this remarkable experiment of trying to cut up the country into Bantustans, and these were created, at least on paper, ten of them, and the move began to advance them towards independence.

Lucas Mangope - Chief Minister of Bophuthatswana homeland

My government would like to continue as we are, an autonomous and independent country, preferably with extended borders, continued friendly and cordial relations with our neighbors and, if possible, international recognition.

Most of them were stooges and really puppets of the Apartheid state.

To give some veneer of reality to the fantasy of the Bantustans, the Afrikaner government threw money at them, built elaborate parliaments, housing for ministers, built airports, sports stadiums.  It was to create separate states.  It was not so much a two-state solution as a multi-state solution.  When I look at Israel, when I traveled through the West Bank, I was looking at Bantustans, totally unviable, impossible states.  In many respects, it struck me as being significantly worse than Apartheid.

Bantustans, as much as we abhorred them in South Africa, Bantustan leaders actually had more power and more control than the Palestinian Authority has.  What the Oslo accords did was create an authority, which allowed Israel to still control the occupied Palestinian territory, but control it through a Palestinian authority.  Ostensibly, there’s some kind of Palestinian authority that’s controlling, that’s in power of the occupied territory.  But in fact, Israel controls the borders.  Israel controls taxes.  Israel controls all kinds of things, access in and out of that area.

To me, the big analogy was that South Africa, in taking these two choices where you’ve got two or more nationalisms laying claim to the same country, you’ve either got to find a way to live together, or you’ve got to have a fair partition.  The big similarity between Apartheid South Africa and the Israeli/Palestinian situation is that both decided to have a partition solution, and, in both cases, it was a grotesquely unfair partition.

And this is why Israel says, “Well, Gaza is not our problem, Gaza is a foreign country.  It’s not a state.  It’s not part of any other country.  It’s just not us.”

Just like South Africa, it’s the same logic.  We need a Palestinian state, because we can’t digest the Palestinians.  We can’t give them citizenship, because then it wouldn’t be a Jewish state.  We have to create a Palestinian state, because that’s the only way we can get them off our hands, but it has to be a minimized state on as little territory as possible that leaves us in control of the entire country.

In South Africa, they were talking about 13% of South Africa for the non-whites.  In cantons, locking them inside cantons.  Here, when you look at the map, what they have created is leaving to the Palestinians about 12% of our historical land.  This is the ghetto state, ghetto system that they are creating, and it’s totally disconnected from each other.  We have one, two, three, and the fourth is Gaza.

It was Saturday the 27th.

Even in dreams, we didn't expect a war of this intensity.

Operation Cast Lead 2008

Day and night, they bombed the area.  They also used phosphorous bombs.

At any moment, I had to collect my children and go running out into the streets.

The 21 days passed and we came back to collect what is left of our lives.

Everything in my house was bombed.  The kitchen, the walls, the bathroom.

Everything was gone.  I was able to fix one room.

I basically sleep on the street.  Look here.

The blankets we had we used to create a sense of privacy so people aren't looking at us.

Now is the time of hunger and pain.

As a father, I can't bring food for my children.  We just don't have flour, vegetables, anything.

This is all because of the siege.

Since 2006, Israel has imposed a deadly siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting most goods and people form entering or leaving the enclave.  The siege has caused an economic standstill in Gaza.  The unemployment rate hovers around 40%.

On the more ridiculous end of spectrum of goods not allowed into Gaza are things like pasta and chocolate.  to be a deliberate policy.  Mathematic formulas were created which defined the minimum caloric needs of the 1.5 million people in Gaza.  As well as an upper limit, so that food items cannot become too plentiful.

In 2009 Israel bombed Gaza’s sewage treatment facilities and electricity plants and now won’t allow the necessary parts in to repair them.  Restrictions on fuel imports further limit the ability of critical infrastructure to function, while also causing daily, prolonged blackouts.

Blackouts can be deadly for patients in hospitals.  But more so is the lack of medicine, specialized care, and clean water.

Can you imagine?  We don't have electricity.

We don't even have drinking water.

Our life and our death are the same.  We're breathing but we're dying slowly.

This is slow death.

In the worst times of Apartheid in South Africa, we never had in any of our townships helicopter gunships flying overhead or F-16 type bombers flying over townships and fighting or dropping bombs into a township.  It didn’t happen.

Phyllis Bennis - Institute for Policy Studies

The problem is we don’t have other examples to look at now.  You could look at perhaps the Warsaw ghetto as one example of that kind of walled-in and then attacking a walled-in community like that.  Maybe a better example is hundreds and hundreds of years ago where you had walled city-states that were completely besieged by armies where no one could get out and food was denied, and if there wasn’t a spring within the city, no one had water, and people died.  Just like in Gaza, people died from insufficient access to medicine, to insufficient water, all those reasons, as well as by air strikes.

There are a number of people and some governments who claim that because Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip unilaterally in 2005, that it’s no longer the occupying power, but that actually is not the case.  In international law, occupation refers to the control of territory by another government, not the indigenous government there.  That’s precisely what exists with Israel and the Gaza Strip right now.  Israel still controls the land of the Gaza Strip, which, many people don’t know, is completely surrounded by a wall very similar to the wall that snakes through the West Bank.  It is completely surrounded.  The Israeli Navy controls the seas off the cost of Gaza.  The airspace is controlled by Israel, which has prohibited the Palestinians from reopening their airport.  So Gaza is completely under the control of the Israelis.

The Palestinian authority can’t issue identity documents, passports, permission for people to come and go, independent of the Israeli Interior Ministry.  If you don’t exist in the Israeli Interior Ministry database, you don’t exist, period.

If you look at a blueprint of a prison, it looks like the prisoners own the place.  They have 95% of the territory, right?  They have the living areas, they have the exercise yard, they have the cafeteria, they have the work areas.  It all belongs to the prisoners.  All the prison authorities have is maybe 5%.  And you know what?  If it’s a minimal security prison, maybe they have 1%.  That’s all you need.  You need the walls around, cell bars, you have some corridors, you have a few locked doors, and that’s it.  With 1% of the territory, you can absolutely control the inmates, and that helps you make the switch.  The issue here isn’t how much territory the prisoners have.  The issue is, can they get out of the prison?

Ilan Pappe - Israeli Historian

When the majority of world leaders and people who have the power to change things talk about a two-state solution, nowadays what they talk about is a Palestinian state that is made of Bantustans separated from each other, a state that has no sovereignty, no independent policies, and has a very similar economic infrastructure to the ones that the Bantustans have in South Africa.

The main thing for the world and for the Israelis is to get this issue off the plate, and that’s where Israel thinks it can get away with a Bantustan in the way that South Africa couldn’t.  You know, you can push a two-state solution that’s Apartheid.  If it doesn’t have borders, it doesn’t have water, doesn’t have access to its greater economic resource, which is Jerusalem.  It’s carved into little islands.  There’s no freedom of movement.  There’s no freedom of commerce.  It’s a prison state.  Therefore, the essential idea of a two-state solution has to be not only the state itself, but a viable state.

The Israelis have rendered the West Bank and Gaza unviable, hopelessly unviable.  I’m saying Israel no longer has that solution as an option.  It has made a two-state solution impossible, physically, morally impossible.

It is time for us to go ahead and move forward on a two-state solution, so thank you very much.

You hear all this talk about the two-state solution.  You see opinion polls that say a majority of Israelis are willing to accept it, and a majority of Palestinians are willing to accept it, but that consensus disappears the moment you try to actually flesh it out in detail.  That’s why all the two-state solution proposals are extremely vague, because Palestinians say, “The West Bank and Gaza are only a fifth of historic Palestine.  Why should we give up anymore?”  Israelis say, “Well, there’s 450,000 settlers in those areas, several generations.  Why should they leave?”  The only thing more difficult than trying to live together, would be trying to force a separation.

Part Two - Inside Israel & Occupied East Jerusalem

Diana Buttu - Attorney, former legal advisor to the PLO

Israel’s over all goal, has been to create a Jewish state.  In 1948, 75% of the population, the non-Jewish population, Christians and Muslims, were expelled from their homeland and never allowed to return.  For one reason, and only one reason, which is that they’re not Jewish.

The 5 to 6 million refugees living in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, etcetera, those are people that should be Israeli citizens that Israel has kicked out and refused citizenship.

Over a million Palestinians became refugees in the 1948 and 1967 wars.  By natural population growth, they now number over 5 million people who still await their right to return.

Some Palestinians managed to stay inside what became Israel in 1948, and today make up 20% of Israeli citizens.

Na'eem Jeenah - South African author, journalist

So in the Israeli state, what kind of rights and privileges and resources are allocated to you are entirely dependent on which ethnic group you come from.  You’re either Jewish or you’re Palestinian, or Arab, as they prefer to call them.  And so you have a situation where welfare benefits for people, for example, are dependent on whether they’re Jewish or not.  You have a situation where a Jew can’t marry a non-Jew in Israel.  For us South Africans, we remember the Mixed Marriages Act, for example.  You have a situation where people from one ethnic group, Palestinians, are not able to freely live in areas that are majority Jewish, similar to old Group Areas Act.

Jonathan Cook - Journalist and Author

Now one of the criticisms people make when you start accusing Israel of being an Apartheid state inside its own borders is that they’ll say, “Well, Palestinians can sit next to Jews inside restaurants.  They sit on the same buses.  They go to the same cinemas,” and that’s true, but that’s not really the significance of Apartheid.  The idea of Apartheid isn’t really about the fact that people can’t sit on the same park bench.  It was about controlling resources, making sure that one ethnic group had control of resources over the other.  And, in that sense, Israel has been very, very effective at doing this, what we might call grand Apartheid rather than petty Apartheid.

In the key areas of people’s lives,their education, their employment, owning land, Palestinian citizens are treated entirely differently from Jewish citizens, and I think that’s one of the reasons why this Apartheid comparison can be made.

By far, the most fundamental element of apartheid with both South Africa and Israel is control of the land.

In apartheid South Africa, a slew of laws were enacted that designated 87% of the land for whites only.

This introduced the oxymoronic term “Foreign Natives” into the language of parliament to describe blacks given permission to live in white areas.

Israel’s complex and creative web of apartheid laws introduced equally oxymoronic terms such as “Present Absentee” into it’s parliamentary language.  This was used to describe Palestinians who are actually present inside Israel, but legally declared absent in order to confiscate their land.

Through these colonial and apartheid style laws, over 90% of the land of Israel is effectively reserved for Jews only.

Aside from the few mixed cities like Haifa and Akko, Israel’s communities are segregated along ethnic lines. Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens are restricted to 120 communities that existed before the creation of Israel in 1948, and which have been unable to expand since.

By contrast, Israel has created and developed more than 700 exclusively Jewish towns since 1948, but not one new town for Palestinian citizens.  

Jonathan Cook - Journalist and Author

 

Land laws in Israel, are very clearly Apartheid kind of laws.  You can belong in the state of Israel, you can be a Palestinian, or you can be a Jew, but if you want to have rights in the state, really you need to be a Jew to have rights.  I have no doubt it’s a Jewish state, but I do question very strongly whether it’s a democratic state.  If we talked about an Afrikaner and democratic state, I think most of us would find that rather an oxymoronic kind of phrase to use.  So why is Jewish and democratic not equally troubling to us?  There are more than a million Palestinians inside Israel today, and that’s a major concern for Israel.  It’s very concerned about the demographic growth, as it calls it, the demographic time bomb, of the Palestinians inside Israel.

I came to realize that when they talk about the elimination of Israel, it’s a demographic thing.  That Israel will cease to exist when it no longer has a Jewish majority.  In other words, your nationhood depends upon your having either an ethnic or a specifically religious majority, permanently entrenched.

Because of the experience I’ve gone through in this country, where I saw terrible injustice committed in the name of the Afrikaners’ need to survive, I became ashamed of my country, grievously ashamed of it.

The reason Israel has a Jewish majority is through entirely artificial means.  The whole framework of Israeli law is designed to prevent the growth of the non-Jewish population and maintain Jewish numerical and political supremacy, and that’s the framework in which we can understand everything we see inside Israel, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.

Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood - Occupied East Jerusalem

In Occupied East Jerusalem, the battle for control of territory is happening on a house-by-house basis.

Israel goes to incredible lengths to manipulate demography, as can be seen in the stark but complicated case of the city of Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem differs from the rest of Occupied Palestinian territory in that Israel unilaterally declared it a part of the state of Israel following the 1967 occupation of the city. No country in the world has ever recognized that annexation, and it is still considered occupied territory by the Palestinians and by international law. But by building the Wall and the vast settlement blocks around it, Israel has illegally severed it from the West Bank.

Over 250,000 Palestinians now find themselves on the Israel side of the wall.  Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not citizens of the country, cannot vote in national elections and cannot live in Jewish West Jerusalem.

A Palestinian can have lived in Jerusalem all his life,

been born here, his father, grandfather, and generations before,

but he will be a resident.

Meir Margolit - Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

A Jew from Russia can come today to Israel,

not even knowing one word of Hebrew,

and in the same day, he becomes a citizen.

There are many, many conditions to be a resident.

If you, for example, live in Jerusalem but you work in

Ramallah, Bethlehem or elsewhere in the Occupied Territories,

they say the center of your life is there, and we can take your ID.

This is one of the strategies to make the number of Palestinians smaller.

This is the booklet.

An official one from the municipality of Jerusalem, from the Department of Planning.

I mean, from the first point here,

They say: "Is to keep the ratio between Jews and Palestinians as it was in 1967 at..."

Look at this:  "70 to 30"

As the government decided.

You must understand, if in any democratic country in the world,

Meir Margolit - Former Jerusalem City Council member

someone says that the Jews will be no more than 40 percent of the population,

we would say that this is anti-Semitism.  It's clear that it would be anti-Semitism.

So why would it be anti-Semitism in Europe or America if someone does this,

and in Israel, it's permitted.  Why?

The politicians are hysterical over this issue,

and they try to implement a policy of segregation,

in order to make the lives of the Palestinians so bad,

that they will decide to voluntarily leave the city.

One of the harshest methods used to force Palestinians to leave Jerusalem is Israel’s house demolition policy. This policy affects all Palestinians living within Israel’s stated borders, and even within the rest of the West Bank, but it is starkest in Jerusalem.

Sarit Michaeli - B'tselem - Israeli Human Rights Group

House demolitions are part of a system of discrimination that does not enable Palestinians to actually build legally.  It’s fair to say that it’s virtually impossible to receive a building permit, a legal permit to build a house in East Jerusalem if you’re a Palestinian.

They would not give us a permit.

We had been trying to get a permit for 20 years.

We took a risk and built the house.

They said this land is confiscated

and does not belong to me so I cannot build here.

They took the furniture out, kicked us out

and demolished the house

without any concern

for the children or our welfare.

What can I do?

The same way they took our lands and

kicked us out as if we were flies

They are now kicking us out house by house.

They do it in order to force the people out.

So people will get sick of the situation and leave.

I have been in bed since the day the house was demolished.

Don Mattera - South African Poet and Activist

Wednesday, July 22nd, 1962.   The Afrikaners are breaking down our house.  Two bulldozers, and of course the house crumbled.  I felt the pain.  It was my blood, my bones, our flesh that was being broken down.  No book can describe, no poem can describe the horror, because our houses were not houses, they were human beings.  I saw bone and blood and veins and brains.

And, of course, when the demolition finally happens, I can’t even begin to convey to you the trauma, you know, and the home is your sacred space, your whole intimate sphere is in the house.  Men, women, and children react very differently.  To the men it’s humiliating; they can’t protect their families.  It’s an entire financial loss.  For women, most Palestinian women don’t work outside the house.  Domestic space is their world, so when a woman loses that, I’ve seen women go into states of mourning.  The trauma is tremendous.  The demolition of a home is really the demolition of the family.

We estimate that in East Jerusalem there are at least 10,000 demolition orders outstanding.  Houses that can be demolished at any time.  That doesn’t include thousands that have been demolished inside Israel.  Inside Israel there’s still a campaign of demolition.  There are about 40,000 homes of Israeli citizens who are Arabs that are slated for demolition in the next few years, and this is on the background of 1948 when more than half the villages of Palestine, more than 400 villages, were systematically destroyed.

After the state was created, Israel continued to forcibly remove thousands of it’s Palestinian citizens off of their lands onto small concentrated areas.  Their villages were bulldozed to make way for Jewish only towns.

This policy still continues inside Israel today, with over 45 Palestinian villages that the government refuses to recognize, and which are slated to be forcibly removed in order to construct new Jewish-only towns.

I was born and raised here.

This area is all that I know.

Our ancestors have been here for a long time.

Because our village is not recognized by the state,

this area is deprived of basic services.

They take people off their lands to build Jewish towns here.

We can't fight them.

They come to our town with weapons and over fifty police cars.

We do not know what to do.

If they demolish our houses, where do we go?

Eddie Makue - South African Council of Churches

The Apartheid authorities had what they called “black spots”, incidents where black people were occupying land where the white people actually wanted to occupy.   And what they, therefore, did was to send in the police, send in the military with heavy trucks to demolish peoples’ homes, and then would remove families that have been staying on land for decades and remove them, and just dump them.

It was nice in Sophiatown until the Afrikaner people started harassing us.  They said we are staying too near to town.  We are blacks.  We are not supposed to stay there, so they started moving us to Meadowlands.

Because they said we couldn’t stay near the white people, so they must separate us; we mustn’t be together.  So they take the place, and they give it to the whites.  They gave us only one day’s notice.  “Tomorrow you are moving.”  The truck will wait outside, and then the soldiers will go into the house, and remove the furniture into the truck.  Then take the children and put you in the truck, and the mother and father.

They just bulldoze it to the ground.  They take the family out and the bulldozer comes.

Israel 2010

Land is more than just a possession.  Land is something integrally bound with your identity.  It’s about your ancestors.  It’s about a sense of knowing who and where you are from, and in South Africa that’s where the biggest damage has been done.  This removal of people off the land, and they’re put in these God forsaken places with nothing, and they have to start all over again.

They come and destroy the whole village.

This is the sixth time we have had to rebuild the tin-roofed houses.

They demolished the village five times.  That cost them over a million Shekels.

They could have built a new road and planned a village with that money.

Aren’t we citizens?  What are we?  We live here.

You came here and occupied our land.  We didn’t occupy yours.

Every time you destroy someone’s house, you destroy their life.

You kill that person and they become like they are neither dead nor alive.

You can shave off my hair.  New hair will grow.  You can spit in my face.  I will find water to wash it.  You can take away my clothes and leave me naked. But if you take away my house, and my dignity.  Where can I go?  Where?  There is no pain quite like being unloved, unwanted in one’s own land among one’s own kind.  The Jewish people come from that experience.  Jews will always have the right, and I would support that right for memory and perpetuation, but now I feel it for the Palestinians.  I feel it for them, because they are stateless, homeless, vanquished, exiled.  You take away my house; you take away my dignity.  You take away my love, and you replace it with bitterness, anger, and revenge.

There have been at least 100,000 Palestinians, if not more, that have gone through house demolitions.  There’s a psychologist in Gaza in the Palestinian mental health center who’s done research that says that 55% of the suicide bombers are kids whose houses have been demolished.  The house demolition issue is one of the most painful parts of the occupation.  If you deny Palestinians a home, and connected to that is a concept of homeland, on two levels you’re denying them a home, on the individual level and the collective level.  The term we use in Hebrew for our form of Apartheid is nishul.  Nishul means displacement or dispossession.  That’s the Israeli form of Apartheid.

Ziad Abbas - Middle East Children's Alliance

The escalation of Israeli measures in how they treated the Palestinians before the first Intifada, make it difficult for the people to accept oppression.

In 1987, as the occupation rolled into its third decade, the first Intifada – or uprising – erupted.

People protested, went on strike, threw stones, organized themselves into groups, and challenged the Israeli occupation in different ways.  Things came from the ground up in the first Intifada where everyone, no matter who you are, man or woman, young or old, you are connected to certain groups, working in this Intifada.  It was amazing how the people were organized.  The people took a stand.  They had a slogan:  No taxation without representation.

The Israeli occupation closed down all the education institutions from the universities to the kindergartens for two and a half years.  They were very strong in their reaction.  The number of the people that were killed, children, youth, women, thousands of people were killed.  This was the Israeli reaction.  If you visit any family in Palestine, West Bank, and Gaza Strip, you will find at least one person that experienced jail.

To go to jail, I don’t want to say it’s normal, but just being Palestinian is reason enough to be put in jail.  It’s part of daily life in Palestine.  Over 700,000 Palestinians have experienced jail since 1967.

Salim Valley - South African Anti-Apartheid Activist

Proportionately there are more political prisoners there than existed in South Africa.  In South Africa we had a campaign against child detainees.  In Palestine you have over 350 children who are political prisoners.

Eddie Makue - South African Council of Churches

They would take very many of our children away from parents and try and use that to coerce parents to appear at police stations.

I remember in 1988 you saw prisoners coming in like crazy.  In a few months we became 6,000 political prisoners in one jail.  And 95% of them were under administrative detention.

Sarit Michaeli - B'tselem - Israeli Human Rights Group

Administrative detention is the detention of people usually for six months, but you can extend it, based on no kind of legal procedure aside from issuing an administrative order.  People are arrested without knowing what they are in for.  They’ve never been charged with anything.  The way it’s been done by Israel is absolutely in contravention of international law.

I remember a famous Palestinian political prisoner in the ‘70s.  He spent around seven years under administrative detention, and it’s scary.  It’s really scary, because you don’t know anything, and they use it as part of the torture.  For example it’s the day after six months or one year in jail, and this is your last day, the day you are released. They come to the jail.  They call your name.  You collect all your stuff. You are released.  You say bye-bye to the prisoners, and you move outside, and the officer comes, “Sorry, another six months” and you go back to jail.

Administrative detention, very similar to the detention without trial in South Africa.

Ralph Nzamo  -  1986 - South African Anti-Apartheid Activist

When you are about to be released, they will release you and let you walk a few steps and re-arrest you.  Which is, by the way, is another form of torture, because you never actually are sure as to whether you will be totally released.

I was arrested in 1985, and there was nothing illegal about what it was that I was doing, and they knew that they could, therefore, not take me to court and charge me with anything.  They basically detained us because they could do it.

Why did Mandela become the hero of the political prisoners issue?  He spent 27 years in the Apartheid system jail.  Right now we have prisoners that have spent more than 30 years in jail, more than Mandela.  Why doesn’t the international community pay attention to that?

Within one year of each other, both Israel and South Africa launched “Operation Iron Fist”, brutal and overwhelming campaigns   

With the “Iron Fist” policy, they used to open the handcuffs and take people’s arms like this and break the bone in this way.  I still remember the sound of my friend when they broke his arm.  The sound is still in my ear.  I will never, ever forget that.

“Iron Fist is no solution”

“No to the Iron Fist”

They went as far as killing very many of our comrades brutally, acts that you can never imagine.

 

The South African Defense Forces, as they were called, their army and navy was almost totally outfitted by Israel, because South Africa couldn’t get weapons from other countries.  Israel was one of the only countries willing to break the arms embargo.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky - Author of "The Unspoken Alliance"

Well, the alliance started in earnest in 1973. By 1979, 35% of Israel’s arms exports were going to South Africa, so they became a crucial client, and a crucial source for export revenue that Israel couldn’t give up easily.  It involved everything from tanks to aircraft to ammunition and you name it.  After 1977 there’s a mandatory U.N. arms embargo.  Israel violated the U.N. arms embargo openly, and many Israeli officials are happy to admit that.  If you talk to South African defense officials, especially people from the air force, they tell you that Israel was an absolutely vital link and was a lifeline for them during the 1980s.

After 1977, the ideological component becomes much stronger.  The top brass of the two militaries really felt that they were in a similar predicament and that they faced a common enemy.  They also had a very similar conception of minority survival.  There felt that Afrikaner nationalists were similar to Israelis, beleaguered minorities surrounded by a hostile majority.

When you look through the documents from the South African defense archive, you see that dozens of South Africans were going to Israel on a regular basis to attend a variety of courses that involved submarine operation, anti-tank technology, counterinsurgency techniques, you name it.  They really see the PLO and the ANC as one in the same.

Nelson Mandela - Freedom Fighter - African National Congress

The reaction of the government ordering a general mobilization, arming the white community, arresting tens of thousands of Africans, a show a force throughout the country, closed a chapter as far as our methods of political struggle are concerned.  There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and nonviolence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people.

Bombs have exploded almost daily in the run-up to Wednesday’s poll, the latest a huge car bomb, which devastated shops in the central town of Witbank.  The blasts have been blamed on the African National Congress.

After decades of non-violent struggle, Nelson Mandela formed the armed wing of the African National Congress.  They turned first to sabotage, then to civilian bombings in order to have their political aspirations recognized.

If this was the work of the ANC, it’s their boldest attack to date, and demonstrates the organization’s determination to carry the guerilla war to South Africa’s major city centers.

The explosion tore apart the bus in the very heart of Jerusalem.  Killing many of those on board.  It was the mirror image of last week’s suicide bomb.

I am pained when I read the story of a 65-year-old Palestinian woman who became the carrier of a suicide bomb, and in a note she indicated that she had to do that because she was trying to save her grandchildren from being killed, and we’re saying what unfair choices to put before people.

Security and terrorism are important issues, but they’re symptoms.  They’re not independent variables.  Israel is the strong party.  Once you bring the occupation into the picture, there isn’t any more symmetry.  There’s no more both sides—us and them—the balance that everybody loves.  Palestinians aren’t occupying Tel Aviv.

We are pleading that we do not wait for more people to be killed.  It is quite apparent that the political authorities will on their own not act.  We need to pressurize them.

Despite all this repressive machinery, there’s a general kind of agreement that it was the international dimension and the internal resistance, the South African Intifada, if you like, that really brought an end to Apartheid.  You had a mass of people, people’s movements, and resistance organizations, etcetera, that were in terms of numbers of people quite large, but weak, taking on very sophisticated structures of repression.  So, a really powerful opponent on the one hand, and a weak one on the other.  It was the international isolation campaign that brought a sense of balance between the two.

At that point, the South Africans actually seek out advice from the Israelis on how to sell themselves in the west and how to improve their image.  The South Africans looked to Israel as a sort of beacon, and they didn’t understand why Israel had managed to withstand criticism for decades and survive, and why South Africa was failing.  A lot of Israelis fear that they may one day be delegitimized in the same way South Africa was.

What we would like is for the public to realize that they actually have a real positive role to play.  They can actually boycott these goods, and we’re only individuals, but together when we act holistically such as the protest today, and even on an individual day-to-day basis, we can have a real impact in challenging the occupation on a long-term level.

Phyllis Bennis - Institute for Policy Studies

The global call came in 2005 from Palestinian civil society organizations, and the idea was to craft a strategy that would be a nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to abide by international law using economic pressure.  These campaigns are taking root.  They’re gaining new supporters every day.  The churches have taken the lead in saying, “We want socially responsible investment, and that means we want to be sure that none of the companies we invest in are profiting from occupation.”

Omar Barghouti - pacbi.org

There are many, many, many initiatives going around the world for boycotting Israeli goods, boycotting Israeli institutions and so on, so it’s growing, in the cultural, academic, medical, even trade unions.  In South Africa COSATU, the main trade union body in South Africa, which has about 2 million members, supported the boycott.  There are so many.  They’re mushrooming really in the last two years.

This is happening more and more.  In North America you have the Canadian union of postal workers.  Prior to that, the Canadian union of public employees.

The incredible growing movement, I mean, I’ve traveled to literally dozens of campuses around the United States, and there are active divestment groups.  There are church divestment movements that are starting and really gaining strength, and facing incredible resistance, but they’re not being deterred by it.

As our South African comrades and colleagues remind us, their first call for boycott was issued in the late 1950s.  Europe and the west started listening in the ‘70s, early ‘80s, so it took them 30 years to get anybody to listen to them.  So we’re doing much better they tell us.  You’re going much faster than we did.

The idea of a one-state solution begins with the notion that no matter how they got there, no matter the competing historical narratives, the country belongs to all who live in it.  Let 100% of the people live in 100% of the land, since nobody can agree on how to divide it.

Israel’s going to have to stop being a Jewish state.  It can’t be an ethnocracy, and it has to become a democracy, whether it’s a one-state or a confederation, or whatever the arrangement is, that’s what’s going to have to happen.  And it doesn’t mean, I try to tell Israelis, that everything’s lost.  In South Africa, people still talk Afrikaans.  They still have an Afrikaner university.  You know, nobody’s going to stop speaking Hebrew here.  You’re restructuring.  It’ll be in a different, healthier environment.  That’s the challenge.  That’s why I like this one-state idea.

You know, it wasn’t only blacks who were freed when Apartheid ended.  I was freed.  We all were freed.  We were liberated from this terrible corrosive vision of trying to build an ethnically pure state.

And decades of Apartheid regime propaganda, like decades of Zionist propaganda, said to the people: “If you give up control, you will be devoured.  You will be thrown into the sea.  You will be killed.”  And so it was very important for the anti-Apartheid movement to offer to ordinary white citizens a credible alternative message.  To say:  “You will not be devoured.  You give up the system, and you will have a place in the future, and it’s an inclusive future.”

Omar Barghouti - pacbi.org

There’s already a one-state.  It’s already one state, but it’s a one-state living under Apartheid.  It’s how to transform it from Apartheid to democracy where people get equal rights based on citizenship, not on ethnicity, religion, gender, or any other identity.

In South Africa saying that the country belongs to all who live in it doesn’t magically solve the problems.  There are still massive political struggles in South Africa over resource allocation, over the speed of land reform, the speed of economic reform, over affirmative action.  Those struggles for social justice continue, but they have to start from the premise that everyone is entitled to equal rights.

Dennis Brutus - South African Anti-Apartheid Activist

But you know the world doesn’t stand still.  There are people I meet today in South Africa who don’t understand what Apartheid was about.  They’ve come into a whole new world, so it’s not impossible to think of other generations.  We must have the ability to think beyond our own generation, to think into the future.

What does it matter if a man is white or black?  What does it matter if he’s a Jew or he’s an Arab?  It is possible.  Israel, it is possible.  It is possible to have peace with Jews and Arabs if the heart is ready, if the soul is ready, if we can transcend these petty foibles of power and pomposity, and we say to this world: “It is possible.”  It is possible.

 

Quote cards:

1) David Ben-Gurion

First Prime Minister of Israel

“Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens, whenever and wherever they want....We must expel Arabs and take their places…I support forced transfer and see nothing unethical in it”

2) F. W. De Klerk

Former president of South Africa

“What Apartheid originally wanted to achieve is what everybody now says is the solution for Israel and Palestine, namely partitioning separate nation states on the basis of ethnicity.”

3) Efi Eitam

Former minister of housing and National infrastructure

“Israeli Arabs are the ticking bomb beneath the whole democratic Israeli order.  Therefore, Israel today faces an existential threat that resembles cancer.  By the time you grasp the size of the threat, it’s already too late.”

4) Hendrick Verwoerd

Former prime minister of South Africa

“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a  thousand years.  Israel, like South Africa, is an Apartheid state.”

5) Yitzhak Rabin

Former prime minister of Israel

“[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to Jordan.”

6) Ariel Sharon

Former prime minister of Israel

“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.  We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the U.S.A., nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”