The protest caused an international controversy as Israel, the United States, and other Israeli allies condemned the demonstrators and withdrew their delegates. Israel defended its policies toward the Palestinians as politically, not racially, motivated. The South Africans failed to see the distinction, and many of the speakers at the conference's opening ceremonies voiced their support for discussing the Palestine issue, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson i.

The South Africans' experience with apartheid makes them sensitive to the Palestinian plight. They recognize the same patterns in the South African and Palestinian experience: limited or no citizenship rights, segregation, arbitrary detentions, collective punishment, and other injustices based on race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion.

There are two different groups of Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid: Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians living under occupation do not have citizenship in any country nor do they have voting rights in Israel, but they are subject to the laws and policies of the Israeli government and its military. Since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has been constructing "colonies" for Jewish Israelis throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and the pace of construction doubled in the 1990s. There are now 205 Israeli "settlements" and 74 "outposts" in the territories; 15 new settlements have been approved since March 2001 ii. These colonies are completely off-limits to Palestinians. There is an entire network of high-quality roads that connect the various settlements, which Palestinians are also banned from using. These roads isolate Palestinian communities from each other and, along with the time-consuming and humiliating checkpoint system, make traveling even short distances a grueling process.

These colonies, bypass roads, and checkpoints have effectively created an Israeli version of the South African Bantustans. Under apartheid in South Africa, the white government created so-called "homelands" for black South Africans. The whites' revoked blacks' citizenship and relegated them to isolated, undesirable areas of the country, claiming to have given them independence. In reality, they stripped black Africans of their rights and resources, and the homelands were economically, militarily, and politically dependent on white South Africa. Israel has done something similar in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority is given official recognition as the representative of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, but it has very little real power. The Israeli military invades the area at will, disregarding the authority of the PA police force, and top PA leaders have been threatened with assassination and held under house arrest. The occupied territories are under Israel's economic and military stranglehold; Palestinians can't work, go to school, or even leave their home without Israeli permission. At the same time, they are confined to shrinking pieces of land as Israel seizes the most desirable locations and Jewish settlements surround Palestinian cities and towns. Although the idea of a truly independent state was likely never any more realistic than an independent Bantustan in South Africa, it is now a near impossibility.

The isolation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be almost complete in June 2003 when Israel finishes the first phase of its "apartheid wall" along the Green Line (Israel's de facto border with the West Bank). The wall, re-enforced with trenches, electric fences, and security patrols, will be 72 miles (116 kilometers) long in the first phase and will eventually run the entire 217-mile (350-kilometer) length of the West Bank. The construction of the wall has destroyed numerous Palestinian homes, expropriated land in the occupied territories, and separated Palestinians from their farmland. The district of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, for example, will be completely encircled by the wall, with only one guarded entrance and exit iii. Although Israel claims it is building the wall to secure its own borders, the wall will literally imprison hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, creating a physical manifestation of Israel's apartheid.

Life in a Jewish colony in the West Bank or Gaza Strip is vastly different from life in a Palestinian town. The colonies expropriate a large amount of water, filling family swimming pools while Palestinians struggle to get drinking water, take showers, and water their crops. Each Israeli in Israel consumes as much water as do four Palestinians; each Israeli settler in the occupied territories uses as much water as do seventeen Palestinians iv. Thirty percent of the Israeli colonists living in the territories also own a home in Israel, and nearly all of them have an income significantly higher than that of the average Israeli, although their tax burden is significantly lower because of government grants and tax breaks v. The disparity in living standards between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians living under the occupation is inexcusable and dangerous. Palestinians are justifiably resentful as they watch luxurious settlements spring up around them, funded by the Israeli government, while their homes are bulldozed because Israel refused to issue them the required building permits.

Palestinians within Israel constitute 18% of the population (1,057,800 out of a total population of 5,757,900). Although these Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, the government only guarantees equal rights for citizens (and non-citizens) with "Jewish nationality." In fact, all people with this "Jewish nationality" can automatically become citizens, even if they have never stepped foot in Israel. On the other hand, Israel's stated policy is to never grant citizenship to non-Jews who wish to immigrate to Israel, automatically banning all of the Palestinians who fled during the establishment of Israel but desperately want to return to the land they lived on for generations.

Palestinian neighborhoods receive less than one fifth of the budgeted municipal services that their Jewish counterparts receive. In many cases, especially in Bedouin communities, Israel simply refuses to recognize the existence of the Arab communities. Because the government denies the legality of these villages, it refuses to issue permits to build or repair homes and does not provide electricity, water, health services, education, roads, or any other infrastructure. The results of this policy are embarrassing for such a highly developed country: in the Negev, for example, 70% of Bedouin infants are not fully immunized and one third must be hospitalized within their first year of life.

Palestinian-Israelis have little recourse within the "democratic" system to challenge the blatant, institutionalized discrimination against them. Any political party that calls for full and equal rights for Palestinian-Israeli citizens is actually banned from running in Knesset (parliament) elections vi. Socially, Palestinian-Israelis are shunned by the Jewish majority, sent to separate schools, and discriminated against in both admissions to universities and in employment. Jewish Israelis have made it clear that non-Jewish citizens are unwanted and have no place (beyond performing menial labor) within Israeli society. This position is no more defensible than that of the segregationist American south before the civil rights movement, the apartheid government of South Africa, or any other racist regime.

Although it is tragic to see apartheid once again rear its ugly head, the South African experience can give us hope. It shows us that peaceful, international, grassroots activism can work. It shows us that a people can move beyond hate, violence, and retribution to reach for peace, healing, and coexistence. This process is not easy, but it is not impossible. It is time for all of us to reject the idea that separate is ever equal. It is time for us to tell the Israelis that they must share their state with the people who were there when they arrived. It is time to end apartheid, once and for all.

Endnotes