[R-G] Envisioning the End of Israeli Apartheid: An Interview With Ali Abunimah

[Anthony Fenton]

Envisioning the End of Israeli Apartheid:  An Interview With Ali  
Abunimah
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=609&Itemid=36

B DIXON:: Tell us how long you have been doing Electronic Intifada,  
and why you started it.

A. ABUNIMAH: Along with several other collaborators I started  
Electronic Intifada about four and a half years ago. We did it for  
much the same reason that you started Black Agenda Report, because  
there were vibrant and important concerns and conversations going on  
among the Palestinian people and their allies, conversations of which  
we could find no trace in the mainstream media. In the beginning we  
did a lot of political analysis, which we still do, along with some  
coverage of Palestinian arts and culture. Lately we have been  
emphasizing on first-hand, on-the-ground coverage of life as it is  
lived by Palestinians under the occupation and blockade.

The conversation about Israel-Palestine in this country might as well  
be about some other universe, it contains so many misconceptions and  
outright lies. There has been very little very little attention given  
to the context, to the history and daily lives of Palestinians living  
under Israeli military occupation, living under apartheid-like laws  
and practices in Israel. There's been very little attention given to  
Palestinian art, music and culture, to the Palestinian Diaspora, which  
is world wide by now, including here in the United States,. These are  
all things you very rarely find reflected in the mainstream media, and  
when you do it's often from a very distorted perspective. The so- 
called experts on Palestine and Palestinians are very often those who  
do not wish the best for the people of Palestine. That's why  
Electronic Intifada exists.

B. DIXON:: You made a reference to apartheid-like laws in Israel- 
Palestine. What should Americans know about that situation, and if  
there was one thing that black people in particular needed to know  
about these apartheid-like laws and situations in Israel-Palestine,  
what would that be?

A. ABUNIMAH: I've been focuses a lot on this in recent years. I  
devoted a chapter in my book One Country to the lessons of South  
Africa for how we can move forward in Israel-Palestine. Looking at  
some of the comparisons between Israel and South Africa, there's so  
much to know. One of the things to know is we are not having this  
discussion in the United States. But in the rest of the world they are  
having it. Some of the key anti-apartheid leaders that are known by  
Americans, and known by many black Americans, like Archbishop Desmond  
Tutu have been very, very forthright in stating that what is happening  
to Palestinians is apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils, a minister in the south  
African government who happens to be Jewish. He has been one of the  
most outspoken allies of therepublican_jesus Palestinians, declaring  
that Israel is an apartheid state. And of course many Israeli leaders  
say it. For example just today (April 25, 2008) in Ha'aretz, the  
newspaper of record in Israel, a former member of Knesset, Israeli  
politician Yossi Sarid has an article entitled “Yes, It's Apartheid”.  
In which he compares Israel to the apartheid state of south Africa.

The other thing I think is important to know is the history, that  
throughout the 1970s and 80s, when black Americans were leading the  
struggle against apartheid in this country, when they were the  
conscience of this country in terms of putting apartheid South Africa  
on the American political agenda, Israel was one of the key supporters  
of apartheid South Africa. Israel is the country that systematically  
violated the international arms embargo on South Africa. The weapons  
used to beat and kill black demonstrators and freedom fighters in  
South African townships were made in Israel, right down to the water  
cannon used in the townships... the fighter jets, the gunboats, all  
the heavy armament of the South African military used were in large  
part supplied by Israel.

It's less well known, there is less hard evidence about it, although  
some information is in the public domain regarding Israeili-South  
African cooperation in their nuclear weapons programs.

B. DIXON::: We've in the midst of a presidential election here. What  
difference will it make who gets elected US president to someone  
living right now, say, in Gaza and to the Palestinian Diaspora?

A. ABUNIMAH: I am very pessimistic that it makes any difference at  
all, because the tone and content of the politics on this issue in the  
United States is really a competition to see who can be the most pro- 
Israel candidate. That has been the case across the board with the  
three candidates who are out there now. All three are competing to be  
the most pro-Israeli to the point where Hillary Clinton has threatened  
to “totally obliterate Iran” on behalf of Israel.

Barack Obama too has been, from his past and I know some of this  
because I knew him hack in his Chicago days, he was much more  
sympathetic and much more attuned to the plight of the Palestinians.  
He used to be a lot more open minded, and now he is busy denying all  
that and trying to portray himself as a stalwart and unconditional  
supporter of Israel. So I don't see much change coming from mainstream  
politics. I think we have to keep pushing from the grassroots for the  
kind of change we want to see, that's where it will have to come from.

That's where it came from with the anti-apartheid struggle. The Reagan  
administration didn't want to impose sanctions. Congress didn't want  
to impost sanctions. There was a grassroots movement from the civil  
rights leaders from the black churches and from others that finally  
put pressure on the establishment to begin to do the right thing.signup

B. DIXON:: Back to Obama, we've got a lot of people who say that he's  
just shammin', he's just doing what he has to do to get elected, doing  
what he has to do to get in, but once he gets in, he's going to bring  
change.

A. ABUNIMAH: None of us can know what's deep down in his heart, we  
have to take him ast his word. He says he is going to stand by Israel,  
tha he's going to veto any UN resolutions which criticize Israel, the  
he thinks Palestinians are largely to blame for their own problems..  
We have to take his word for that, and hold him accountable for the  
positions which he has stated. As for whether he is going to turn  
around and do something different, well, I understand that a lot of  
people hope that will be the case. But the reality of politics in this  
country is that the things you have to do to get elected are the same  
things you have to do to stay in office. I don't see what wold really  
push him to change.

B. DIXON:: Tell us what is the Nakbah

A. ABUNIMAH: The Nakbah is an Arabic word, el nakbah. It means the  
catastrophe. Palestinians use to to describe the events which took  
place in late 1947 and continued into late 1948, when three quarters  
of the Palestinan population were ethnically cleansed from their  
land.so that the state of Israel could be established upon the ruins  
of their society. In that process, 750,000 Palestinian were forced out  
of their homes by an organized campaign carried out by the Zionist  
movment. It wasn't yet the Israeli state. More than 500 Palestinian  
towns, villages and cities were depopulated and destroyed, and the  
Palestinians were driven into exile.

We're now in the third or fourth generation of that, though acutally  
for many it's still a first generation experience. My parents for  
example, lived though that, so this is very much a live and ongoing  
catastrophe, not something that is only in the past because thisof  
ethnic cleansing is continuing in Palestine against Palestinians who  
are still there.

B. DIXON: How is it continuing?

A. ABUNIMAH: It's continuing in many ways. The irony of it is that  
although the Zionist leaders very clearly intended, and this is  
something that the Israili historian Ilan Pape talks about in his  
latest book, The Ethnic Cleansiing of Palestine. They had a very claer  
intentiuon to get rid of the Palestinians because you cn't set up a  
Jewish state in a place where the majority of the population is not  
Jewish.

They had to get rid of that majority population. Despite that, the  
Palestinian population today is actually larger, with more  
Palestinians living in Palestine than any time before. They have a  
very high birth rate, and they have a very strong commitment to their  
land, regardless of the obstacles put in their way.

What Israel has been trying to do is exclude or expel the Palestinians  
politically and literally. They do it by taking their land to build  
fortified Jewish-only settlements which the American media calls  
“neighborhoods”. They do it by building walls around entire  
Palestinian cities and communities, a wall the rest of the world  
outside the United States calls “the apartheid wall”. We can see that  
not only in Gaza, where almost a million and a half Palestinians are  
confined to a vast open air prison. We can see it by the other  
Palestinian cities and towns that are surrounded by these walls and  
barbed wire fences. It's a process of physical expulsion as well, as  
every day more and more land is taken, more and more Palestinians are  
pushed off it.

Israel has moved this population in exactly the same ways that the  
former South African government did when it tried to pen up its black  
population in bantustans.

It's exactly the same thing that South Africa did when they said OK,  
blacks are physically present on this land but we are going to make  
your politically invisible gy creating these fake independent states.  
If you want citizenship, if you want the right to vote, go home to one  
of your bantustans and exercise your political rights there, but you  
don't get to vote for the real government of the country.

B DIXON Exactly what is goiing on in Gaza right now, and what is  
collective punishment

A. ABUNIMAH: Imagine that here on my block in Chicago, a kid is  
accused of a crime, let's say robbing a store. Instead of the police  
looking for the individual, arresting and charging that person with a  
crime, they simply surround the block with armored vehicles and tanks,  
order everyone out of their houses, arrest all the men, or simply  
destroy the entire block. That is an example of the kind of collective  
punishments which have been implemented against Palestinians for  
decades. Israelis claim that they are defending themselves against the  
Palestinians, but that's just like saying the United States was  
defending itself against the Native Americans.

So now Gaza is totally cut off from the outside world. There are a  
million and a half Palestinians living there, I have friends living  
there. We try to stay in touch by email when they have electricity,  
but the electricity is frequently cut off by the Israelis who deny  
Gaza the fuel to keep the power plants running. The universities have  
shut down because there is no power, cancer patients are dying because  
they can't get chemotherapy, the lives of dialysis patients are  
threatened because they cannot get the treatment they need. People  
cannot get to school to work, can't keep their businesses open. Eighty  
percent of the population, and these are proud, independent-minded  
people, are subsisting on charity, on rations handed out by the UN,  
malnutrition is rampant....

B DIXON: And why would the Israeli government do that?

A. ABUNIMAH: We've reprinted the statements of Israeli officials at  
Electronic Intifada which appeared in the Israeli press. They say  
their objective is to put pressure on the Palestinian populaiton so  
they will put pressure on their leaders to submit to what we want.  
Palestinians had a democratic election, back in 2006 and they elected  
the “wrong leaders”., leaders which Israel and the United States don't  
want, so they have to be starved into submission for that crime.

B. DIXON: We hear all the time from the mouths of the US Secretary of  
State, from Bush, from the presidential candidates about what they  
call an independent Palestinian state, but which you call a bantustan.  
What's wrong with an independent Palestinian state?

A. ABUNIMAH: What's wrong with an independent Palestinian state is  
that it' is a bantustan, just like the little back country South  
African reservations to which the apartheid government proposed to  
relocate most of its black population. A so-called independent  
Palestinian state is a complete farce, with no possibility of an  
independent economy, since Palestinian territory is divided into  
dozens of pieces separated by Israeli-only roads and fortified  
settlements, by walls, barbed wire and checkpoints.

In the case of South Africa, nobody bought it. The South African  
people didn't buy it, and no country in the world acknowledged these  
little puppets as real independent states. Most importantly, the South  
African leadership, Nelson Mandela and the ANC refused to play this  
game. They said we want our whole country, we want our full rights.

palestineThe difference, I would say, between the proposed Palestinian  
state and the bantustans is that the bantustans actually had more  
territory, and more resources than the fake Palestinian state. The  
Palestinian state is simply a ruse to hide and to perpetuate the fact  
of Israeli apartheid.

B. DIXON: If a separate Palestinian state is no solution, then what  
needs to happen in Israel-Palestine?

A. ABUNIMAH: We have to recognize that in Israel-Palestine today there  
are 10.8 million people. 48% of them are NOT Israeli Jews. The  
majority population right now are Palestinians and others, with the  
numbers of Jews and Palestinians being about equal, at just under  
half. Another five percent who are neither Palestinians nor Jews make  
up the rest. But the trends are very clear. Within five to ten years  
at most, Palestinians will be an absolute majority of the population  
of the state of Israel-Palestine, just as they were sixty years ago.

What we need to be saying is that this Jewish minority has a right to  
live in peace. It has a right to be secure. It has a right to be part  
of the country. It cannot have better rights and special rights over  
the rest of the population. It must not have the exclusive right to  
determine the destiny of the country. What we need to do, and this is  
what I have been arguing with other Palestinians, is we need to be  
talking not about a separate Palestinian state because that is a pipe  
dream. The geography doesn't work, the economy doesn't work.

We should be calling for full civil and economic rights for everyone  
who lives within the boundaries of the country, whether they are  
Jewish or Palestinian or anything else. And of course we need to be  
calling for full decolonization, for reparations and restitution for  
the victims of the current regime.

Those are the two things that have to happen; equality and  
restitution. Legal equality without restitution is not enough, as we  
know from the history of this country. There also has to be active  
restitution for the victims. I don't see why Palestinians and Israeli  
Jews cannot live together peacefully under such a situation.

B. DIXON: The picture you have painted for us is not a bright and  
happy one. What if anything, makes you hopeful?

A. ABUNIMAH: What makes me hopeful is that 60 years of catastrophe  
have not dimmed the will of Palestinians to see justice done. 60 years  
of brutality, of oppression, by Israel have not succeeded in  
establishing the legitimacy of that regime. Each day, the Israelis  
have to wake up and prove to the world that their state has a right to  
exist as what they call a Jewish state, and what I call an apartheid  
state. They have not been able to succeed. There is growing,  
nonviolent global political movement to bring justice to Palestinians,  
and only that can bring peace to Israelis.

Apartheid and colonialism lasted for 300 years before they were  
brought down. The Soviet Union lasted for eighty years, and nobody  
anticipated its collapse either. You look at the history of this  
country where there is so much further to go, and yet there was change  
here as a result of social movements, not from the top down, but from  
the bottom up, coming from the efforts of people who decided they were  
not going to take this any more, that they would stand up for their  
rights. Every single one of these social movements has prevailed  
against overwhelming odds, and against enemies determined to hold onto  
power at any cost.

So Palestinians are in good company in this struggle, and we are in a  
position to put forth a vision of justice that can serve all the  
people living in Israel-Palestine.one_state

Mr. Abunimah is the author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the  
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, and co-counder of Electronic Intifada.    
EI publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about  
the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective. EI is  
the leading Palestinian portal for information about the Israeli- 
Palestinian conflict and its depiction in the media.

Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and can be  
reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com