Thirty-five years ago, the UN ratified the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. It took the historical experience of South Africa and universalised it, defining the crime of apartheid as ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.’The fact of Israeli apartheid has been an all too brutal reality for Palestinians for decades. In the West an apartheid analysis may have only been brought to popular attention recently, but the oppressive combination of colonisation and separation has defined the Palestinian experience for over sixty years. In South Africa, European settlers established racial domination through the colonisation of the land of the native population and the physical separation of the white settlers from the natives.
In Palestine, whether forced to live as refugees in exile, under military occupation or as excluded citizens in an ethnocratic state, the Palestinian majority has been systematically oppressed by the settler Jewish minority.In spite of UN Security Council Resolution 194 and international legal norms, the refugees who were forced from their homeland in 1948 have never been allowed to return. In 1950 the Law of Return legalised the ethnic cleansing by granting Israeli citizenship to any Jew worldwide. The second act of apartheid began in 1967 with the occupation of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine. Having rejected any of the attendant legal duties of an occupying power, Israel has ignored international law, establishing colonies, building an apartheid wall, routinely demolishing homes and imposing daily acts of collective punishment. The Gaza strip has become the world’s biggest prison. Israel holds the key and can lock the door, denying the people of Gaza access to the most basic goods. The Palestinian citizens of Israel, cut off from the majority of Palestinians and consistently regarded as a ‘demographic threat’, have been denied basic equality in education, health, housing and land ownership.Prominent South Africans themselves have taken the lead in the campaign against Israeli Apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils, a former ANC leader and current Minister in the South African government, has declared ‘that the violence of the apartheid regime, as inhuman as it was, “was a picnic” (in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu) in comparison with the utter brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.’ Earlier this week students, politicians and activists in Soweto launched the Fourth International Israeli Apartheid Week.
In Oxford, the OU Arab Cultural Society is bringing together leading academics, journalists and artists, Israeli and Palestinian on a common platform of solidarity with Palestinians against the injustice of Israeli Apartheid. Together we are building an anti-apartheid movement for a new generation.Omar Shweiki is from the OU Arab Society.
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