Israel: A confirmed apartheid state

Peace is at the best of times a tenuous proposition in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even as the world hopes the new indefinite ceasefire that has brought 50 days of bloodshed to an end will last, the real causes of the conflict have been put to the side, rather than resolved. So what do the Hamas rockets aimed at Israel and the disproportionate firepower of the modern Israeli military machine add up to? The loss of lives, particularly on the Palestinian side, has been immense. More than 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed, some 10,000 injured, hundreds of houses on the Gaza Strip destroyed against 65 Israeli soldiers and six civilians dead.

Both sides are now claiming victory, but the horrific loss of lives and property in this third round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been far higher than the two preceding conflicts even as Israel’s guardian angel, the United States, continued to replenish ammunition and gifted Israel many hundreds of more aid dollars.

Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is rightly described as an open air prison  which, since the fall of the Morsi government in Egypt, has meant that apart from the Israeli-controlled crossings, the Rafah crossing to Egypt was also mostly closed. What has now been agreed to is the tentative regulated opening of these crossings and that the Gazans can now fish six miles from their coast, instead of three. The question of opening a seaport on the Gaza coast and an airport are subjects for further discussions.

Clearly, Palestinians are the underdogs in this conflict. Israelis enjoy overwhelming American support in every way, and Egypt, the traditional regional mediator ruled by a general in civilian clothes, has more in common with Tel Aviv geopolitically than with the Gazans or Palestinians of the Fatah variety nominally in charge of slivers of the occupied West Bank.

However, despite the wide military disparity between the two main parties to the conflict and the support one side enjoys of the only remaining superpower, Israel has perhaps lost more in terms of its international legitimacy and the isolation it has experienced. Indeed, the scale of the Palestinian suffering, with nearly 600 children killed, compared to one Israeli child, has pricked the conscious of the world, particularly in Europe.

Several indicators point to the new phenomenon. The ranks of the Jewish diaspora have never been as vocal as they are now in decrying the actions of the Jewish state. And as an unfortunate consequence, there is a perceptible rise in anti-semitism in countries like France, forcing more people of Jewish origin to migrate to Israel. Some European institutions in the Netherlands and Norway have taken funds out of Israeli entities functioning in the occupied territories.

It is now universally assumed that the so-called two-state solution — with Israel and Palestine living side by side — is dead, with Israeli ruling circles divided between the Right and more extreme shades of the Right. The irony is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considered a moderate on the present Israeli scale.

Thus, it has become a fact of life that Israel will have the distinction of becoming that rare entity, being a colonial power in the 21st century, with the support of the United States. Given Israeli policies, the logical outcome of Tel Aviv’s actions is narrowing to the option of running an apartheid state along the old South African model. Given the nature of the Jewish state, the Palestinian people living in it can only be second-class citizens.

All impartial American political observers recognise that Washington’s hands are tied, given the power of the domestic Israeli lobby. Indeed, the marathon efforts made by the then new US secretary of state, John Kerry, were America’s last hurrah. President Barack Obama is handicapped by his low public ratings and the perception that he has not proved to be a savvy practitioner of foreign policy, with the threat of the ISIS now staring him in the face in Iraq and Syria.
The Palestinians on their part are a divided house. A unity government of Hamas and Fatah formed some time ago has thus far remained largely on paper. The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has outlived his term and is the straw the outside world is clutching on to, to give a semblance of doing something to solve the problem without attempting to get at the origin of the disease, which is the illegal occupation and appropriation of Palestinian land and subjecting Palestinians to colonial rule.

There have been three Israeli-Palestinian conflicts in the Gaza Strip in six years. Even as circumstances suggest that the long-term ceasefire this time will last, it can only be an interregnum before the next conflict starts. The dilemma for Israel is that it is tough to remain a colonial power in the 21st century and in the eyes of much of the world, the disproportionate power equation and the numbers of Palestinians dead and injured, nearly 75 per cent of whom were innocent civilians, according to UN estimates, is obscene.

Israel justifies the killings at the altar of its security. But the argument fails to convince increasing sections of the outside world because the causes of the strife and conflict lie in the injustice of occupation and subjugation of an entire people. If the United States cannot resolve the problem, thanks to its bias and total support of one party, who can?