Get Herald RSSWe live in an era of smokescreens. Formal colonialism is mostly dismantled, but old colonial structures are constantly rejuvenating themselves, using complex and innovative strategies of multiracial window-dressing to hide the fact that colonialism has not gone away.
Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip is one example of this. There has been much fanfare in the U.S. media over this supposedly historic offering of peace, but to understand the reality of the Gaza withdrawal, one needs to look at the history of why the withdrawal actually happened.
There have been two Palestinian popular uprisings in the last two decades. Each of these created an immense political crisis for the Israeli state and official society (not to mention the Palestinian establishment). These uprisings challenged the very foundation of unequal social relations institutionalized in the laws and de facto practices of Israel - relations characterized by ethnic separation and subjugation in a hierarchy of citizenship. As in apartheid South Africa, access to citizenship is defined by ethnicity, Jew versus Arab, a system in which Jews have full political rights and Palestinians have modified ones or none at all, depending on where they live.
There have been two approaches to dealing with the Palestinian democratic challenge to this state of affairs. One promotes continual military subjugation and even genocide against the Palestinian population. Another advocates a political arrangement of limited-autonomy ghettoes where Palestinians are kept in inferior status. Despite recent maneuvers, current Prime Minister Sharon is sympathetic to the former. Shimon Peres, who recently spoke at New York University in defense of the Gaza pullout, represents the latter. However, both share a philosophy of racial manifest destiny and separation, falsely equating the history and identity of Jewish people with the existence of an apartheid state. This philosophy is called Zionism. Zionist justification for this is intimately tied to notions of superior and inferior races and cultures, often associated with the idea and practice of white supremacy.
The Gaza withdrawal is a small part of a much larger phenomenon often called the peace process. Its goal is to empower Palestinian representatives, whose base of support is the U.S. and Israeli governments, to affirm an international recognition of de facto apartheid. This is the function of the Palestinian Authority's latest president, Mahmoud Abbas. With the halt of the Intifada, a multicultural bureaucracy of officials has again come out of the woodwork to restart and justify this process of compartmentalizing Palestinians into militarily regulated ethnic reservations while calling these reservations a "state." While Abbas and the PLO leadership (which have never had control over the Intifada but presume to speak for it) issue Marie Antoinette-like media sound bites about the importance of disarming everyday Palestinians, Gazans still find themselves subjected to Israeli military domination, as the Israel Defense Force has total control over Gaza's airspace, sea shore, and borders. This week, the IDF has been conducting mass raids, extra-judicial killings and aerial attacks all throughout the Gaza strip and the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel is quietly consolidating its apartheid structure in the West Bank, strengthening and expanding its infrastructure of Jewish-only towns, Jewish-only roads, IDF checkpoints and the latest "security" wall. Inside "Israel proper" Arab-Israelis are third-class citizens (right behind Mizrahai Jews), legally segregated from access to land and citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity.
In his recent NYU appearance, Peres claimed that the Gaza pullout marked "the first time in the annals of Palestine that they [the Palestinians] will be completely in charge of their land." Common sense says otherwise. The Gaza pullout is a public relations stunt characteristic of the peace process itself; it hopes to exchange limited self-rule for leaving the policy of separate and unequal untouched. Palestinians are not in charge of anything and, if Peres gets his way, never will be.
Given that the Gaza withdrawal and the peace process are intended to facilitate segregation in Palestine, not end it, Anti-Racist Action continues to affirm that the only just solution to the conflict in Israel/Palestine is one, democratic, multi-ethnic state in which Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims - everyone who resides in the territory - lives side by side in legal and political equality. This will not come about through the initiatives of the United Nations, the maneuverings of the Israeli state, or the diplomacy of US official society, truly democratic innovations rarely do. Real multiracial equality in Palestine will only come through the democratic struggle of Palestinians from below and the solidarity efforts of their supporters.
Chris Shortsleeve '06 and Dara Bayer '08 are members of Anti-Racist Action.
