Israel and Palestine

“We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) express our deepest condolences and our full solidarity with the family and friends of the American pilot Aaron Bushnell, whose name has been immortalized as a defender of human values and the oppression of the Palestinian people who are suffering because of the American administration and its unjust policies, as well as the American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by a Zionist bulldozer in Rafah in In 2003, it is the same city that Bushnell paid with his life for putting pressure on his country’s government to prevent the criminal Zionist army from attacking it and committing massacres and violations there.

The administration of US President Biden bears full responsibility for the death of US Army pilot Aaron Bushnell due to its policy that supported the Nazi Zionist entity in its war of extermination against our Palestinian people, as he gave his life in order to shed light on the Zionist massacres and ethnic cleansing against our people in the Gaza Strip.

  The heroic pilot, Aaron Bushnell, will remain immortal in the memory of our Palestinian people and the free people of the world, and a symbol of the spirit of global human solidarity with our people and their just cause.

The tragic accident that cost Pilot Bushnell his life is an expression of the growing state of anger among the American people who reject their country’s policy that contributes to the killing and extermination of our people, and who reject their government’s violation of universal human values, by providing cover to ensure the impunity of the entity and its Nazi leaders from punishment and accountability.” 

Biden likes to say that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. But Israel is not a democracy. Not by a long shot. In fact, it is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world.

Here’s the reality: there are 5 million people living within the borders that Israel controls who do not have the right to vote over the government that determines virtually everything about their lives, and whose human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated.  On top of this, there are another 6 million people from that territory who are so completely disenfranchised that they have no rights within it at all, and have been rendered legally “stateless”.

So what’s going on here?

Well, apartheid. Now, a lot of people get hung up on the “apartheid analogy”, because when they think of apartheid in South Africa they think of segregation and unequal rights among citizens, and they say this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Israel. But in the academic literature, this is known as “petty apartheid”, and it was only a minor part of the apartheid system in South Africa. The real action – “grand apartheid” – had much bigger designs…

Grand apartheid was the process of reshaping the territory. The idea was to forcibly remove the Africa population from the majority of the country (literally bulldozing their houses and putting them into trucks) and dump them onto tiny chunks of land called Bantustans. Then you put a border around the Bantustan, give people “citizenship” there, give it a flag and a coat of arms, and set up a parliament.

Taking this approach – ethnic cleansing – the apartheid regime shoved most of the African population into enclaves comprising just 13% of the land, and denied them any rights of citizenship within the “white” territory.  White people justified this by saying Africans had rights in their own “countries”, the Bantustans. But of course the Bantustans had no real power, no economic sovereignty, no independent militaries, etc. The apartheid regime controlled their borders and trade.

Israel has followed the “grand apartheid” playbook, chapter and verse.  The Nakba began the process of shoving Palestinians off their land, out of their homes, and either (a) into the enclaves that today form Gaza and the West Bank, where 5 million people live within borders Israel controls, or (b) into neighboring countries where 6 million people live as stateless refugees. The process of ethnic cleansing continues today.

The result? 11 million people are hived off from the realm of rights within their own territory, and denied the right to vote over the government that controls it. Minority rule by Zionists is declared “democratic” only because it excludes the majority of the population. Calling this democracy is an extraordinary farce.

There is no democracy within apartheid. Apartheid must be abolished – it’s as simple as that. The 11 million must be free to return to their land and homes, and they must enjoy full rights of citizenship within a fully democratic polity, including the right to vote over the state that governs them.  Apartheid must fall and we must fight until it does. 

~ Jason Hickel