Israel and The Apartheid Analogy - Land and Infrastructure

Land and Infrastructure

Yossi Paritzky, a former Israeli minister, has used the apartheid analogy to describe a proposed bill that banned non-Jewish citizens of Israel from purchasing land privately owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF has long insisted that its lands be sold only to Jews, due to the fact that the land was purchased with money from Jewish donors for the purpose of settling Jews in Israel. Noam Chomsky, American professor of linguistics and political activist, has stated that "if you look at the land laws, and decode it all, what it amounts to is that about ninety percent of the land inside Israel is reserved to what's called 'people of Jewish race, religion and origin'... That's in the contract between the state of Israel and the Jewish National Fund, which is a non-Israeli organization, which, however, by various bureaucratic arrangements, administers the land... All of this is covered up enough so that nobody can say, "Look, here's an apartheid law."

In 2006, Chris McGreal of The Guardian stated that as a result of the government's control over most of the land in Israel, the vast majority of land in Israel is not available to non-Jews. In 2007 in response to a 2004 petition filed by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz ruled that the policy was discriminatory, it has been ruled that the JNF must sell land to non-Jews, and will be compensated with other land for any such land to ensure that the overall amount of Jewish-owned land in Israel remains unchanged.

Representative of a Palestinian view is that of Leila Farsakh, associate professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Boston, according to whom, after 1977, "the military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories: they continued to be governed by Israeli laws. The government also enacted different military laws and decrees to regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian inhabitants. These strangled the Palestinian economy and increased its dependence and integration into Israel." Farsakh holds that "any view these Israeli policies of territorial integration and societal separation as apartheid, even if they were never given such a name."

Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress, has stated that the network of settlements in the West Bank has created an "irreversible colonial project" aimed to foreclose the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. According to Siegman, in accomplishing this Israel has "crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world". Siegman argues that denial of both self-determination and Israeli citizenship to Palestinians amounts to a "double disenfranchisement", which when based on ethnicity amounts to racism. Siegman continues to state that reserving democracy for privileged citizens and keeping others "behind checkpoints and barbed wire fences" is the opposite of democracy.

John Dugard has compared Israel's confiscation of Palestinian farms and land, and destruction of Palestinian homes, to similar policies of Apartheid-era South Africa.