The Yishuv and the Falsity of Apartheid

Orthodox Jewish birthrates exceed that of Palestinians. You better make your peace now. Orthodox Jews are like Arabs - they don't see individuals, they see communities.

Israel today may tear down the home of a Palestinian terrorist. The Israel of tomorrow, with a majority Orthodox Jewish population, will hold everyone in the village accountable as a community.

If you want a real war, try starting one with Orthodox Jews. They will kill all your men and women and take the children and cattle as servants. Let me rephrase, you should NOT start a war with Orthodox Jews. Jewish Law - Halacha - relating to warfare is very clear as to how Jews must deal with those who threaten Jewish life; there is no mention of mercy or surrender in that context. I pray it never comes to that.

Jews owned approximately 5% of the land that ebcame Israel in 1948.

Yes, Jews owned just 5% of the land, and Arabs could not accept even that 5%. They pogromed Jews in villages and cities on a regular basis, often with support of the British.

The Hagganah was created because the Jewish community was being attacked by Arab gangs, and the British police refused to interfere or protect the Jewish population.

Once Arabs started a war, any territory that Jews captured no longer belonged to its original owners.

Er, the settler movement on the West Bank and later Gaza arrived in July 1974. That's 34 years of being colonising racist thugs, not 60 years of being neighours.

Jews have been living continuously in the West Bank for 3000 years, until Arab gangs raped, looted and killed them in Hebron, Jerusalem, etc.

Even before the settler movement, it was a common thing for Jordanian or Egyptian or Syrian trained Palestinian terrorists to infiltrate a kibbutz and murder a Jewish family in their sleep. To this day if you visit some of these small communities which were once on the border, they had to build watchtowers and trenches to protect the community from Arab attack.

Regarding your statements about water rights, roads, etc., there was a reason why they were built. The Jews built on a path of least resistance. The other roads in the West Bank lead through Arab villages. When Jews traveled on these roads, they would often be attacked, the army had to be called in, it was very messy. The thought was that building roads around Arab villages instead of through them would reduce the violence by keeping the two sides separate. It was not created for Apartheid; it was designed to reduce tensions between the communities by limiting their interaction.

As you yourself said, any Israeli can travel on these roads, be they Jewish, Druze, Israeli Arab, Muslim or Christian. The point was to stay out of the villages and avoid tensions. You can spin it however way you want, but this was the intent.

As for water and other resources, these problems stem from separate and competing interests for Israel in the West Bank. On the one hand, Jews went to the West Bank and started large communities, and demanded regular government services - sewer, water, electricity, etc. In fact, such migration was encouraged to provide Israel with strategic depth in a future Arab conflict.

On the other hand, Israel never thought it would rule the West Bank and have to provide utility services for the Palestinian population. As with Sinai, it assumed the West Bank would at some point be returned to Jordan, who would then be responsible for dealing with the population. However, in 1985, Jordan explicitly abandoned any rights it had to the West Bank and left Israel holding the bag.

Then the Palestinians demanded independence, and got, in large part. After Oslo, it was assumed that now the Palestinians would be responsible for their own government services. Of course, the PLO and Fatah just stole the billions pumped into the West Bank from abroad and did little to build a public utility infrastructure, much less manage it properly.

Then the Palestinians started yet another war, and now the thinking was... they don't want to be ruled by us, they don't want their own state, they don't want to build a decent society, they just want to fight us. Throw some bombs at them and put up a wall so that we don't have to deal with them anymore.

The Security Barrier is no more apartheid than the security barrier in Northern Ireland or Cyprus, or now Iraq. It was the path of least resistance - to separate the communities and prevent constant violence. And it works! Violence is down dramatically from its height in 2002-04.

Were Palestinian terrorist organizations to continue being able to attack Israel in a meaningful way, we would continue to see forceful military response on the part of the IDF, leading to more casualties and hostilities on both sides.

The Security Barrier was a pragmatic step to a resumption of normalcy, so that the next generation could try again without a recent biter legacy of violence.

I can see how from a Palestinian activist perspective, it was useful to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of Apartheid and resistance to colonialism. However, this characterization does not represent reality, and has become a hindrance to meaningful dialog on the subject. That is, if anyone still cares about dialog.

Every activist reaches a point where the ultimate, positive resolution of the issue is of secondary importance to the activism itself. They find new reasons to continue "the struggle", because they have lost their identity and purpose - they are defined by the act of activism itself.

At that point, a peaceful resolution of the conflict doesn't really matter - what matters is to somehow continue the fight. This may be the case for some on this blog.