Israeli Labour Party adopts full apartheid plan

Yitzhak Herzog embraces apartheid
Nureddin Sabir, Editor, Redress Information & Analysis, writes:

The Israeli Labour Party on 7 February endorsed a plan for a full apartheid regime and the theft of what remains of the Palestinian territories occupied in the 1967 war, the French news agency AFP reported.

The plan was first proposed by party leader Yitzhak Herzog at a conference at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies on 5 January.

“I want to separate from as many Palestinians as possible, as fast as possible,” he told the conference, the right-wing Jerusalem Post reported.

He promised to “erect a big wall between us. That is the kind of co-existence that is possible right now… Ariel Sharon… didn’t finish the job. We want to finish it, to complete the barrier that separates us.”

“The situation will be clear to everyone,” Herzog said, adding: “We are settling here, you are settling there.

By “here”, he meant the large, stolen tracts of land that have been turned into squatter-colony blocs, and “there” are the Bantustans planned for the Palestinians on small portions of the occupied West Bank.

As Israeli academic Neve Gordon notes, the Israeli Labour Party, “which is the only viable alternative to the current Likud government and which is considered by many, both in Israel and among international leaders, to be a progressive substitute, has, in other words, unanimously supported a plan that would have been applauded by apartheid South Africa”.

In order to ensure the consolidation of the division of the West Bank into archipelagos, the plan emphasises the importance of completing the separation barrier around settlement blocs in the West Bank, because the blocs, according to Herzog, will always remain under Israeli sovereignty and “will be part of the permanent solution”.

In order to get rid of Palestinians who are residents of Israel and have an Israeli identity card, Herzog endorses cutting off Palestinian villages from Jerusalem.

Needless to say, the Israeli Wehrmacht, according to Herzog, should continue to control the entire West Bank, including the Palestinian Bantustans.

Though hard to believe, given the slaughter in the Gaza Strip perpetrated under Binyamin Netanyahu, Herzog criticised the Israeli prime minister for being too soft on the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s Likud government, he claims, is not really bombing Palestinians in Gaza, but only empty spaces.

He therefore promised that, if he gains power, he would employ an “iron fist”, including shutting down Palestinian radio and TV stations and ensuring that the Palestinians would be forbidden from having internet or mobile phone services.

The conclusion the rest of the world should draw from this is obvious. As Gordon says,

Given this reality, it does not seem likely that a just solution to the Palestinian plight will come from within Israel. Indeed, at this historical juncture, international pressure is perhaps the only hope and is desperately needed.

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