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This is the beautiful land of Israel and Palestine.

The world’s three most prominent religions

Islam, Christianity and Judaism, consider it holy land.

Each year, millions of people from around the world

Come here to pray for peace and prosperity.

Yet this land is also a major center

of conflict in the world today.

(gunshots)

For Jewish Israelis, the conflict

centers on protecting a homeland

Created for the Jewish people in 1948.

For Palestinians, it is about

resisting decades of colonialism,

expulsion, occupation, and apartheid.

(music)

Most people identify apartheid with the

grotesque system of control that existed

in South Africa from 1948 to 1994,

in which the white minority

ruled over the black majority, stole their

land, and deprived them of basic rights.

It was a system reviled by the whole world,

and it eventually crumbled under the

combined pressure of internal

resistance and international sanctions.

Today the word is back, and with it too

is a growing global movement to end the

Israeli form of apartheid.

(music)

(music)

(music fades out)

Time, October, 1948. A new leadership.

It denies the morality of economic free

for all. Its slogan: “To each his own.”

Its belief: parallel development,

separate identity. Apartheid.

The word Apartheid, is an Afrikaans word,

Which simply means separateness, Being apart.

So we had the wonderful term called separate

development, but it was never intended to be equal.

One could talk about the petty Apartheid. That

was about the fact that almost from birth

your life was separated from people of other races.

You’d have to stand if the bus was

full. If you went to the beach,

there were some beaches you could not walk on.

Those were the sorts of petty manifestations.

But you had the real Apartheid, which for me was about

the structural systems and policies of Apartheid,

the way in which land was taken away from people.

In the first post-war election, the

white electorate voted into power

a group of men dedicated to the complete

separation of the races in South Africa.

The vision was to create a demographic

white majority, at least of citizens,

even though you were going to have the others in your midst.

The entire nationalistic existence was

at stake. It was going to be swamped

by the black majority, so they

evolved the concept of Apartheid.

Ultimately the driving force behind it all

was to create the white Afrikaner-led

nation so that Afrikanerdom could sustain its

permanent existence as a national entity.

Now united, the folk would decide South Africa’s destiny.

The years of division, of second-class citizenship,

had conditioned Afrikaners to thinking

of themselves as a people besieged.

Afrikaner history formed a sort

of self-contained moral universe.

Whereas the rest of the world saw them as

oppressors, as colonizers, as racists,

they saw themselves primarily as victims, settlers

who were escaping religious persecution in Europe.

They saw themselves as fighting for self-determination.

In 1836, in an extraordinary gesture

of self-reliance and courage,

2,000 Afrikaners crossed the Orange River into the

wilderness, out of the bondage of British rule.

The first time in history that the

term concentration camp appears,

is in Afrikaner history. About 10% of the

population died in British concentration camps.

So for them, Apartheid was about survival,

about self-determination, about redemption,

about preserving a way of life. You see

a very similar pattern in Zionism.

Despite that Palestinians experienced it as

a very aggressive colonizing movement that

has dispossessed them Israelis are capable of

seeing themselves as victims, as survivors

of drawing on Jewish history in

order to justify their status quo.

It’s important to address that. It’s

important to address them with empathy

and to say, “I don’t accept what you do,

but I understand what the motivation is”,

and to be able to talk about that.

(ambient sounds)

We feel that the concept of Apartheid

is really crucial for understanding

what’s happening here, and where Israel

is going, because it’s the only term

that accurately defines the system

that Israel is trying to develop.

It isn’t just a policy. It’s not just discrimination.

It’s the way the system is structured.

It’s separation of populations in which one

group permanently and institutionatally

dominates another group.

It’s getting to the point where there

isn’t going to be a Jewish majority.

If you take the entirety of Israel and

the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,

we’re at the point now where it’s roughly 50/50.

And that’s before any Palestinian refugees return.

Palestinians are broadly categorized

into three main groups.

The majority of Palestinians are refugees

who were forced out of the land that became

Israel in 1948. Today they number over 6

million people and still live in refugee camps

in places like Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

A second group are the Palestinians

who managed to stay inside Israel

during the 1948 war and became Israeli citizens.

And lastly, there are the 5 million Palestinians

living in the occupied territories:

the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

This territory is defined by what is known as the green line.

This is land that Israel occupied in the

1967 war, and still controls to this day.

Palestinians in these areas do not have Israeli

citizenship, nor do they have a state of their own.

(children shouting)

What you have in the West Bank is two entirely

separate and unequal geographies that are

super-imposed on each other, but exist separately.

You have the Palestinians who are cut off

into dozens of ghettos, literally surrounded

by walls and physical barriers, with

little access to work, to education.

Even the basic means of survival; food

and water is often difficult to come by.

And then super-imposed on that you have the settlers,

who live in what look like American-style

suburbs, very spacious, very luxurious homes

with swimming pools, with access to water.

Immediately after the 1967 occupation, Israel

began building Jewish-only settlements

in the occupied territories and started

moving its population into these settlements,

a practice that is illegal under international law.

There are approximately 220 Jewish-only

settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.

Their territorial jurisdiction includes not only

the Palestinian land upon which they’re built,

but often the land that surrounds the settlements

which is reserved for their so-called natural growth.

Each of those settlements, every single one of

them, is only allocated to Jewish Israelis.

Roughly 60% of the West Bank is allocated to,

or controlled by the settlements, or the

military installations.

What we see in the last 40 years is

vast Israeli government efforts and vast amounts of public money

spent and poured into allocating land in the territories,

building settlements on it, and encouraging Israelis to move out

of Israel and into these settlements.

Gilo is, I think, a neighborhood where everybody is living.

Because if you can’t afford to live in the center

of the city, you move out to the new neighborhoods,

and you’re going to find you have everybody

living over here, religious and not religious;

more people to the left, people to the right,

because most people look at Gilo as part of Jerusalem.

This is Gilo settlement, which was

annexed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

They started building it in the mid-‘80s,

and they started bringing in caravans, then it started being

built up and built up until it became

a very big neighborhood of Jerusalem,

accommodating thousands of settlers’ families.

On Palestinian land. The people there

didn’t sell the land. They stole it.

There was a decision taken by Israel in 1967

that Jerusalem should be reunited as one city

and part of that political agenda was to build and

establish on the hills surrounding Jerusalem,

new Jewish neighborhoods in a way

that would make it very difficult

to, again, divide the city into two parts.

The settlements were not built for security.

They were built out of a proactive claim to the country.

The words mislead.

They're not a couple of little trailers on the hillside.

These are cities of 40, 50, 60, 70,000 people.

They’re built over water aquifers.

They’re built at key junctions.

They’re built on certain hilltops.

They’re built to control movement.

They’re built to control the border.

Every settlement has its rationale.

We can see from here the village

extended toward the settlement of Ariel,

which is located above the hill over there.

Ariel, located in the heart of the West Bank,

25 kilometers to the east of the green line.

There’s a very important aquifer located underground,

under this area, which the Israelis are

stealing. They are enjoying the water.

They are irrigating their gardens, washing their cars

and playing with their dogs with water, and

here we are suffering a shortage of water.

Per capita Israelis use about six

or seven times the amount of water

that Palestinians use, and many times in the

summer months Palestinians do not get water,

even though it’s their water that’s being pumped

out by the Israelis and sold back to them,

they don’t get sufficient supplies.

They cut off water in summer, meaning that we will be

without water for three or four months of the year,

so we try to compensate for that by collecting the rain

in the cisterns and the wells, which is not healthy.

But we are forced to use this

water, which causes many diseases

for the children and for the inhabitants in the village.

And my daughter was one case of

that; she got a very bad infection

because of the water, and she got kidney failure.

Apartheid was the attempt to separate people

and allow resources and privilege and rights

to flow to people on the basis of the separate

groups in which they were categorized.

And so the settlements are very

strategic; it’s not just real estate.

They were built out of aproactive claim to the country.

Nowhere is the government’s separation

principal shown so starkly as in the city

of Hebron, a city deep in the heart

of the West Bank with a population

of about 160,000 Palestinians.

In the middle of Hebron, in Palestinian

homes, often vacated under severe

pressure, live 600 Jewish settlers

cordoned off and protected by thousands of soldiers.

Although neighbors, these two populations live

under two separate and unequal sets of laws.

Jewish settlers in the West Bank live under Israeli civil law,

while Palestinians live under Israeli military law.

The settler population in the West Bank

is roughly 500,000. The Palestinian

population in that same area is roughly 2.5 million.

So we have a classic situation of an ethnic minority claiming

the entire country, a large territory,

and then, now, what do with the natives?

What do you do with the non-whoever

you are? in this case, the non-Jews.

In South Africa, the architecture was

amazing. First, you give people an identity.

Then, of course, you give people pass laws,

so you define how they can move freely,

and you construct blockages for the movement of people.

Control was exerted through a complicated

pass system that determined when and where

an African could move. These passes

became one of the most detested

symbols of apartheid.

The issue of the pass was much more than a

question of identity or an identity document.

It was a mechanism to ensure the control over

people’s movement and where people lived.

Today in occupied Palestine,

Palestinians must carry IDs at all times

that essentially dictate where they can live, work and move.

A complex system of movement restrictions

requires special permits to enter certain areas.

There are over 600 manned checkpoints and

physical roadblocks in the West Bank

that restrict the freedom of movement of

Palestinians. Only 36 of these separate

Israel and the West Bank.

The rest separate Palestinian towns

from other Palestinian towns.

Abuse, beatings, humiliation at the checkpoints

is a routine part of the experience.

It’s part of the systematic disempowerment of Palestinians,

placing an entire population at the mercy of

18, 19-year-old soldiers who have absolute

power over the lives of Palestinians.

How many? Is it over 60 women who have

given birth at checkpoints because some

silly kid won’t let them through, or taking

20 minutes to let an ambulance through?

I have been able to visit Israel and

Palestine, on more than two occasions.

And what I experienced there was such a crude reminder of a

painful past in Apartheid South Africa.

We were largely controlled in the same way.

The continuous checking at the roadblocks,

and to see these young men and young

women standing at the roadblock,

having to perform the duties of a military junta.

These parallels with Israel pained me severely while

I was travelling through that lovely country.

The settlements are linked by modern

superhighways, which are Jewish-only roads.

Palestinians are not allowed to use them,

and these super highways crisscross

across Palestinian land, linking the settlements together,

and linking them with Israeli cities inside the 1948 borders.

The separate roads that you find, that

kind of settlement infrastructure

that you find in the West Bank, you know, in

South Africa, we didn’t dream that we’d have

roads that would be only for whites.

In 2008 there were 800 kilometers of

Jewish-only roads in the West Bank,

or as the Israeli military prefers

to call them, "Sterile roads".

Settlers are issued yellow license plates

so that the military can distinguish

them from Palestinian drivers.

The other part of this system is the

Palestinian roads, which is linking the

Palestinian villages and cities

together, but with tunnels and bridges

under the main network of roads that

they are creating for themselves.

And these bridges and tunnels have gates,

and the gates have locks, and the keys

are in the hands of the soldiers.

So if they want to impose a curfew all over the West Bank,

they can do it in two hours.

The Jewish-only roads serving the settlement of Avne Hefez,

are but one of the many examples of the segregated road

system in the West Bank. Because of the settlement,

Israel declared the roads between the

Palestinian towns of Shufa and Izbat Shufa

a sterile road for Jews only, erecting

dirt roadblocks for Palestinians at every

exit of the town.

Recently, Israel allowed Palestinian pedestrian

but not vehicular traffic on the road.

Due to these conditions, one out of

every four families has left Shufa.

(quiet music and road noise)

A deeply religious people, the white

Afrikaners of South Africa believed they

had a god-given right to a land that

they considered mostly uninhabited.

In what is known as the great trek, what

Afrikaners consider their equivalent of the Exodus

thousands trekked into the wilderness

in search of the Promised Land.

The Afrikaners pushed into land the Africans

considered theirs, and many battles ensued.

Armed with guns and protected by a circle

of covered wagons, known as a “laager”,

the Afrikaners easily beat back the

indigenous masses that outnumbered them.

This image of the heroic settlers in their

“laager” fending off the savage masses

became the dominant mythology in Afrikaner history, morphing into

the philosophy of Apartheid in 1948.

Under apartheid law, the one standard

against which everything was judged

was the security of the state, and the

state meant the Afrikaner people.

With every law enacted, the freedoms

of the majority were whittled away

in order to protect the privileges of a white minority.

In Pretoria today stands a monument to the Great

Trek, a shrine to this history and philosophy.

A concrete "laager"; that iconic image of

the Afrikaners’ military defense tactic,

completely surrounds the monument.

A physical representation of a state of mind

that sees enemies everywhere and will

do anything to protect against them.

What I experienced there was made even

more painful by the existence of the wall

of separation, what we from South Africa

prefer to call the Apartheid wall.

We didn’t have that type of division in South Africa.

In 2002, under the guise of a temporary

security measure, Israel began construction

of the separation barrier to completely

seal off the West Bank from Israel.

In urban areas it is a concrete wall eight meters tall.

In rural areas it is a “smart” fence

averaging 60 meters wide, with motion,

heat and vibration sensors, cameras,

trenches, patrol roads, and razor wire.

To many however, the wall is not about security.

Its snake-like route through the

West Bank annexes large Jewish-only

settlements, agricultural land and

important water resources, clearly marking

it as a tool for massive land grabs.

Only 15% of the wall follows the green line.

Instead, the wall twists and turns deep

into the West Bank, making it more than

twice as long as the green line itself.

It separates Palestinian villages from

neighboring Palestinian villages,

farmers from their land and income, parents from children,

and severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement.

It encircles many towns from all sides

creating isolated ghettos surrounded

by walls, checkpoints and Israeli-only roads.

When you put people behind the wall, in

all of these ghettos, because almost

everywhere it is creating ghetto communities with one road or one

checkpoint or one tunnel with a gate on it.

Then at a certain point there is going

to be, when there's not enough work

and not enough food, more and more pressure built up.

Obviously a lot of people will leave, and

I think that’s part of the intention.

(music)

Now in the South African context, the

attempt by the Apartheid government

was to take away citizenship from more

than 80% of the South African population,

and then give them new citizenship

in some kind of a fantasy entity:

Bophuthatswana, Transkei, etc. So

the South African state could say,

“You have no claims here. You’re a citizen of Bophuthatswana.

Social benefits, etcetera, are what

you should be looking for there.”

The godfather of the system was Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

- "In South Africa you can only achieve

peace by separating the nations."

And he spelled out the whole Bantustan concept.

He said: “The black people have got

to be given their own countries.”

They embarked upon this remarkable

experiment of trying to cut up the country

into Bantustans, and these were created,

at least on paper, ten of them, and the

move began to advance them towards independence.

(trumpet)

My government would like to continue as we

are, an autonomous and independent country,

preferably with extended borders,

continued friendly and cordial

relations with our neighbors and, if

possible, international recognition.

Most of them were stooges and really

puppets of the Apartheid state.

To give some veneer of reality to the fantasy

of the Bantustans, the Afrikaner government

threw money at them, built elaborate

parliaments, housing for ministers,

built airports, sports stadiums.

It was to create separate states.

It was not so much a two-state

solution as a multi-state solution.

When I look at Israel, when I traveled through the West Bank,

I was looking at Bantustans, totally

unviable, impossible states.

In many respects, it struck me as being

significantly worse than Apartheid.

Bantustans, as much as we abhorred them in

South Africa, Bantustan leaders actually

had more power and more control

than the Palestinian Authority has.

What the Oslo did was create an

authority,which allowed Israel to still

control the occupied Palestinian territory, but

control it through a Palestinian authority.

Ostensibly, there’s some kind of Palestinian

authority that’s controlling, that’s in power

of the occupied territory. But in

fact, Israel controls the borders.

Israel controls taxes. Israel controls all kinds

of things, access in and out of that area.

To me, the big analogy was that South

Africa, in taking these two choices

where you’ve got two or more nationalisms

laying claim to the same country,

you’ve either got to find a way to live together,

or you’ve got to have a fair partition.

The big similarity between Apartheid

South Africa and the Israeli/Palestinian

situation is that both decided to have a

partition solution, and, in both cases,

it was a grotesquely unfair partition.

And this is why Israel says, “Well, Gaza is not our problem,

Gaza is a foreign country. It’s not a state.

It’s not part of any other country. It’s just not us.”

Just like South Africa, it’s the same

logic. We need a Palestinian state,

because we can’t digest the Palestinians.

We can’t give them citizenship,

because then it wouldn’t be a Jewish state.

We have to create a Palestinian state,

because that’s the only way we can

get them off our hands, but it has

to be a minimized state on as little

territory as possible that leaves us

in control of the entire country.

In South Africa, they left 13% of

South Africa for the non-whites.

In cantons, locking them inside cantons.

Here, when you look at the map, what

they have created is leaving to the

Palestinians about 12% of our historical land.

This is the ghetto state, ghetto system

that they are creating, and it's totally

disconnected from each other. We have

one, two, three, and the fourth is Gaza.

(explosions and drums)

(siren)

(drums and ambient sounds)

Since 2006, Israel has imposed a deadly

siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting

most goods and people from entering or leaving the enclave.

The siege has caused an economic standstill in

Gaza. The unemployment rate hovers around 40%.

On the more ridiculous end of spectrum of goods not

allowed into Gaza are things like pasta and chocolate.

Recently obtained Israeli government documents

show this to be a deliberate policy.

Mathematic formulas were created which defined

the minimum caloric needs of the 1.5 million

people in Gaza. As well as the upper limit, so

that food items cannot become too plentiful.

In 2009 Israel bombed Gaza’s sewage

treatment facilities and electricity plants

and now won’t allow the necessary

parts in to repair them.

Restrictions on fuel imports further limit the

ability of critical infrastructure to function.

while also causing daily, prolonged blackouts.

Blackouts can be deadly for patients in hospitals.

But more so is the lack of medicine,

specialized care, and clean water.

In the worst times of Apartheid in

South Africa, we never had in any of

our townships helicopter gunships

flying overhead or F-16 type bombers

flying over townships and firing

or dropping bombs into a township.

It didn’t happen.

The problem is we don’t have other examples to look at now.

You could look at perhaps the Warsaw

ghetto as one example of that kind of

walled-in and then attacking a walled-in community like that.

Maybe a better example is hundreds and

hundreds of years ago where you had

walled city-states that were completely besieged by armies

where no one could get out and food was

denied, and if there wasn’t a spring within

the city, no one had water, and people died.

Just like in Gaza, people died from

insufficient access to medicine,

to insufficient water, all those

reasons, as well as by air strikes.

There are a number of people and some governments who claim that

because Israel withdrew its settlers

and soldiers from the Gaza Strip

unilaterally in 2005, that it’s no longer

the occupying power, but that is actually

not the case. In international law,

occupation refers to the control

of territory by another government,

not the indigenous government there.

That’s precisely what exists with

Israel and the Gaza Strip right now.

Israel still controls the land of

the Gaza Strip, which, many people

don’t know, is completely surrounded by a

wall very similar to the wall that snakes

through the West Bank. It is completely surrounded.

The Israeli Navy controls the seas off the coast of Gaza.

(gunfire)

The airspace is controlled by Israel,

which has prohibited the Palestinians

from reopening their airport.

So Gaza is completely under the control of the Israelis.

The Palestinian Authority can’t issue

identity documents, passports, permission

for people to come and go, independent

of the Israeli Interior Ministry.

If you don’t exist in the Israeli Interior

Ministry database, you don't exist period.

If you look at a blueprint of a prison,

it looks like the prisoners own the place.

They have 95% of the territory, right?

They have the living areas, they have the exercise yard,

they have the cafeteria, they have the work

areas. It all belongs to the prisoners.

All the prison authorities have is maybe 5%. And you know what?

If it’s a minimal security prison, maybe

they have 1%. That’s all you need.

You need the walls around, cell bars,

you have some corridors, you have

a few locked doors, and that’s it. With 1% of the territory,

you can absolutely control the inmates,

and that helps you make the switch.

The issue here isn’t how much territory the prisoners have.

The issue is, can they get out of the prison?

When the majority of world leaders

and people who have the power

to change things talk about a two-state solution, nowadays

what they talk about is a Palestinian

state that is made of Bantustans

separated from each other, a state that has

no sovereignty, no independent policies,

and has a very much similar economic

infrastructure to the ones that the

Bantustans had in South Africa.

The main thing for the world and for

the Israelis is to get this issue off

the plate, and that’s where Israel

thinks it can get away with a

Bantustan in the way that South Africa

couldn’t. You know, you can push a

two-state solution that's Apartheid.

If it doesn’t have borders, it doesn’t

have water, doesn’t have access to its

greater economic resource, which is Jerusalem.

It’s carved into little islands. There’s no freedom of movement

there's no freedom of commerce. It’s a prison state.

Therefore, the essential idea of a two-state solution

has to be not only the state itself, but a viable state.

The Israelis have rendered the West Bank

and Gaza unviable, hopelessly unviable.

I’m saying Israel no longer has that solution as an option.

It has made a two-state solution impossible.

Physically, morally impossible.

- It is time for us to go ahead and move forward

on a two-state solution, so thank you very much.

You hear all this talk about the two-state

solution. You see opinion polls that say a

majority of Israelis are willing to accept it,

and a majority of Palestinians are willing to

accept it, but that consensus disappears the

moment you try to actually flesh it out in detail.

That’s why all the two-state solution

proposals are extremely vague,

because Palestinians say, “The West Bank and

Gaza are only a fifth of historic Palestine.

Why should we give up anymore?” Israelis

say, “Well, there’s 450,000 settlers

in those areas, several generations.

Why should they leave?”

The only thing more difficult than trying to live together,

would be trying to force a separation.

(music)

Israel’s overall goal has been to create

a Jewish state. In 1948, 75% of the

population, the non-Jewish population,

Christians and Muslims, were expelled

from their homeland and never allowed to return.

For one reason, and only one reason,

which is that they’re not Jewish.

The 5 to 6 million refugees living in Lebanon

and Syria and Jordan, etc. those are people

that should be Israeli citizens, that Israel

has kicked out and refused citizenship.

Over a million Palestinians became

refugees in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

By natural population growth, they

now number over 5 million people

who still await their right to return.

Some Palestinians managed to stay

inside what became Israel in 1948,

and today make up 20% of Israeli citizens.

So in the Israeli state, what kind of rights

and privileges and resources are allocated

to you are entirely dependent on

which ethnic group you come from.

You’re either Jewish or you’re Palestinian,

or Arab, as they prefer to call them.

And so you have a situation where welfare

benefits for people, for example,

are dependent on whether they’re Jewish or not.

You have a situation where a Jew can’t marry a

non-Jew in Israel. For us South Africans, we

remember the Mixed Marriages Act, for

example. You have a situation where people

from one ethnic group, Palestinians, are not

able to freely live in areas that are majority

Jewish, similar to old Group Areas Act.

Now one of the criticisms people make when

you start accusing Israel of being an

Apartheid state inside its own borders is that they’ll say,

“Well, Palestinians can sit next to Jews

inside restaurants. They sit on the same

buses. They go to the same cinemas,” and that’s true,

but that’s not really the significance of Apartheid.

The idea of Apartheid isn’t really about

the fact that people can't sit on the same

park bench. It was about controlling

resources, making sure that one ethnic

group had control of resources and the other didn't.

And, in that sense, Israel has been

very, very effective at doing this,

what we might call grand Apartheid

rather than petty Apartheid.

In the key areas of people’s lives, their

education, their employment, owning land,

Palestinian citizens are treated entirely

differently from Jewish citizens,

and I think that’s one of the reasons why

this Apartheid comparison can be made.

By far, the most fundamental element of

Apartheid with both South Africa and Israel

is control of the land. In apartheid South

Africa, a slew of laws were enacted

that designated 87% of the land for whites only.

This introduced the oxymoronic term

"Foreign Natives" into the language

of parliament to describe blacks given

permission to live in white areas.

Israel’s complex and creative web of

apartheid laws introduced equally

oxymoronic terms such as "Present Absentee"

into its parliamentary language.

This was used to describe Palestinians

who are actually present inside Israel,

but legally declared absent in order to confiscate their land.

Through these colonial and apartheid style

laws, over 90% of the land of Israel

is effectively reserved for Jews only.

Aside from the few mixed cities like Haifa

and Akko, most of Israel’s communities are

segregated along ethnic lines. Israel’s

1.3 million Palestinian citizens are

restricted to 120 communities that existed

before the creation of Israel in 1948,

and which have been unable to expand since.

By contrast, Israel has created and

developed more than 700 exclusively

Jewish towns since 1948, but not one

new town for Palestinian citizens.

Land laws in Israel are very clearly

Apartheid kind of laws. You can belong

in the state of Israel, you can be a

Palestinian, or you can be a Jew, but

if you want to have rights in the state,

really you need to be a Jew to have rights.

I have no doubt it’s a Jewish state, but

I do question very strongly whether

it’s a democratic state. If we talked

about an Afrikaner and democratic state,

I think most of us would find that

rather an oxymoronic phrase to use.

So why is Jewish and democratic not equally troubling to us?

There are more than a million Palestinians

inside Israel today, and that's a major

concern for Israel. It’s very concerned about

the demographic growth, as it calls it,

the demographic time bomb, of the Palestinians inside Israel.

I came to realize that when they talk

about the elimination of Israel,

it’s a demographic thing.

That Israel will cease to exist when

it no longer has a Jewish majority.

In other words, your nationhood depends

upon your having either an ethnic or

a specifically religious majority,

permanently entrenched.

Because of the experience I’ve gone

through in this country, where I saw

terrible injustice committed in the name

of the Afrikaners’ need to survive,

I became ashamed of my country, grievously ashamed of it.

The reason Israel has a Jewish majority

is through entirely artificial means.

The whole framework of Israeli law is designed to

prevent the growth of the non-Jewish population

and maintain Jewish numerical and political

supremacy, and that’s the framework in which

we can understand everything we see inside

Israel, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.

(music)

(rain and ambient sounds)

(chatting)

(shouting)

In Occupied East Jerusalem, the battle for control

of territory is happening on a house-by-house basis.

(shouting and arguing)

(shouting)

Israel goes to incredible lengths

to manipulate demography,

as can be seen in the stark but complicated

case of the city of Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem differs from the rest of

occupied Palestinian territory in that Israel

unilaterally declared it a part of the state of

Israel after the 1967 occupation of the city.

No country in the world has ever recognized

that annexation, and it is still considered

occupied territory by the Palestinians

and by international law.

But by building the wall and the

vast settlement blocks around it,

Israel has illegally severed it from the

West Bank. Over 250,000 Palestinians

now find themselves on the Israel side of the wall.

Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not

citizens of the country, cannot vote

in national elections and cannot live in Jewish West Jerusalem.

A Palestinian can have lived in Jerusalem

all his life, been born here, his father,

grandfather, and generations

before, but he will be a resident.

A Jew from Russia can come today to Israel,

not even knowing one word of Hebrew,

and in the same day, he becomes a citizen.

There are many, many conditions to

be a resident. If you, for example,

live in Jerusalem but you work in Ramallah,

Bethlehem or elsewhere in the occupied

terriroties they say the center of your

life is there, and we can take your ID.

This is one of the strategies to make

the number of Palestinians smaller.

This is an official booklet, from the municipality

of Jerusalem, from the Department of Planning.

I mean, from the first point here, They

say: "Is to keep the ratio between

Jews and Palestinians as it was in 1967 at..." Look

at this: "70 to 30" As the government decided.

You must understand, if in any democratic

country in the world, someone says that

the Jews will be no more than 40 percent of the population,

we would say that this is anti-Semitism.

It's clear that it would be anti-Semitism.

So why is it anti-Semitism in Europe

or America if someone does this,

and in Israel, it's permitted. Why?

The politicians are hysterical over

this issue, and they try to implement

a policy of segregation, in order to make

the lives of the Palestinians so bad,

that they will decide to voluntarily leave the city.

(music)

One of the harshest methods used to

force Palestinians to leave Jerusalem

is Israel’s house demolition policy.

(machinery and crumbling rubble)

This policy affects all Palestinians

living within Israel’s stated borders,

and even within the rest of the West

Bank, but it is starkest in Jerusalem.

(machinery)

House demolitions are part of a system

of discrimination that does not enable

Palestinians to actually build legally.

It’s fair to say that it’s virtually

impossible to receive a building permit,

a legal permit to build a house

in East Jerusalem if you’re a Palestinian.

(sniffing)

Wednesday, July 22nd 1962, The

Afrikaners are breaking down our house.

Two bulldozers, and of course the

house crumbled. I felt the pain.

It was my blood, my bones, our

flesh that was being broken down.

No book can describe, no poem can describe

the horror, because our houses were not

houses, they were human beings.

I saw bone and blood and veins and brains.

And, of course, when the demolition

finally happens, I can't even begin to

convey to you the trauma, you know,

and the home is your sacred space;

your whole intimate sphere is in the house.

Men, women, and children react very

differently. To the men it's humiliating;

they can’t protect their families.

It’s an entire financial loss.

For women, most Palestinian women

don’t work outside the house.

Domestic space is their world, so when a woman loses that,

I’ve seen women go into states of

mourning. The trauma is tremendous.

The demolition of a home is really

the demolition of the family.

We estimate that in East Jerusalem

there are at least 10,000

demolition orders outstanding. Houses

that can be demolished at any time.

That doesn’t include thousands that

have been demolished inside Israel.

Inside Israel there’s still a campaign of demolition.

There are about 40,000 homes of Israeli citizens

who are Arabs that are slated for demolition

in the next few years, and this is on the

background of 1948 when more than

half the villages of Palestine,

more than 400 villages, were systematically destroyed.

After the state was created, Israel

continued to forcibly remove thousands

of its Palestinian citizens off of their

lands onto small concentrated areas.

Their villages were bulldozed to make way for Jewish-only towns.

This policy still continues inside Israel

today, with over 45 Palestinian villages

that the government refuses to recognize,

and which are slated to be forcibly

removed in order to construct new Jewish-only towns.

The Apartheid authorities had what they

called “black spots”. Incidents where

black people were occupying land where the

white people actually wanted to occupy.

And what they, therefore, did was to

send in the police, send in the military

with heavy trucks to demolish people's

homes, and then would remove families

that have been staying on land for decades

and remove them, and just dump them.

It was nice in Sophiatown until the

Afrikaners started harassing us.

They said we are staying too near to town. We are blacks.

We are not supposed to stay there, so

they started moving us to Meadowlands.

Because they said we couldn’t stay near the

white people, so they must separate us;

we mustn’t be together. So they take the

place, and they give it to the whites.

They gave us only one day’s notice.

“Tomorrow you are moving.”

The truck will wait outside, and then the

soldiers will go into the house, and remove

the furniture into the truck.

(airplane noise and radio chatter)

Then take the children and put you in

the truck, and the mother and father.

They just bulldoze it to the ground.

They take the family out and the bulldozer comes.

(shouting)

(crushing noises)

Land is more than just a possession.

Land is something integrally bound with

your identity. It’s about your ancestors.

It’s about a sense of knowing who and

where you are from, and in South Africa

that’s where the biggest damage has been done.

The removal of people off the land

and they’re put in these god forsaken places with nothing,

and they have to start all over again.

You can shave off my hair. New hair will grow.

You can spit in my face. I will find water to wash it.

You can take away my clothes and leave

me naked. I will find a blanket.

But if you take away my house, and

my dignity, where can I go? Where?

There is no pain quite like being

unloved, unwanted in one's own land among

one’s own kind. The Jewish people

come from that experience.

Jews will always have the right, and I would support that right

for memory and perpetuation, but now

I feel it for the Palestinians.

I feel it for them, because they are

stateless, homeless, vanquished, exiled.

You take away my house; you take away my dignity.

You take away my love, and you replace

it with bitterness, anger, and revenge.

(music)

There have been at least 100,000 Palestinians, if not more, that

have gone through house demolitions.

There’s a psychologist in Gaza in the

Palestinian mental health center

who’s done research that says that 55% of the suicide bombers

are kids whose houses have been demolished.

The house demolition issue is one of the

most painful parts of the occupation.

If you deny Palestinians a home, and

connected to that is a concept of homeland,

on two levels you’re denying them a home, on

the individual level and the collective level.

The term we use in Hebrew for our

form of Apartheid is "nishul".

Nishul means displacement or dispossession.

That’s the Israeli form of Apartheid.

(music)

(music)

The escalation of Israeli measures in how

they treated the Palestinians before the

first Intifada, make it difficult for

the people to accept oppression.

In 1987, as the occupation rolled into its third decade,

the first Intifada – or uprising – erupted.

People protested, went on strike,

threw stones, organized themselves

into groups, and challenged the

Israeli occupation in different ways.

Things came from the ground up in

the first Intifada where everyone,

no matter who you are, man or woman, young or old,

you are connected to certain

groups, working in this Intifada.

It was amazing how the people were organized.

The people took a stand. They had a slogan:

No taxation without representation.

The Israeli occupation closed down

all the education institutions

from the universities to the

kindergartens for two and a half years.

(kids shouting)

They were very strong in their reaction.

(crying)

The number of the people that were

killed, children, youth, women,

thousands of people were killed. This was the Israeli reaction.

If you visit any family in Palestine,

West Bank, and Gaza Strip,

you will find at least one person

that experienced jail. To go to jail,

I don’t want to say it’s normal, but just being

Palestinian is reason enough to be put in jail.

It’s part of daily life in Palestine.

Over 700,000 Palestinians have experienced jail since 1967.

Proportionately there are more political

prisoners there than existed in South Africa.

In South Africa we had a campaign

against child detainees.

In Palestine you have over 350

children who are political prisoners.

They would take very many of our

children away from parents and try

to use that to coerce parents to

appear at police stations to deport.

I remember in 1988 you see prisoners coming

in like crazy. In a few months we became

6,000 political prisoners in one jail. And 95%

of them were under administrative detention.

Administrative detention is the detention of

people, usually for six months, but you can

extend it, based on no legal procedure aside

from issuing an administrative order.

People are arrested without knowing what they are

in for. They've never been charged with anything.

The way it’s been done by Israel is absolutely

in contravention of international law.

I remember a famous Palestinian political

prisoner in the ‘70s. He spent around

seven years under administrative

detention. It’s really scary, because

you don’t know anything, and they

use it as part of the torture.

For example it’s the day after six months or

one year in jail, and this is your last day,

the day you are released. They come to the jail,

they call your name. you collect all your stuff.

You are released. You say bye-bye to

the prisoners, and you move outside,

and the officer comes, “Sorry, another

six months” and you go back to jail.

Administrative detention, very similar to the

detention without trial in South Africa.

When you are about to be released,

they will release you and let you walk

a few steps and re-arrest you. Which is,

by the way, is another form of torture,

because you never actually are sure as

to whether you will be totally released.

I was arrested in 1985, and there was nothing

illegal about what it was that I was doing,

and they knew that they could, therefore, not take me to court

and charge me with anything. They basically

detained us because they could do it.

Why did Mandela become the hero

of the political prisoners issue?

He spent 27 years in the Apartheid

system jail. Right now we have prisoners

that have spent more than 30 years

in jail, more than Mandela.

Why doesn’t the international community pay attention to that?

(gunshots)

Within one year of each other, both Israel and

South Africa launched “Operation Iron Fist”,

brutal and overwhelming campaigns to crush

opposition to their respective polices.

With the “Iron Fist” policy, they used

to open the handcuffs and take people's

arms like this and break the bone in this way.

I still remember the sound of my friend when they broke his arm.

The sound is still in my ear. I will never ever forget that.

They went as far as killing very many of our comrades brutally,

acts that you can never imagine.

The South African Defense Forces, as they

were called, their army and navy was almost

totally outfitted by Israel, because South

Africa couldn't get weapons from other

countries. Israel was one of the only

countries willing to break the arms embargo.

Well, the alliance started in earnest

in 1973. By 1979, 35% of Israel's arms

exports were going to South Africa, so they

became a crucial client, and a crucial

source for export revenue that Israel couldn’t give up easily.

It involved everything from tanks to

aircraft to ammunition and you name it.

After 1977 there’s a mandatory U.N.

arms embargo. Israel violated the

U.N. arms embargo openly, and many Israeli

officials are happy to admit that.

If you talk to South African defense

officials, especially people from the

air force, they tell you that

Israel was an absolutely vital link

and was a lifeline for them during the 1980s.

After 1977, the ideological component becomes much stronger.

The top brass of the two militaries really

felt that they were in a similar predicament

and that they faced a common enemy. They also

had a very similar conception of minority

survival. They felt that Afrikaner

nationalists were similar to Israelis,

beleaguered minorities surrounded

by a hostile majority.

If you look at the documents from the South

African defense archive, you see dozens of

South Africans were going to Israel on a

regular basis to attend a variety of courses

that involved submarine operation, anti-tank

technology, counterinsurgency techniques,

you name it. They really see the PLO

and the ANC as one in the same.

The reaction of the government ordering a general mobilization,

arming the white community, arresting

tens of thousands of Africans,

a show of force throughout the country,

closed a chapter as far as our methods

of political struggle are concerned.

There are many people who feel that it

is useless and futile for us to continue

talking peace and nonviolence against

a government whose reply is only

savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people.

"Bombs have exploded almost daily

in the run-up to Wednesday’s poll,

the latest a huge car bomb, which

devastated shops in the central town

of Witbank. The blasts have been officially

blamed on the African National Congress".

After decades of non-violent struggle,

Nelson Mandela formed the armed wing

of the African National Congress.

They turned first to sabotage, then

to civilian bombings in order to have

their political aspirations recognized.

"If this was the work of the ANC, it’s their

boldest attack to date, and demonstrates the

organization’s determination to carry the guerilla

war to South Africa's major city centers."

(music)

"The explosion tore apart the bus

in the very heart of Jerusalem,

killing many of those on board. It was the

mirror image of last week’s suicide bomb."

I am pained when I read the story of a

65-year-old Palestinian woman who became

the carrier of a suicide bomb, and in a

note she indicated that she had to do that

because she was trying to save her

grandchildren from being killed,

and we’re saying what unfair choices to put before people.

(music)

Security and terrorism are important issues,

but they’re symptoms. They’re not independent

variables. Israel is the strong party. Once

you bring the occupation into the picture,

there isn’t any more symmetry. There’s no

more both sides—us and them—the balance

that everybody loves. Palestinians

aren’t occupying Tel Aviv.

We are pleading that we do not

wait for more people to be killed.

It is quite apparent that the political

authorities will on their own not act.

We need to pressurize them.

(singing)

(singing)

Despite all this repressive machinery,

there’s a general kind of agreement that

it was the international dimension and the

internal resistance, the South African

Intifada, if you like, that really

brought an end to Apartheid.

You had a mass of people, people’s

movements, and resistance organizations etc.

that were in terms of numbers of people

quite large, but weak, taking on very

sophisticated structures of repression.

So, a really powerful opponent on

one hand, and a weak one on the other.

It was the international isolation campaign

that brought a sense of balance between the two.

At that point, the South Africans actually

seek out advice from the Israelis

on how to sell themselves in the

West and how to improve their image.

The South Africans looked to Israel as a

sort of beacon, and they didn't understand

why Israel had managed to withstand

criticism for decades and survive,

and why South Africa was failing.

A lot of Israelis fear that they may one

day be delegitimized in the same way

South Africa was.

(hip-hop music)

What we would like is for the public

to realize that they actually have a

real positive role to play. They

can actually boycott these goods,

and we’re only individuals, but

together when we act holistically

such as the protest today, and even

on an individual day-to-day basis,

we can have a real impact in challenging

the occupation on a long-term level.

The global call came in 2005 from Palestinian

civil society organizations, and the idea

was to craft a strategy that would be a

non-violent means of pressuring Israel

to abide by international law using economic pressure.

These campaigns are taking root. They’re

gaining new supporters every day.

The churches have taken the lead in saying,

“We want socially responsible investment,

and that means we want to be sure that

none of the companies we invest in

are profiting from occupation.”

There are many, many, many initiatives going

around the world for boycotting Israeli goods

boycotting Israeli institutions and so on,

so it’s growing, in the cultural, academic,

medical, even trade unions. In South

Africa COSATU, the main trade union

body in South Africa, which has about 2

million members, supported the boycott.

There are so many. They’re mushrooming

really in the last two years.

This is happening more and more. In North

America you have the Canadian union

of postal workers. Prior to that, the

Canadian union of public employees.

The incredible growing movement, I mean, I’ve

traveled to literally dozens of campuses

around the United States, and there

are active divestment groups.

There are church divestment movements that

are starting and really gaining strength,

and facing incredible resistance, but

they’re not being deterred by it.

As our South African comrades and

colleagues remind us, their first call for

boycott was issued in the late 1950s.

Europe and the West started listening

in the ‘70s, early ‘80s, so it took them

30 years to get anybody to listen to them.

So we’re doing much better they tell us.

You’re going much faster than we did.

(hip-hop music)

The idea of a one-state solution begins with the notion that

no matter how they got there, no matter

the competing historical narratives,

the country belongs to all who live in it.

Let 100% of the people live in 100% of the land,

Since nobody can agree on how to divide it.

Israel’s going to have to stop being a

Jewish state. It can't be an ethnocracy,

and it has to become a democracy, whether

it’s a one-state or a confederation,

or whatever the arrangement is, that’s

what’s going to have to happen.

And it doesn’t mean, I try to tell

Israelis, that everything’s lost.

In South Africa, people still talk Afrikaans.

They still have an Afrikaner university.

You know, nobody’s going to stop speaking Hebrew here.

You’re restructuring. It’ll be in a

different, healthier environment.

That's the challange, That’s why I like this one-state idea.

You know, it wasn’t only blacks who

were freed when Apartheid ended.

I was freed. We all were freed. We were

liberated from this terrible corrosive

vision of trying to build an ethnically pure state.

And decades of Apartheid regime propaganda, like decades of

Zionist propaganda, said to the people: “If

you give up control, you will be devoured.

You will be thrown into the sea. You will be killed.”

And so it was very important for the

anti-Apartheid movement to offer to

ordinary white citizens a credible alternative

message. To say: “You will not be devoured.

You give up the system, and you will have a place in the future,

and it’s an inclusive future.”

There’s already a one-state. It’s already

one state, but it’s a one-state living

under Apartheid. It’s how to transform it

from Apartheid to democracy where people

get equal rights based on citizenship, not on

ethnicity, religion, gender, or any other identity.

(singing)

In South Africa saying that the country

belongs to all who live in it doesn't

magically solve the problems. There are

still massive political struggles in South

Africa over resource allocation, over

the speed of land reform, the speed of

economic reform, over affirmative action.

Those struggles for social justice

continue, but they have to start

from the premise that everyone is entitled to equal rights.

But you know the world doesn’t stand still.

There are people I meet today in South Africa

who don’t understand what Apartheid

was about. They've come into a

whole new world, so it’s not impossible

to think of other generations.

We must have the ability to think beyond our

own generation, to think into the future.

What does it matter if a man is white

or black? What does it matter if he’s

a Jew or he’s an Arab? It is possible.

Israel, it is possible.

It is possible to have peace with Jews and Arabs

if the heart is ready, if the soul is ready,

if we can transcend these petty foibles of power and pomposity,

and we say to this world: “It is possible.”

It is possible.