"Life in the Bubble: At Home in the Israeli Settler State" -- Ed Kinane

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Part of article below; whole here: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=56632&s2=04

Those Other Settler States

I was prepared for what I saw in Israel/Palestine thanks to my knowing what European settlers did to First Nations people in what became the United States. The five or six weeks I spent back in the early eighties in South Africa was also good prep. There too I was struck by how at home I felt. White South Africa was also a 51st state – one then backed by the US government.

In Johannesburg, the commercial and government center, many of the affluent white minority lived in gated communities while by law blacks lived in the grim sprawling Soweto ghetto – whose few roads in and out were controlled by the South African Defense Force.

The South Africa I experienced was legally and physically divided by ethnicity and skin color. "Divided," though, doesn’t begin to acknowledge the stark disparity of wealth, power and opportunity.

In Israel – and in the US – there are similar disparities, the product of similar apartheids. (Another thing that surprised me, in both Israel and Palestine, were the legions of young male and female Israeli soldiers…many casually toting automatic weapons.)

The US, South Africa, Israel: all three are/were expansionist "settler states." All three have been populated by land-hungry Judeo-Christian Europeans. These outlanders arrived with far more capital and political and military backing than the indigenous people whose land they coveted − and, by hook or by crook, eventually confiscated…or are now bent on confiscating.

Our delegation spent a week in the occupied West Bank. We passed through the Separation Wall, the Berlin-like barrier dividing Israel from its hapless – but stubborn and resisting – colony. The thing to note about the Wall, four times the height of a man, is that only 20% of it is built on the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Israelis built most of the Wall well inside the West Bank on inhabited or cultivated Palestinian land – thereby seizing more Palestinian territory. That land grab is part of achieving "facts on the ground" ASAP before some "peace process" forces the Israelis to stop multiplying their (illegal) settlements throughout the West Bank.