'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Bantustans: South Africa and Palestine

How quickly the world forgets. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the apartheid government in South Africa pushed forward its plan to create "Bantu homelands" within South Africa which would:

(a) be small, territorially non-contiguous, and located in some of the country's most unfertile regions, and

(b) be totally under the control of the Pretoria government in practice, even though four of the ten homelands were given a nominal "independence". (Note the importance of the fact that no significant outside powers--except Israel!--ever gave formal recognition to this "independence".)

What did the map of all of South Africa with the ten tiny homelands inside it look like? It looked like this. Maps of the Bantustans are so hard to come by these days that it took me a while to find that one: it came from vol. 7 of the TRC's report, p.935.

When you look at that map, remember that the Black African population of South Africa at the time was more than 75% of the total. No wonder the vast majority of the country's people rose up to oppose that system, and replaced it with a unitary system of one-person-one-vote democracy.

So here, now, are some maps that show what has been happning to the occupied Palestinian territories during the 37 years of Israel's military occupation:

First up, this very clear map from the Foundation for Middle East Peace that shows the "leopard spots" of limited self-government in the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians were allowed under the post-Oslo "peace process" of 1993-2000.

Then, we have this map of the situation in Gaza as of last October. It comes from the UN's Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. If you click on the link for the large version there, you can see clearly just how much of the surface-area of Gaza is now off-limits to the Palestinians, because of the Israeli settlements and various "security" needs. And oh, the Israeli "security roads" just happen to cut the "Palestinian" parts of Gaza into four non-contiguous chunks.

There are a few other things worth remembering in this picture...

The first is that the number of Palestinians in Gaza is over 1.2 million, and the population of Israeli settlers somewhere under 8,000. Figure out what that means for relative population density inside the Strip!

The second is that the whole "butterfly wing" of the occupied West Bank and the whole "Strip" of Gaza between them represent less than 23% of the surface area of Mandate-era Palestine. Since the 1970s, the PLO has worked hard (though not very effectively) to win the "liberation" of these two portions of their historic homeland from Israeli rule, with the general idea--sometimes articulated, sometimes not--that this portion of land would, at the end of the day, satisfy the Palestinian people's desire to establish a national state in the homeland.

But now, the settlement policies pursued by every single Israeli government down to the present one have, between them, gobbled up increasing chunks of even this fragment of the Palestinians' earlier homeland.

There are over 8 million Palestinians now living in and around the area of Mandate Palestine. 1.1 million of them live inside and have citizenship in Israel itself; 3.3 million live in the occupied territories; and some 3.7 million are refugees registered in surrounding countries.

There are about 5.2 million Jewish Israelis.

What is an equitable outcome? One could envisage it taking the form of either a unitary, binational state in the whole of Israel/Palestine, or the form of two mainly mono-national states living side by side in peace. But as I frequently say, a viable two-state solution depends on there being two viable states. And the kind of territorial outcome that Sharon and the rest of the Israeli elite seem to be heading toward looks very, very far from this...

In fact, it looks much more like this.