BADIL

The same ground you walk on, we do too…

15 August 2007 marked the 60th anniversary of India's partition. However, little attention was paid by Palestinians this summer to the ways in which governments and people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh tackled the legacy of "their" partition, a violent event whose repercussions are apparent 60 years on. Having shared similar struggles for decolonization and freedom from the same British imperial power, and traumatic and formative partition experiences, the peoples of pre-1947 India and Palestine have taken little notice of each other's apparently similar historical tragedies.

Already in 1863, the U.S. Civil War-era Lieber Code, which influenced the subsequent Hague Conventions, instructed that, in our modern age, “private citizens are no longer carried off to distant parts.”(¹) That claim now appears majestically naïve and tragically premature. At a time when the UN Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities was considering the human rights dimensions of “population transfer,”(²)

Apartheid is an Afrikaans term for "apartness," which means to "separate," to "put apart," to "segregate." It can be summed up as the institutionalization of a regime of systematic racial discrimination or more precisely, "a political system where racism is regulated in law through acts of parliament."¹

Discussions on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid are not new; numerous articles were published in the 1980s and 1990s concluding that the situation in Israel and to some extent the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) is one of apartheid.²  These discussions were, however, sidelined by the Madrid-Oslo process in the mid-1990s, which was widely expected to bring about at least partial self-determination of the Palestinian people in the OPT. Discussions on the applicability of the apartheid label to Israel have recently re-emerged, mainly as a result of the entrenchment of Israel's regime of occupation and colonization in the OPT and its continued discriminatory policies towards Palestinian refugees and citizens of Israel.³