West Bank bantustans
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The West Bank bantustans,[lower-alpha 1] or West Bank cantons, figuratively described as the Palestine Archipelago,[lower-alpha 2][3][4] [5] are the proposed noncontiguous enclaves for the Palestinian population of the West Bank under a variety of US and Israeli-led proposals to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[lower-alpha 3][7] The process of creating the fragmented Palestinian zones has been described as "encystation" by Professor Glenn Bowman, Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations at Kent University,[8] and as "enclavization" by Professor Ghazi Falah at the University of Akron.[9][10]
The terms have also been used to describe Areas A and B under the 1995 Oslo II Accord, and the similar but less formal situation between 1967 and 1995.[11] Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the area of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian National Authority is composed of 165 "islands". [lower-alpha 4]
The bantustan structure underpinned many of Israeli “final status” proposals for the conflict, including Allon Plan, the WZO plan, Menachem Begin’s plan, Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Allon Plus” plan, 2000 Camp David Summit and Ariel Sharon’s proposals.[lower-alpha 5] and most recently, the Trump peace plan.
Debate has continued as to whether the existing or proposed arrangements are contiguous or noncontiguous.
History[edit]
1967-1995[edit]
After the 1967 Six Day War, a small group of officers and senior Israeli officials advocated for Israel, on its own, to create a small externally controlled Palestinian area or "canton", in the north of the West Bank. Policymakers did not implemente this cantonal plan at the time. Defense minister Moshe Dayan said that Israel should keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip.[lower-alpha 6] In early 1968, Yigal Allon, the Israeli minister for whom the 1967 Allon Plan is named, proposed reformulating his plan by transferring some Palestinian areas back to Jordan, for fear that the resulting Palestinian areas "would be identified as... some kind of South African bantustan".[15]
According to former Israeli ambassador and vice president of Tel Aviv University Avi Primor, writing in 2002, in the top echelons of the Israeli security establishment in the 1970s and 1980s there was widespread empathy for South Africa's apartheid system, and were particularly interested in that country's resolution of the demographic issue by inventing bantustan 'homelands' for various groups of the indigenous black population.[lower-alpha 7] Pro-Palestinian circles and scholars, despite the secrecy of the tacit alliance between Israel and South Africa, were familiar with ongoing arrangements between the two in military and nuclear matters, though the thriving cooperation between Israel and the Bantustans themselves was a subject that remained neglected until recently, when South Africa's archives began to be opened up.[17] By the early 1970s, Arabic-language magazines began to compare the Israeli proposals for a Palestinian autonomy to the Bantustan strategy of South Africa.[18]
Oslo Accord and subsequent peace plans[edit]
The 1995 Oslo Accords offered the Palestinians over 60 disconnected fragments;[lower-alpha 8] by the end of 1999 the West Bank had been divided into 227 separate entities, most of which were no more than 2 km2 (about half the size of New York's Central Park). [lower-alpha 9]
Many observers, including Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein and seasoned Israeli analysts such as Meron Benvenisti were highly critical of the arrangements, with Benvenisti concluding that the Palestinian self-rule sketched out in the agreements was little more than a euphemism for Bantustanization.[21][22]
The failure of the subsequent 2000 Camp David Summit has been blamed, amongst other factors, on the inability to unwind the bantustans; as Israeli journalist Ze'ev Schiff stated: "the prospect of being able to establish a viable state was fading right before [the Palestinians'] eyes. They were confronted with an intolerable set of options: to agree to the spreading occupation... or to set up wretched Bantustans, or to launch an uprising."[23]
Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan[edit]
Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza was widely interpreted as part of a broader strategy of bantustanization connected to the creation of the Separation Barrier. his contention was that the Apartheid system's Bantustan model was the appropriate model for the conflict,[24] and explicitly mentioned in 2003 that in constructing a 'map of a (future) Palestinian state,' he had in mind the model of South Africa's Bantustan system.[lower-alpha 10] Not only was the Gaza Strip to be reduced to a bantustan, but the model there, according to Meron Benvenisti, was to be transposed to the West Bank by ensuring, simultaneously, that the Wall itself broke up into three fragmented entities Jenin-Nablus, Bethlehem-Hebron and Ramallah. [lower-alpha 11] [27]
Avi Primor in 2002 described the implications of the plan: "Without anyone taking notice, a process is underway establishing a "Palestinian state" limited to the Palestinian cities, a "state" comprised of a number of separate, sovereign-less enclaves, with no resources for self-sustenance."[16]
Trump peace plan[edit]
The 2020 Trump peace plan proposed splitting a possible "State of Palestine" into five zones:[28]
- A reduced Gaza Strip connected by a road to two uninhabited districts in the Negev desert;
- Part of the southern West Bank;
- A central area around Ramallah, almost trisected by a number of Israeli settlements;
- A northern area including Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm;
- A small zone including Qalqilya, surrounded by Israeli settlements.
According to Professor Ian Lustick, the "appellation “State of Palestine” applied to this archipelago of Palestinian-inhabited districts is not to be taken any more seriously than the international community took apartheid South Africa’s description of the bantustans of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei as “independent nation-states.”"[28]
Names[edit]
The name “cantons” is considered to imply a neutral concept where political implications are left to be determined, whereas the name “bantustans” is considered to imply economic and political implications and the lack of meanginful sovereignty. [lower-alpha 12] The name "islands" or "archipelago" is considered to communicate how the infrastructure of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has disrupted contiguity between Palestinian areas.[2]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Also contracted as “Palutustans”.'The experience of the past four decades puts a question mark over this assumption. If a Palestinian state is not established, Israel will most likely continue to administer the area, possibly allotting crumbs of sovereignty to Palestinian groups in areas that will continue to function as “Palutustans” (Palestinian Bantustans).'[1]
- ↑ 'In 2009, French artist Julien Bousac designed a map of the West Bank titled “L’archipel de Palestine orientale,” or “The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine”... Bousac’s map illustrates — via a military and a tourist imaginary — how the US-brokered Oslo Accords fragmented the West Bank into enclaves separated by checkpoints and settlements that maintain Israeli control over the West Bank and circumscribe the majority of the Palestinian population to shrinking Palestinian city and village centers.' [2]
- ↑ 'Faced with widely drawn international parallels between the West Bank and the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, senior figures in Mr Netanyahu's Likud party have begun to admit the danger.'[6]
- ↑ '90 percent of the population of the West Bank was divided into 165 islands of ostensible PA control.'[12]
- ↑ 'Israel responded to the second intifada with a strategy of collective punishment aimed at a return to the logic of Oslo, whereby a weak Palestinian leadership would acquiesce to Israeli demands and a brutalized population would be compelled to accept a “state” made up of a series of Bantustans. Though the language may have changed slightly, the same structure that has characterized past plans remains. The Allon plan, the WZO plan, the Begin plan, Netanyahu’s “Allon Plus” plan, Barak’s “generous offer,” and Sharon’s vision of a Palestinian state all foresaw Israeli control of significant West Bank territory, a Palestinian existence on minimal territory surrounded, divided, and, ultimately, controlled by Israel, and a Palestinian or Arab entity that would assume responsibility for internal policing and civil matters.'[13]
- ↑ 'During the early days of the occupation a handful of senior Israeli officials and army officers advocated unilateral plans for a Palestinian satellite mini-state, autonomous region, or “canton” — Bantustan actually — in the northern half of the West Bank, but the policymakers would have none of this.'[14]
- ↑ 'Many in the top echelons of the security establishment in the 1970s and 1980s had a warm spot in their hearts for the white apartheid regime in South Africa that was derived not only from utilitarian interests, but also from sympathy for the white minority rulers in that country. One of the elements of the old South African regime that stirred much interest in Israel remains current to this day: To seemingly solve the demographic problem that troubled the white South Africans (that is, to hang on to all of South Africa without granting equal rights, civil rights and the vote to blacks), the South African regime created a fiction known by the name Bantustans, later changed to Homelands.'[16]
- ↑ 'In any case, what was on offer at Oslo was a territorially discontinuous Palestinian Bantustan (divided into over sixty disconnected fragments) that would have had no control over water resources, borders, or airspace, much less an independent economy, currency, or financial system, and whose sovereignty, nominal as it was, would be punctuated by heavily fortified Israeli colonies and an autonomous Jewish road network, all of which would be effectively under Israeli army control. Even this, however, was never realized.'[19]
- ↑ 'By December 1999, the Gaza Strip had been divided into three cantons and the West Bank into 227, the majority of which were no larger than two square kilometers in size. Both areas were effectively severed from East Jerusalem. While Palestinians maintained control over many of the cantons and were promised authority over more if not most, Israel maintained jurisdiction over the land areas in between the cantons, which in effect gave Israel control over all the land and its disposition. Hence, the actual amount of land under Palestinian authority proved far less important than the way that land was arranged and controlled.'[20]
- ↑ 'In 2003, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon revealed that he relied on South Africa's Bantustan model in constructing a possible “map of a Palestinian state.'[25]
- ↑ 'with breathtaking daring, Sharon submits a plan that appears to promise the existence of a "Jewish democratic state" via "separation", "the end of the conquest", the "dismantling of settlements" - and also the imprisonment of some 3 million Palestinians in bantustans. This is an "interim plan" that is meant to last forever. The plan will last, however, only as long as the illusion is sustained that "separation" is a means to end the conflict.'[26]
- ↑ ìAriel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister since 2001, had long contended that the Bantustan model, so central to the apartheid system, is the most appropriate to the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others, by contrast, have maintained that the Palestinian territories have been transformed into cantons whose final status is still to be determined. The difference in terminology between cantons and Bantustans is not arbitrary though. The former suggests a neutral territorial concept whose political implications and contours are left to be determined. The latter indicates a structural development with economic and political implications that put in jeopardy the prospects for any meaningfully sovereign viable Palestinian state. It makes the prospects for a binational state seem inevitable, if most threatening to the notion of ethnic nationalism.'[24]
Citations[edit]
- ↑ Yiftachel 2016, p. 320.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Kelly 2016, pp. 723-745.
- ↑ Barak 2005, pp. 719-736.
- ↑ Baylouny 2009, pp. 39-68.
- ↑ Peteet 2016, pp. 247-281.
- ↑ FT 2013.
- ↑ Chaichian 2013, pp. 271–319.
- ↑ Bowman 2007, pp. 127-135.
- ↑ Falah 2005, pp. 1341-1372.
- ↑ Taraki 2008, pp. 6–20.
- ↑ Harris, Jr. 1984, pp. 169-189.
- ↑ Thrall 2017, p. 144.
- ↑ Beinin & Stein 2006, p. 346.
- ↑ Raz 2020, p. 278.
- ↑ Gorenberg 2006, p. 153.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Primor 2002.
- ↑ Lissoni 2015, pp. 53-55.
- ↑ Clarno 2009, pp. 66-67.
- ↑ Makdisi 2005, pp. 443–461.
- ↑ Roy 2004, pp. 365-403.
- ↑ Finkelstein 2003, p. 177.
- ↑ MacMahon 2010, pp. 23-24.
- ↑ Slater 2001, pp. 171-199.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 Farsakh 2005, p. 231.
- ↑ Feld 2014, pp. 99,138.
- ↑ Benvenisti 2004.
- ↑ Machover 2012, p. 55.
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 Lustick 2005, p. 23.
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- Bowman, Glenn (2007). "Israel's wall and the logic of encystation: Sovereign exception or wild sovereignty?" (50). Focaal-European Journal of Anthropology: 127–136.
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