Rev Dr Eoin Cassidycriticises Israel's legal treatment of Palestinians and its policies in relation to the West Bank and Jerusalem
The book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is one of the most remarkable publications on the Middle East to appear in many years. It is remarkable, not just because its author is Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States and one of the signatories to the historic Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, but even more so because of his reference to apartheid.
To use a word such as apartheid, with all the moral opprobrium attached to it, to describe the current political reality in the occupied Palestinian territories is not something that is to be undertaken lightly. In a recent article that he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, an edited version of which appeared in the Guardian (December 13th), Carter acknowledges that some reviewers have accused him of being "anti-Semitic".
Nevertheless, in the following passage from the article, he does not recoil from the challenge to restate his views: "The book describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine, to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid."
Given the appalling history of "anti-Semitism" that has scarred our European civilisation, it is difficult not to be sympathetic to the legitimate aspirations of Jews who have struggled for the best part of a century to secure a homeland in what has become the state of Israel. For far too long the rights of Israelis to be recognised as citizens of the state of Israel have been denied by their neighbours. In addition, one has to acknowledge the deleterious effect on the population of the two intifadas. In the past six years, no fewer than 171 people have been killed in 38 suicide bombings in the city of Jerusalem alone.
This wanton destruction of human life has left scars that will take generations to heal.
In the face of the threat to Israel's security and its right to defend itself against violence from whatever quarter, can one sustain the thesis that the restrictions imposed on Palestinian freedom of movement are progressively transforming Israel into an apartheid state? Unfortunately, I think that we can.
One major issue that forms part of the contemporary Palestinian story is the 2003 nationality law, which in effect obliges many Palestinian couples, married and living in east Jerusalem, to live either apart or illegally together. For example, a Palestinian woman with a Jerusalem identity card can be living with her husband in east Jerusalem "illegally" because he has a West Bank identity card and is not allowed to live with her in east Jerusalem.
Other restrictions on the rights of Palestinians living in Jerusalem include the severe difficulty in obtaining planning permission to build houses in east Jerusalem and the fact that those who leave Jerusalem to study or work abroad lose any automatic right to retain their Jerusalem identity cards.
These obstacles to Palestinians living and making their home in east Jerusalem are designed to ensure the status of Jerusalem as a Jewish city.
Of the restrictions on the Palestinian freedom of movement, by far the most serious is the construction of the separation wall.
If physical safety for Israeli citizens was the aim, simply building the separation wall along the Green Line (the 1948 ceasefire line which is the internationally accepted de facto border between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories) and within Israeli territory would suffice. However, the route currently being taken by the wall will ensure that approximately 10 per cent of the West Bank, encompassing the most fertile land, will remain in Israeli hands.
In some areas, the route of the wall defies all security logic. For example, there are places in Jerusalem where the wall cuts through Palestinian neighbourhoods, at times literally running down the middle of busy, urban streets.
Finally, the manner in which the wall deviates from the Green Line and follows the contours of planned settlement expansion suggests that security concerns are not the only factors at play in its construction.
Whatever the intentions behind the construction of the separation wall, it is an unarguable fact that its course dissects the Palestinian West Bank into a series of semi-autonomous enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements, reducing Palestine to a patchwork of municipal cantons or a collection of bantustans and thus destroying any hopes for a viable state.
• Rev Dr Eoin Cassidy is a member of the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs (ICJSA). The ICJSA's role is to support the Irish Bishops' Conference in promoting the social teaching of the Catholic Church and advise on issues of social concern.