Summary
The term Henry Siegman, quoted by Makdisi, applies to the enclosed Palestinian territories Israel’s settlement enterprise is producing: Gaza, sealed since the 2005 redeployment, “was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans”, whose residents’ treatment will depend on whether they “behave as Israel wants” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.212).
Details
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Gaza is presented as “a world turned outside in”, and not unique: it is the prototype for a form of enclosure and isolation now being applied to Palestinian communities in the West Bank as well (PDF p.212).
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Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, as quoted: “Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory—based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon—knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved”; “Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.” (PDF p.212)
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The features of the condition, as the passage lists them: being cut off from the outside world except through points of access under Israeli control; being utterly dependent on Israel for vital communications and supplies; being subject to frequent, even daily, Israeli raids and bombardments; and growing used to confinement so severe that the tiny territory inhabited seems to have become a world unto itself (PDF p.212).
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In the Coda, the canton “state” Ehud Olmert envisages is compared to South Africa’s fictional homelands: “exactly the same series of disconnected and impoverished cantons (of which Gaza is the prototype)”, a patchwork of open-air prisons whose label “is a fiction that is unlikely to last very long—probably not even as long as the fictional states of Transkei, Ciskei, and Bophuthatswana”, which were finally reincorporated into the new South Africa after apartheid collapsed (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.363).
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Tutu, in the passage quoted in the Coda, notes the term itself: “bantustan” is an explicit reference to the little homelands with which South Africa experimented at one point in order to artificially reduce its black population (PDF p.358).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Gaza, Mona el-Farra, Apartheid, Closure system