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Area A and B under the Oslo II Accord
Proposal in the Trump peace plan

The West Bank bantustans,[a] or West Bank cantons, figuratively described as the Palestine Archipelago,[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.[6][7] The process of creating the fragmented Palestinian zones has been described as "encystation" by Glenn Bowman, Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations at Kent University.[8]

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.[9] Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the area of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian National Authority is composed of 165 "islands".[10]

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.[11] and most recently, the Trump peace plan.

Debate has continued as to whether the existing or proposed arrangements are contiguous or noncontiguous.

History

1967-1995

After the 1967 Six Day War, a small group of officers advocated creating a small independent Palestinian "mini-state" in the north of the West Bank, but policymakers did not support that plan.[12] By the early 1970s, Arabic-language magazines began to compare the Israeli proposals for a Palestinian autonomy to the Bantustan strategy of South Africa.[13]

Oslo Accord and subsequent peace plans

The 1995 Oslo Accords offered the Palestinians over 60 disconnected fragments;[14] 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).[15]

The failure of the subsequent 2000 Camp David Summit has been blamed 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."[16]

Trump peace plan

The 2020 Trump peace plan proposed splitting a possible "State of Palestine" into five zones:[17]

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.”"[17]

Names

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.[18] 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

  1. ^ Also contracted as “Palutustans”[1]

References

  1. ^ Oren Yiftachel. "Between One and Two: Apartheid or Confederation for Israel/Palestine?". Israel and Palestine: Alternative Perspectives on Statehood. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 320. 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, pos- sibly allotting crumbs of sovereignty to Palestinian groups in areas that will continue to function as "Palutustans" (Palestinian Bantustans).
  2. ^ a b Jennifer Lynn Kelly (2016), Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Solidarity in Occupied Palestine, American Quarterly, 68(3), 723-745. doi:10.1353/aq.2016.0060 "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."
  3. ^ Barak, O. (2005). The Failure of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, 1993-2000. Journal of Peace Research, 42(6), 719-736. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042415
  4. ^ Baylouny, A. (2009). FRAGMENTED SPACE AND VIOLENCE IN PALESTINE. International Journal on World Peace, 26(3), 39-68. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20752894
  5. ^ Peteet, J. (2016). The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid. Anthropological Quarterly, 89(1), 247-281. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43955521
  6. ^ Settler policy imperils Israel's foundations, Financial Times, 21 February 2013: "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."
  7. ^ Mohammed Chaichian (13 November 2013). "Bantustans, Maquiladoras, and the Separation Barrier Israeli Style". Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration, and Colonial Domination. BRILL. pp. 271–319. ISBN 978-90-04-26066-5.
  8. ^ Bowman, G. (2007). Israel's wall and the logic of encystation, Focaal, 2007(50), 127-135. Retrieved Nov 13, 2020
  9. ^ Harris, B. (1984). The South Africanization of Israel. Arab Studies Quarterly, 6(3), 169-189. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857718
  10. ^ Nathan Thrall (16 May 2017). The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. Henry Holt and Company. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-62779-710-8. 90 percent of the population of the West Bank was divided into 165 islands of ostensible PA control
  11. ^ Joel Beinin; Rebecca L. Stein (2006). The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford University Press. pp. 346–. ISBN 978-0-8047-5365-4. 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.
  12. ^ Jens Hanssen; Amal N. Ghazal (20 November 2020). The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History. Oxford University Press. p. 278. ISBN 978-0-19-967253-0. 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.
  13. ^ Andrew James Clarno (2009)The Empire's New Walls: Sovereignty, Neo-liberalism, and the Production of Space in Post-apartheid South Africa and Post-Oslo Palestine/Israel, p. 66–67
  14. ^ Saree Makdisi (2005) “Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 443–461: "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."
  15. ^ Sara Roy (2004), The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Palestinian Socioeconomic Decline: A Place Denied, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 17(3), 365-403: "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."
  16. ^ Slater, J. (2001). What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process. Political Science Quarterly, 116(2), 171-199. doi:10.2307/798058
  17. ^ a b Ian Lustick, (2020), The One-State Reality: Reading the Trump-Kushner Plan as a Morbid Symptom, The Arab World Geographer, Vol 23, no 1, p.23
  18. ^ Farsakh, L. (2005). Independence, Cantons, or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?, Middle East Journal, 59(2), p.231: "Ariel 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."
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