As happened in 1966 at District Six, a Colored community near Cape Town, "Israel's Arabs" can be forced off their lands at the drop of the hat - as is currently happening at Umm al-Hiran in the Negev - if the state deems that the land is needed more by the masters than the serfs.
The New York Times article notes that apartheid South Africa's policy towards its Coloreds and Blacks was governed by a "security" approach that treated them as an enemy. Just such an official policy towards "Israel's Arabs" was highlighted nearly 20 years ago by a state commission of inquiry.
Another observation by the Times will echo with "Israeli Arabs": "Most black townships, for instance, have few entrances and are thus easily sealed." Similarly, "Arab" communities in Israel typically have one or two ways in or out - a legacy of the military government that in Israel's first two decades tightly controlled all "Arab" movement.
In recent months those memories were revived in Nazareth, for example, when the police again blockaded the city's entrances during periods of lockdown.
Very belatedly it has finally dawned on Jewish human rights groups in Israel that the country's apartheid system can no more be separated between a "democratic" Israel and a non-democratic occupied territories than South Africa's could be between its white areas and the so-called black homelands, the Bantustans.
One group, B'Tselem, concluded last month that Israeli apartheid is indivisible, just as South Africa's was. Its executive director, Hagai El-Ad, observed: "There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself."
The division, El-Ad noted, was not primarily between Israelis - Jews and "Arabs" - and Palestinians but between the segregated treatment of people under Israeli rule as either "desirable or undesirable".
Those picnicking "Arabs" are the undesirables just as much as are the Palestinians living close by in Ramallah. Which is why the settlers were determined to move them off the land, and why the soldiers were only too happy to assist.
Israel upholds a system of Jewish supremacy over the land, and it matters not one jot whether those challenging its apartheid rule are Palestinian subjects without rights or "Arab" citizens supposedly with full rights.
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