designed to sever the attachment of Palestinians to their land and to each
other, undermining the right to self-determination, a peremptory norm of
international law. These policies reduce Palestinian communities to strangled
and isolated Bantustans, surrounded by Israeli colonies, with no continuity
and lacking the organic connections that once unified them. Moreover, they
are enacted against the entire structure of Palestinian society, concentrating
Palestinians into villages detached from their agricultural lands, then into
towns, urban centers and across Palestine as a whole. This undermines the
integrity of Mandatory Palestine and therefore the legitimacy of its indigenous
people to lay claim to their territorial rights, and most critically their right to
self-determination.
4.2. Undermining the Tenets of the Right to
Self-Determination
Interconnected and coordinated practices and policies of segregation,
fragmentation and isolation culminate in the rupturing of each tenet of
self-determination as described under Common Article 1(1) of the ICCPR
and of the ICESCR.
4.2.1. De-Development of the Economic, Social and Cultural
Pillars of Palestinian Society
With regards to the first tenet of self-determination, Israel’s policies
are deployed to systematically inhibit the right of Palestinians to freely
pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and their
correlated free and unhindered disposal of Palestine’s natural wealth
and resources.
De-development and economic dependency
The Palestinian economy, once centered on an agrarian structure around
which communities, land and societal connections were ordered and
understood, has been deliberately dismantled and obliterated by Israel’s
policies of segregation, fragmentation and isolation. On the one hand, the
oppressive control and domination of the transportation system has led
to the collapse of traditional Palestinian economic industries that used
to form the basis of their self-sufficiency. For example, such policies have
deliberately obstructed access to Palestinian lands and economies which
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