Quotes by Ronnie Kasrils

The “security barrier”, as the ­Israeli’s term it, is designed to crush the human spirit as much as to enclose the Palestinians in ghettoes. Like a reptile, it transforms its shape and cuts across agricultural lands as a steel-and-wire barrier, with watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads and alarm systems. It will be 700km long and, at a height of 8m to 9m in places, dwarfs the Berlin Wall.

A journey from one West Bank town to another that could take 20 minutes by car now takes seven hours for Palestinians, with manifold indignities at the hands of teenage soldiers.

13-year-old Iman al-Hams ... was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300 are in Israeli prisons.

In the occupied territories, Israel maintains a strict racial and colonial segregation between Israeli Jewish settlers and the native Palestinians... The former group enjoys economic benefits, special roads, heavily subsidised and more heavily protected housing, and full political rights. Even under apartheid there were never whites-only roads. There was never a comparable prolonged siege, or curfews,