Painful Truth: Israeli Apartheid

This isn't 20th century South Africa; it's 21st century Israel, and it's worse

than South Africa. After all, globally, we are much more sensitized to human rights abuses and collective punishment than we were just a few decades ago. Though a thoroughgoing and explicit system of racial domination in South Africa was not imposed until after World War II, apartheid was rooted in the racist policies and attitudes of the British colonial regime and white settlers. It can be argued, therefore, that the global argument in favor of human rights and against genocide, colonialism and racism (articulated by, for example, the United Nations, the Nuremburg Trials, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) was not potent enough by 1950 to prevent the establishment of the apartheid regime in South Africa or, for that matter, to stop the creation of a theocratic Jewish state in Palestine.

But the Holocaust made a settler state in Palestine possible. After World War II no people in the world, other than European Jews, would have been endorsed by the United Nations in their desire to establish a national state on territory already occupied by an indigenous community. There are those who argue that there was a Jewish presence in Palestine that was at least as continuous as that of the Arabs. There may be some truth to this, but it is not relevant to the central point that Palestinians living on the land did not assent to the establishment of the state of Israel and that tens of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in a process that resembles in every detail other colonial expropriations of land.

It may also be true that some Palestinians were not rooted in a specific spot, but a nomadic existence in a territory does not weaken a people's claim to their land. Neither does it make any practical difference that Palestinians were hardly a coherent political community at the time of the establishment of the Jewish state; such a description suggests that European Jewish leaders were simply better positioned to manipulate major world powers than were the leaders of Palestinian clans and groups. More relevant is the point that South African apartheid is gone, defeated both by native African resistance and international pressure, while Israel, denying that it maintains a system of religious, political and cultural domination and separation, forcefully expands its grip on Palestinian territory, while resisting international pressure and a relatively impotent U.S.

Certainly there is a linguistic argument against the use of the word "apartheid" to describe the regime maintained by the theocratic Jewish state of Israel, but the argument is trite. In Apartheid? Not Israel, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen argues that Israel is not an apartheid state "where political and civil rights are withheld on the basis of race and race alone." Israeli Arabs, Cohen writes, "have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews."

But this statement is a gloss on a reality in which Arabs in Israel live as second-class citizens. Public schools in Arab neighborhoods are underfunded and are clearly a case of "separate and unequal;" the same reality exists in regard to health care, development funding and other government services. Israel also allows Jews from anywhere in the world to come to Israel and assume all the rights of Israeli citizenship, an implicitly clear statement on the differing status of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

Meanwhile, many Palestinians, displaced during the creation of Israel, have no rights to citizenship and no way to claim damages for their displacement or for their continuing exile from their homes. They live in de facto bantustans, and are subject to punitive raids by the Israeli armed forces, collective punishment, house demolitions, further expropriation of territory, extra-legal arrest, detention and imprisonment, and regulated access to most essential requirements and services, such as employment, education, health care, sanitation and, even, water. If the Palestinians living in the occupied territories were included in calculations of the Arab population in Israel, the result would reflect the forceful domination by a minority of a distinctly and separately defined majority population. Because it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is apartheid.

But if anything defines the difference between the South African and Israeli apartheid states, it is that the South African version named itself. Israeli apartheid is the apartheid that dare not speak its name. It is understandable that large numbers of American Jews cannot concede this truth, Richard Cohen among them. Israel was created at a moment of celebration and hope for Jews around the world. Freshly scarred by the Holocaust, and still fearful that history might repeat itself, Jews were inclined not to notice that their joy might be the occasion for the suffering of others.

In this way, Israel, became "a beacon of hope," entering the mythology of American Jews and, eventually, becoming the driving force in the creation of a specific American Jewish ideological argument supporting the Israeli state in its current form. The power of that idealizing of Israel pushed me to celebrate Israeli victories in the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Despite the fact of my anti-Vietnam War activism and the continuing displacement of Palestinians, I easily convinced myself that Israel's cause was simply self-defense. It would be many years before I would be willing to judge Israel's founding and expansion in Palestine with the same critical perspective that I routinely applied to the foreign adventures of the United States.

But Cohen doesn't want to hear it. Those who name Israeli apartheid, who assert that zionism is racism, "have made Israel tone-deaf to legitimate criticism and exasperated with any attempt to find fault," he writes. "Israel has its faults (don't get me started), but it is not motivated by racism. That's more than can be said for many of its critics."

But Cohen "will never get started." Neither he, nor most American Jews, feel comfortable with criticisms of even the most minimal and obvious nature, like, say, the suggestion that continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an absolute violation of international law. Cohen is as guilty of slamming the door shut on dialogue as are the critics whom he calls "tone deaf." They batter on the door, shout to be heard, and quite frankly are no longer speaking to Cohen or to the garrison state of Israel. Their accusations are aimed at a shrinking group of neutral observers, who may not believe that Israel is a racist or apartheid state, but are not inclined to believe that the name-calling is the problem. The world is watching and losing patience with an Israel that perpetrates continuing injustice.