‘Israeli apartheid’ is a slur that does no one any good

Campuses around the world are beginning to witness a series of annual events known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), and it’s a particularly depressing time of the year to be a progressive Jew.

That’s because when you call Israel an apartheid regime, as many on the left are wont to do, you’re effectively arguing, whether explicitly or implicitly, that you want the world’s only Jewish state to disappear.

Many left-wingers may support an end to the occupation of the West Bank and an end to the siege on Gaza, and they say that Israel’s practices relating to these two territories are akin to apartheid in the old South Africa. Others argue that’s Israel’s very nature as a Jewish state makes it unabashedly racist, and hence inherently unredeemable, occupation or no occupation.

These arguments are usually conflated by IAW organizers, who hope to muddy the waters in order to attract progressive supporters of a two-state solution to their cause, thereby inflating their movement’s numbers.

Unfortunately for IAW organizers, both arguments are ultimately false.

When you get down to first principles, Israel obviously isn’t an apartheid state, even if there might be superficial resemblances between it and South Africa, and even if Israel’s occupation of the West Bank complicates the picture, and perhaps even the ultimate possibility of a future two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The word apartheid was used to describe the system of legal racial segregation in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. South Africa was a colonial nation founded by European Christian whites on land where mostly black Africans lived. That its whites came to completely disenfranchise its black and “coloured” populations was a travesty that has rightly ended.

Israel, by contrast, is a multiracial and multiethnic state that was founded on the site of the ancient Jewish homeland by Jews who returned there after a 2,000-year exile (although the area did have a relatively small Jewish presence all through that time). All its citizens have equal rights under the law, and any segregation that may occur isn’t legally binding. The state was indeed founded as a Jewish one, but it’s Jewish character is no less shocking than the Muslim nature of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, or the less-than-subtly Christian nature of most western democracies. (If you doubt that the latter is true, try going shopping on Christmas or Easter in Canada or the United Kingdom.)

As for the canard made famous by a 1975 UN General Assembly resolution (since repealed), Zionism, which is simply Jewish nationalism, doesn’t equal racism. It’s no more or less less offensive or chauvinistic than any other kind of nationalism.

Is there discrimination in Israel against non-Jews? Yes, but show me a democratic country where there isn’t discrimination against minorities.

Is the country’s sizable Arab minority perfectly integrated? No.

Yet Israel is working on these issues, and it’s doing so while being surrounded by Arab countries whose citizens, if not always their leaders (in the case of Jordan and Egypt, anyway), are hostile to its very existence.

The ultimate problem for Israel and its supporters is that – without getting into questions of how many Arabs lived in Palestine at which historical moments – while “we” Jews were (mostly) away in exile, Christian and Muslim Arabs developed a claim on “our” homeland. (For proof, see the prominent mosques on what “we” call the Temple Mount and what “they” call Haram Al-Sharif.)
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It means that while “they” look like squatters to “us”, “we” look like colonialist interlopers to them, and to many others, unfortunately.

The upshot? We’re talking fundamentally about a national conflict, not a racial one.

To claim that Israel, or Zionism, is inherently racist, which is what the apartheid slur does, is to argue that Israel should be dismantled in the same way that apartheid-era South Africa was dismantled. For most Jews, this is anathema. It also reeks of a double standard, in that it’s not applied to any other ethnically based state on Earth.

If you think Israel ought not to exist, what do you have to say about Pakistan? And why not criticize Quebécois nationalism as vehemently you criticize Jewish nationalism? (Most Canadian leftists give the former and its chauvinisms a relatively free pass.) And what about Palestinian nationalism? Or pan-Arab nationalism?

Furthermore, Israelis (or at least most Jewish Israelis) don’t advocate kicking Arabs out of Israel proper, yet that’s exactly what many Palestinians want to do to Jews in the territories that they seek to control. Why? And where’s the outcry about it? (And while we’re at it, where are the critics of Israel while president-for-life Bashar Assad is slaughtering his own citizens in Syria? Where’s the freedom flotilla to Latakia?)

Unlike Afrikaaner colonialists in South Africa, Jews have a legitimate historical claim to the Land of Israel. To say Israel is akin to apartheid South Africa is actually antisemitic, in that it denies this central element of Judaism.

Unfortunately for Jews, the group that the world now calls the Palestinians also has a claim to the land – squatters’ rights, if you will – which means “we” Jews need to negotiate with them if we’re to realize “our” ultimate dream of being a free nation at peace in “our” own country.

Calling Israel an apartheid state is not only false, but it gives succor to those who believe that with pressure, Israel will wither and die. It encourages people who want Israel to disappear to press harder in this direction and discourages them from compromising. This, in turn, only reinforces Israel’s sense of isolation and makes it less secure, and, therefore, in no mood to make any kind of deal, let alone take chances for peace. It thus encourages a hunker-down mentality and a hardening of positions.

After a state of war that’s persisted for more than 100 years, we find ourselves at a stalemate. Two nations that have quasi-aborginal claims to the same territory both see themselves as the underdog , and violence has been of only limited value to either side in achieving their goals. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are going anywhere, and the somewhat arbitrary boundaries that have placed historically Jewish sites such as Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in Palestinian territory and Arab areas such as large swaths of the Galilee in Israeli hands seem more or less permanent.

In other words, both sides need to sit down and compromise, which means that they won’t get everything they might want in their heart of hearts (i.e., everything) from any final peace deal they reach.

But anti-Israel events such as IAW will only prolong the conflict between two peoples that out of necessity need to learn to get along.

So if you’re on the left and you support Israeli Apartheid Week, just be clear that you’re supporting a mindset that will ultimately lead to more conflict and more bloodshed.

But if you want to see an end to the occupation of the West Bank and peace for Israelis and Palestinians – as I do – encouraging both sides to sit down and hammer out a two-state solution is the only way to go.