Richard Cohen says that Israel has its faults but apartheid isn’t one of them– and wishes away the complete denial of rights to Palestinians in the occupied territories that even Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have characterized as apartheid (emphasis mine):
The Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. In South Africa, the minority white population harshly ruled the majority black population. Nonwhites were denied civil rights, and in 1958, they were even deprived of citizenship. In contrast, Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military, although most are exempt from the draft. Whatever this is — and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy — it cannot be apartheid.
The West Bank, more or less under Israeli military rule, is a different matter. But it is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan — including those proposed by Israeli governments — almost all of it will revert to the Palestinian Authority and become the heartland of a Palestinian state.
This is denial masquerading as prophecy. It is the same tactic that Clyde Haberman employed a few years back at Yivo when he was questioned about how much power Jewish journalists have and said, that this is "a function of a generation or two, I don’t think it’s going to remain that way forever." Is it journalism to predict a more equitable future so as not to talk about today? Here is Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor, in his book The Myths of Liberal Zionism, which will never be picked up by the Post, speaking about r e a l i t y:
Close to 4 million people are currently living under the longest military occupation in modern times, stripped of the right to vote on the laws that have governed their lives for more than four decades… They are not allowed to ride on the same roads that Israel’s citizens ride on, not even in "their own" territory, let alone through "ours."…[T]he infant mortality rate among Arab citizens of Israel is double the rate among the Jewish population–8 per 1,000 live births compared with 4 per 1,000 live births. What is the infant mortality rate in the occupied territories? In 2006 it was 25.3 per 1,000 live births.
