The New York Times has published four letters in response to Richard Goldstone’s “Israel and the Apartheid Slander” Op-ed. The letters are split, with two opposing the judge. Here is a passage from John Dugard:
Mr. Goldstone and I knew apartheid in South Africa. We knew apartheid as a discriminatory, repressive system accompanied by the seizure of land belonging to blacks for the use of whites.
We know something about Gaza, as we investigated Israel’s actions there in 2009 and concluded that Israel had committed war crimes. I know the West Bank better than Mr. Goldstone, as from 2001 to 2008, I was special rapporteur to the Human Rights Council, a United Nations body, on human rights in the Palestinian territories and visited there regularly.
There are distinctive similarities between apartheid in South Africa and Israel’s practices in the West Bank. Israel discriminates against Palestinians in favor of settlers. Its restrictions on freedom of movement resemble the pass laws of apartheid South Africa.
Israeli practices in the Palestinian territories are repressive. Torture of Palestinians is rife; houses are destroyed, and there are more political prisoners in Israeli jails than there were in South Africa under apartheid. Israel seizes Palestinian land for settlements and for the construction of the wall.
There are sufficient similarities between the two systems to justify an investigation into whether or not Israel commits the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
David Markowitz of Pound Ridge, NY had a snappier response:
Why is it “important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel … and in West Bank areas”?
If Alabama had segregated in Montgomery but not in Birmingham, would it have been responsible for discrimination or not?
But the most appalling insult to logic is the claim that there can be no apartheid because Israel has no “intention of maintaining” its regime of “domination by one racial group.”
It’s a fact on the ground, but we can’t call it by its name because Israel means well?
I’m sure the Times was inundated with letters, and surely could not print them all. Here are two more that were shared with us after being sent to the Times:
To the Editor: Re “Israel and the Apartheid Slander”:
It was disheartening to see former justice Richard J. Goldstone seek to defend Israel’s continued occupation with distortion and half-truths. He claims the West Bank security barrier and and other measures are designed to “stop unrelenting terrorist attacks,” but fails to mention that the 26-foot high wall slices through the West Bank well inside the 1967 borders, leaving a considerable amount of Palestinian land on Israel’s side. He claims that Israel has “agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state,” but fails to mention that the “state” Israel is offering is a truncated entity, having limited access to Jerusalem and with no control over its borders or air space. The fact is that West Bank Palestinians are living under military occupation, surrounded by often violent settlers, forbidden to use the main roads, subject to humiliating waits at checkpoints,and in constant danger of having their homes demolished to make way for new settlements. Whether of not we choose to call this “apartheid,” it is wrong, and regarded as so by most of the world.
Rachelle Marshall, Mill Valley, CA
In his op-ed Richard J. Goldstone seeks to dispel the notion that Israel practices apartheid both in Israel and the West Bank. Aside from the fact that no one ever claimed that the type of “apartheid” practiced by the Israelis is identical to that of pre-1994 South Africa, the similarities are more than demonstrable, even if one employs the 1998 Rome Statute that Mr. Goldstone cites in his piece. For instance, how would Mr. Goldstone explain West Bank settlements and the underlying Jewish-only infrastructure used to maintain those settlements? In Israel proper, how would Mr. Goldstone explain, just to name a few things, the bulldozing of Bedouin villages in the Negev, the inability of non-Jews to immigrate to Israel to live with their non-Jewish relatives, the inability of Arab citizens to serve in the military or the fact that since 1948 not a single new Arab village has been created in the whole country while literally thousands of Jewish ones have been? These discriminatory practices can not be explained away by Israel’s legitimate security needs. Something else is at play and it is not surprising that Mr. Goldstone did not make mention of even one of these issues.
Scott Roth, New York, NY
Dugard: “there are more political prisoners in Israeli jails than there were in South Africa under apartheid.” AND (he might have added) the Palestine population of West Bank and Gaza is very, very much smaller than then black population of South Africa during apartheid.
In 2011, there were 40,206,275 (black) South Africans but only 4,565,825 (white) South Africans,
whereas in 2005 there were about 4M Palestinians living in Gaza and West Bank suggesting that the proportion of Palestinian political prisoners today is far higher than the proportion of black SA political prisoners was then.
There are sufficient similarities between the two systems to justify an investigation into whether or not Israel commits the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
I have to conclude that he means an investigation conducted by the ICC Prosecutor, since there have already been several UN fact finding mission, treaty monitoring body, NGO, and victim state reports containing prima facie evidence of the crime of apartheid.
I came across this quotation today.
“It has always seemed to me unjustified for the world to unequivocally condemn the discriminatory practices of the settlers in South Africa, to unequivocally condemn the usurption of power by the settlers in Southern Rhodesia, and at the same time to be more lenient in respect of the crimes the Zionist settlers have committed and are still committing in Palestine, when the basic lines of all these regimes are identical to one another, when the thre regimes are but manifestations of the same colonialism, settler colonialism.”
George Jabbour, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, Khartoum and Beirut, 1970.
What is interesting is that the categorization of Israel as an apartheid state had already been made by a number of people in Africa and the Middle East over forth years ago. But, the connection between liberalism and Jews in 20th Century America was too strong to allow for such an association in the US. For them of course apartheid was wrong in Southern Africa for the same reasons that apartheid in Palestine was right. It all boiled down to identity politics. American Jews were almost all liberals therefore all Arabs were reactionaries who got what they deserved at the hands of the progressive and moral Israelis. The opposition to South African apartheid by these same liberals proved in their mind that there was no racism in Israel. Why other Americans allowed themselves to buy this narcistic version of reality is a mystery. But, certainly Africans, both Arab and Black saw the similarities. It is one of the reasons that most African states broke diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967.
Israeli propaganda still tries to tell the world, that the world is the one that is misaken. Israel ( and USA) are the only ones, who can recognise the difference between what is an apartheid ,and what is not.
The whole world is blind, and the are the one who can see.
The whole world is wrong, and they are the ones, who are right.
Apparentely, the whole world shares different values than Israel, but it is not Israel’s fault.
It is the damn world fault that they don’t want to buy Israeli propaganda anymore.