Today’s Times performs the great service of describing the separate road system that Israel has built for Arab and Jew in the West Bank. Bless the editors, a stark 4-column photo at the top of page 1 shows us the divided highway system with its concrete barrier between carriageways. There are of course different exits for Israelis that the Palestinians can’t use; and the Times quotes an Israeli lawyer who sees the roads as creating "an ominous map of the future" in which settlements will proliferate around Jerusalem creating a Jewish "cordon" between the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Palestinians in the West Bank. So much for a viable Palestinian state.
A year ago a South African I met in Hebron told me that conditions in the West Bank were worse than under apartheid. "In Johannesburg we had access to all the roads; they do not have that
here," he said. "There were times we couldn’t use the roads but those
were exceptional occasions. We did not have these checkpoints…"
No, apartheid Israeli-style is not utterly racial; Israel proper has Arab citizens, who will be able to use these bypass roads. But the West Bank infrastructure is in practice almost entirely racial, and call it segregation or apartheid, or a response to suicide bombing, it is an effort to separate "each tribe," as the Times’ Steven Erlanger thankfully states at the top of the article.
I relate as an American, and think of the damage done to American Jewish youth: Young Jews are recruited by Jewish leadership in a campaign to justify this system of oppression half a world away. AIPAC gives out copies of The Case for Israel (by Alan Dershowitz) at Hillels on college campuses, stating that the book should "bolster the confidence and effectiveness of pro-Israel student activists engaged in efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship" (so reads the AIPAC sticker in my copy of the book). I.e., they are to use the book to argue with the left. So young Jews are being scripted to say that this apartness is right and necessary. When any normal person looking at the Times recoils in outrage.
This seems to me one of the great unspoken prices of the Israel lobby and alongside it, the official construction of Jewish identity: the effect on the young Jewish mind. Back in the 60s, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld celebrated the "revolutionary" spirit of young Jews who went to the South to try and break up desegregation. They took their power. They did not listen to the southerners’ rationalizations of that system, they were moved by a moral horror, and they acted. Today young Jews are being told not to respond innocently and prophetically to an outrage, but to study it and accept it; and then to argue that black is white.
The Jewish brain is one of the great gifts of civilization. Freed, it can do amazing things. And look what it has been reduced to.
