It has been two weeks since the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a bombshell report stating that Israel is an apartheid regime, from the river to the sea. As Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem put it, on January 12:
Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.
There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. This is apartheid.
These statements were a bombshell because an Israeli group led by Jews said this at last, one held in high regard by American liberals. We are used to Palestinians being ignored when they say as much, and Jimmy Carter too. And the former chancellor of Brown University. This time, even CNN reported on the report fairly, and the report has gotten a lot of attention, though the New York Times is silent.
Jewish Voice for Peace has been extremely forthright about the apartheid report, patiently laying out the law and the parallels to South African apartheid. And it has gone further by highlighting the writings of Dr. Lana Tatour, who insists the accurate apartheid analogy is not enough in and of itself, hammering home the argument that Israel is also in its entirety a settler colony.
At The Nation, Mitchell Plitnick says the report has political impact: the Biden administration will have to face the facts, Israel is an apartheid regime.
B’Tselem makes a strong case, one that will be a difficult for the Biden administration to ignore. The organization’s reputation, and its identity as an Israeli rights group, will make it more difficult for American leaders to dismiss the group’s characterization.
Nonetheless, it is likely that Biden’s first inclination will be to ignore this change. There will certainly be attacks on both B’Tselem’s position and the organization itself, both within Israel and in the United States. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the past publicly attacked B’Tselem, and his ambassador to the United Nations called B’Tselem’s Executive Director Hagai El Ad a “collaborator” in response to El Ad’s testimony before that body in 2018. Such attacks are sure to be harsher now, and they will likely be echoed by Israel’s supporters in the United States, supporters who are very much a bipartisan group.
Therein lies the problem: it appears that B’Tselem is being ignored by the liberal gatekeepers of official discussion. Liberal Zionists could be giving oxygen to the charge. They are obviously hoping it goes away. The silence of Liberal Zionists in the face of Apartheid is deafening.
The Jewish Forward newspaper has not even covered the report. (Just like the NYT; note that its editor is a former New York Times correspondent in Israel.)
Americans for Peace Now has at least mentioned the report:
If you care about Israel and Palestine, you need to read this. If you care about democracy, you need to read this. You may not like it. You may not agree with it. But you need to read what @HagaiElAd and @btselem have to say.
That materially is, at best, an equivocation.
Democratic Majority for Israel would prefer to talk about Martin Luther King’s support for Israel. And AIPAC (which has many adherents in the Democratic Party) has of course said nothing.
J Street, the avowed alternative to AIPAC– and strong supporter of the Iran deal– has similarly been mum on the B’Tselem report- even though in the past they have hosted B’Tselem, cited other B’Tselem reports, and in 2016 said Israel should “listen to B’Tselem” not marginalize it.
These Israel lobby groups are in a bind because in the wake of the report it’s all but impossible to call yourself both progressive and pro-Israel, as J Street and many other groups do. And, if you acknowledge that Israel is practicing apartheid, you are in essence endorsing BDS. Because apartheid is a crime against humanity, and as was the case with apartheid South Africa, one’s duty is to support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
No wonder that Democratic Majority for Israel is now working hard to try to change the discussion from “apartheid” to “antisemitism,” saying that BDS is antisemitic. And even J Street has said that BDS must be seen “in the context of rising antisemitism.”
Liberal Zionist organizations have settled on a policy of focusing on the “occupation,” as if the problem is only what Israel is doing on the east side of the Green Line. Peace Now in Israel slams the latest settlement expansion in the West Bank for eroding “the possibility of an I-P peace in the long-term” and for putting “Israel on a collision course with the incoming Biden administration.” Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now does the good work of publicizing settler attacks on Palestinians, but avoids the overall issue raised by the report: a government that has different rules for two groups based on ethnicity/religion is apartheid.
The day B’Tselem came out with its news, J Street put out its own report on the some Israelis working against the “absurdity and humiliation” of Palestinian life under occupation. It spotlighted Machsom Watch, one of “the amazing Israeli groups who share our vision and our values, and who work to build and preserve a liberal, democratic society underpinned by the principles of equality, freedom, justice and peace.” Not a word about “apartheid.”
On social media, J Street is organizing support for a return to the Iran deal, praising Biden for restoring aid to Palestinians, and keeping up the mantra of the two-state solution, which Tony Blinken says is “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic state and to give the Palestinians the state to which they’re entitled.”
Again, nothing about apartheid.
Caught in the middle here is the young Jewish group IfNotNow. IfNotNow is dedicated to ending US Jewish groups’ support for “the Israeli occupation” and it does a good job of calling out atrocities in the West Bank
To its credit, in the wake of the apartheid report, IfNotNow has been talking about apartheid. It has retweeted Hagai El-Ad’s commentary on apartheid. It retweeted Nathan Thrall explaining his important new piece in the London Review of Books. “It is apartheid,” Thrall says. “A 53-year-old occupation is not ‘temporary.’ The permanent occupation and the Israeli settlements are not somewhere ‘outside’ Israel. A state that denies basic civil rights to millions from one ethnic group is not a democracy. It’s apartheid.”
IfNotNow has used the word apartheid for the West Bank.
Unless we in the United States forcefully reject Israel’s illegal settlement expansion, Israel will continue de facto annexing Palestinian lands, cementing the apartheid status quo
The challenge to IfNotNow is, What are they going to do to “forcefully reject” the expansion of settlements? The left-wing discussion is out in front of the young Jewish group. As Ilhan Omar and Marc Lamont Hill demonstrate, Palestinians have an answer: BDS. IfNotNow is inching up to BDS by calling for the conditioning of aid to Israel and supporting Ilhan Omar in her defense of BDS against an attack by the Democratic Majority for Israel.
“We demand accountability for those flouting international law,” IfNotNow writes. And:
How can the new Biden administration stop runaway Israeli settlement expansion? Leverage the billions in annual US military aid to Israel.
That’s good but they can go further! For a Jewish tradition of social justice that was all but built through struggles for labor rights, it is an utter shande to see the near unanimous Jewish liberal/ left rejection of the Palestinian Picket Line that is BDS.
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Article From a Canadian friend written over 10 years ago:
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/03/08/MurrayDobbinIsrael/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=080310
ISRAEL’S APARTHEID The Tyee, March 8, 2010
“Blacks in South Africa never faced a 20-foot wall dividing their communities. Palestinians’ land is still being seized, their orchards bulldozed. By Murray Dobbin,
EXCERPT:
“For the first two weeks of March, Palestine’s supporters around the world focus public attention on Israel’s continued brutal occupation of the West Bank and its even more vicious siege of Gaza. They do so through Israeli Apartheid Week and this is the sixth year the public education campaign has taken place.
“One of the principal signs of its success has been the ferocious counter-campaign by supporters of Israel. Like so much of the history of Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, the facts about Israeli separation of Jews and Arabs — also known as apartheid — are beside the point. The response to criticism of Israel has always been one of self-righteous indignation and outrage, accompanied by charges of anti-Semitism.
“Yet there is absolutely no doubt that the system of separation of Arabs and Jews can be compared with the apartheid system in South Africa. Indeed, many experts on how the apartheid system was run claim that Israel’s system of hafrada, or separation, is far more brutal and deliberately humiliating than anything devised by the racist regimes of Pretoria.
“Even members of the Israeli political elite use the term apartheid to describe the system they administer — the latest being the current defence minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak who stated: ‘If there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.’
“Shulamit Aloni, who once served as Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin, wrote: ‘The state of Israel practises its own, quite violent form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.’ And in November of 2007, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: ‘If the day comes when the two state solution collapses, and we face a South African style struggle for equal voting rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’ (con’td)
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“Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general from 1993 to 1996, described Israel’s approach to the Palestinian territories captured in 1967 as apartheid in 2002:
“‘We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft & finding justification for all these activities… We developed two judicial systems: one — progressive, liberal in Israel. The other — cruel, injurious in the occupied territories…we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.’
Worse than South Africa?
“Those who compare Israel’s actions in the West Bank & Gaza to an apartheid regime often express shock at how much worse the Israeli system is. Nothing like Israel’s settlement structure in the West Bank ever existed in South Africa. The illegal settlements are all connected by a special set of paved highways. Shulamit Aloni: ‘Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night–all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated & he is sent on his way.’ Some four million Palestinians are governed not by civil law but by Israeli military law, which is enforced by soldiers… Palestinians face systematic & deliberate humiliation at hundreds of these road-blocks.
“At literally every turn, Palestinians are treated as people with no rights. Israel controls water in the West bank & while its citizens have swimming pools, Palestinians are on water quotas — prohibited even from digging wells. Ask blacks in South Africa if they were ever faced with a 20-foot concrete wall dividing their communities, their land & the roads connecting their villages. Palestinian land is still being seized for use by Israeli settlers, their orchards bulldozed.
“And what of Arab ‘citizens’ living in Israel? This “fact” of Arab citizenship is at the core of the myth of Israeli democracy, for even here a milder form of apartheid prevails. Arab citizens can vote but must carry ID cards saying they are ‘Arab.’ Most are obliged to live in exclusively Arab villages that are not allowed to expand; they cannot work for the Israeli government; their schools are starved for funds while Jewish schools are well endowed. Arab political parties cannot advocate for a change in the Zionist system of differential treatment …”
Soon the word “Apartheid” will be labelled anti-semitic, and used as a silencing tool, to shut down criticism, and the facts from coming out. As usual the MSM is noticeably mute, and I have yet to hear it being discussed by anyone in the media. I guess they have a long way to go to grow a spine.
A tree did fall in the forest, but the world pretends it did not hear that sound.
“That’s good but they (Biden administration) can go further!”
They sure can! How about cutting ties with Israel altogether – at least until Israel stops: using our tax dollars to brutalize Palestinians, and; stops lobbying our government behind the scenes in its relentless attempts to drag us into illegal, immoral and costly wars of choice in the Middle East (the Iraq War, most notably, with the Iran War pending)!
Sure, Israel shares intelligence with our country (though it also steals it from our country) related to so-called dangerous actors in the Middle East – at least that are dangerous to Israel’s efforts to secure hegemony in the region. But, whatever value there is in our ‘special relationship’ is much more than offset by the cost in blood and treasure it has meant to us and to people throughout the Middle East.
The really dangerous Zionists are not those who frontally oppose the boycott.
The most dangerous are those “liberal” Zionists and “not-a-Zionists” who pretend to collaborate with the BDS organization to limit all activity selectively to post-1967 conquest areas.