On July 4 we published an essay by Robert Herbst on the importance of the apartheid discussion, titled, “Israeli Apartheid: The power of the frame, the shame of the name,” that included a paragraph on Tony Klug’s views expressed during a webinar for the Palestine-Israel Journal in June. Klug did not feel that his views were adequately conveyed and offered us the full version of his remarks that we publish below out of fairness. –Editor.
I want to begin by observing that many years ago, three Israeli prime minsters, among other friends of Israel, warned that if the Jewish state continues to rule the West Bank much longer, it will end up presiding over a regime of apartheid. Well, here we are these many years later.
It may be useful to break down the question into three areas: the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem/Israel within the green line (what I shall call Israel proper)/ and, thirdly, the whole space. Then I shall pose the question of whether the apartheid designation – which the Amnesty report [of February 2022] applies to all three areas — may help or hinder a resolution of the conflict, without which none of the other matters will truly be resolved.
The accusation of apartheid in the West Bank need not delay us for long, for it is apartheid by design: the totally foreseeable outcome of a policy to encourage Jewish settlers to inhabit the West Bank while retaining full Israeli citizenship, a stone’s throw from the occupied Palestinians in the same territory, who have none of the rights that citizenship bestows, and are subject to a military occupation.
This system has inevitably given rise to a pattern of entrenched human rights violations. Demands to make Israeli rule less onerous – to shrink the conflict or reduce the apartheid – totally miss the point. The problem is foreign rule over a people which seeks to govern itself, even if that foreign rule aspired to be exceptionally benign.
In principle, even after 55 years, Israel could plead that its rule in the West Bank is a temporary occupation that will end imminently and that meanwhile it has been observing the Geneva-Convention prohibition against changing the legal and political status of an occupied territory and its population. If this is not Israel’s case against apartheid in the West Bank, which it isn’t, then it doesn’t have a case.
The matter is more complex in the territory of Israel proper. On the one hand, there is legal and social discrimination and, in some instances, an entrenched pattern of abuses. On the other hand, while falling short of the full package of rights and privileges enjoyed by Jewish Israeli citizens, Palestinian citizens carry Israeli passports, have freedom of movement and expression, and the right to vote and stand for election. They serve as members of the Israeli parliament and government, and as diplomats, professors, doctors, senior judges and so on, all in non-segregated institutions.
Their reality is not comparable to Palestinians under occupation, let alone to Blacks under South African apartheid. These observations are made not to paint a rosy picture, as Palestinian citizens of Israel do suffer discrimination, most acutely experienced by the Bedouin in southern Israel, but rather to unveil the fuller picture, which is missing from the Amnesty report.
The critical question is: does the discrimination within Israel proper amount, on the whole, to the grave sin of apartheid, especially when compared with other countries? It’s not just a matter of ticking boxes. It’s also a matter of where to position the bar, analogous to when maltreatment becomes torture. In my article in the journal, there is a brief survey of the egregious discrimination suffered by minorities in other Middle East states — not comprehensive, but enough to suggest that if the bar is lowered to include Israel proper, most other countries in the region, and many beyond, would almost certainly be guilty of the crime of apartheid, too. And if apartheid is everywhere, it’s nowhere.
Since the crime of apartheid is considered exceptionally serious, there is an onus on a prestigious worldwide human rights body such as Amnesty International to establish the threshold. But Amnesty has bypassed due diligence in this case and plunged straight into the toxic pit of apartheid in picking out one country for intensive scrutiny from a clutch of regional contenders and historical foes.
As for the third part of the analysis – is there apartheid in the whole space of the West Bank and Israel taken together? — the answer is bound to be the same as for the first part: one space, two peoples, two different and grossly unequal systems. Again, it speaks for itself, without the need for extensive case studies.
The best way to combat violations of human rights in the Israel-Palestine cauldron is to bring the wretched conflict to a swift, tolerable end. I struggle to see how the Amnesty report – in throwing its full weight behind one discourse — is helpful to that goal, even if that discourse is essentially valid in its own terms. For it is inevitably slanted, which is fair enough for parties in dispute, but not for international institutions with a hard-earned reputation for political impartiality.
The charge that Israel proper, alone and from the beginning, is intrinsically an apartheid state — and that that is the essence and substance of the problem — plays into the simplistic notion that the Arab-Israel conflict, from its inception, is an elemental struggle between good and evil. Whilst the Israel-vilifying current exclaims: “Eradicate Zionist Israel and dismantle its settler-colonial apartheid and all conflict will disappear”, the Palestinian-demonizing current, in like fashion, cries: “Once the Arabs stop their Jew-hatred and give up terrorism, all the problems will be solved”. Of course, it’s a lot more complex than that.
Even for the West Bank, there is a caveat. The Amnesty report calls for an end to apartheid, but absurdly does not call for an end to occupation. Yet the paramount need now is for a worldwide campaign to end the occupation, not to alleviate its ugliest effects while keeping the occupation intact. Only when the two peoples have political parity and can breathe freely, will they be obliged to reflect inwardly and confront their internal inequities.
Tony Klug also fails to mention the fact that Israel doesn’t even accept it is in occupation of the West Bank. After all god gave them it!
I have sent the following message to Tony Klug:
Tony,
You believed your views on Apartheid and the Amnesty Report were unfairly portrayed. Your article in Mondoweiss today makes it clear that there was no misrepresentation.
The problem, as I said in a comment underneath the article and below, is that you refuse to recognise the kind of state that Israel is and therefore end up making excuses for it.
The Arab states are of course very repressive and discriminatory but there is no system of apartheid with all the machinery of laws, regulations etc. that accompany it.
Clearly you don’t understand either settler colonialism or indeed apartheid and your view can only lend comfort to those who preside over the far-Right racist state that Israel has become.
In a few weeks we shall see the election, in their own right, of the Jewish neo-Nazis of Otzma Yehudit, who are currently tipped to win as many if not more seats than the Zionist ‘left’.
Perhaps that will give you some food for thought?
regards
Tony Greenstein
This is still an atrocious article, whether abbreviated or not. Tony Klug simply does not get it because he operates in a liberal Zionist paradigm.
Nowhere in his article does he mention settler colonialism and the desire to exclude Palestinians from the ‘Land of Israel’ i.e. Palestine. Settler colonialism operates both within 1948 Israel as it does in post-67 Greater Israel.
How is the destruction of Umm al Hiran to replace it with the Jewish only town of Hiran different from the eviction and destruction of Masafa Yatter? They are both motivated by the colonial desire to ethnically cleanse the land of its indigenous population. The same applies to East Jerusalem where a similar programme is in operation.
Palestinians in Israel do not suffer just from ‘violations of human rights in the Israel-Palestine cauldron’. Black and Muslim people in Britain experience racism and violations of human rights but there are no laws which specifically discriminate against them because they are not White Britons. Israeli Palestinians do experience such laws. Lots of them.
The Admissions Committee Law 2011 for example allows segregated Jewish communities to continue to bar Arabs from living in them. Planning is designed to hem in Arab communities. This goes far beyond simply a breach of human rights.
What Tony Klug cannot and will not face up to is that the very concept of a Jewish state is racist and in a colonial context inevitably gives rise to apartheid.
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EXCERPT:
“How Israel Teaches Its Children to Hate” (https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/palestine/3357-israel-teaches-its-children-to-hate.html)
“Much like white South Africans, Jewish Israelis will never voluntarily give up their privileged position as settlers.” American Herald Tribune, July 30/2019 by Asa Winstanley
“Dissident Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s important academic study, ‘Palestine in Israeli School Books’ is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand some important realities about the Israeli state & Israeli society.
“As a settler-colonial entity, real change can never come from within Israeli society. It must be imposed from the outside. Much like white South Africans, Jewish Israelis will never voluntarily give up their privileged position as settlers.
“South African apartheid was defeated by the masses of South Africa (with the support of some white dissidents), & their political leaders, in alliance with a global solidarity campaign.
“In the same way, Israeli apartheid will be defeated by the Palestinian struggle. This struggle is supported by a minority of Israeli dissidents, & by the international solidarity movement – especially the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“Peled-Elhanan’s book was a major study of 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography & civic studies. As you can see from what she says in the interview above, she came to some stark conclusions.
“When they even mention Palestinians at all, Israel’s official schoolbooks teach a ‘racist discourse,’ which quite literally wipes Palestine off the map. Maps in the schoolbooks only ever show ‘the Land of Israel,’ from the river to the sea.
“She explained that not a single one of the schoolbooks included ‘any positive cultural or social aspect of Palestinian life-world: neither literature nor poetry, neither history nor agriculture, neither art nor architecture, neither customs nor traditions are ever mentioned.’
“Of the rare times that Palestinians are mentioned, it is in an overwhelmingly negative & stereotypical fashion: ‘all [the books] represent [Palestinians] in racist icons or demeaning classificatory images such as terrorists, refugees primitive farmers — the three ‘problems’ they constitute for Israel.'”
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“She concluded that the children’s schoolbooks ‘present Israeli-Jewish culture as superior to the Arab-Palestinian one, Israeli-Jewish concepts of progress as superior to the Palestinian-Arab way of life & Israeli-Jewish behaviour as aligning with universal values.’
“All this is quite the opposite of the stereotypical & misleading story about children’s schoolbooks in Palestine. The books printed by the Palestinian Authority since the 1990s are frequently portrayed in anti-Palestinian demonology as putting forth the worst anti-Semitic calumnies about Jewish people. Overall, this narrative is a crude fabrication instigated by anti-Palestinian propaganda groups, such as that run by Israeli settler Itamar Marcus and his “Palestinian Media Watch”.
“Peled-Elhanan’s book comprehensively demolished a second, complementary, Israeli myth: that Israelis – by way of contrast to the dastardly Palestinians – instead ‘teach love thy neighbour,’ to quote Israel’s war criminal ex-foreign minister Tzipi Livni.
“Seven years ago, when Peled-Elhanan’s book was published, she warned that, in contrast to liberal hopes for change from within Israeli society, things were moving ‘backwards & backwards’ & that the then-current textbooks were little more than ‘military manifests.’
“’We have three generations of students who don’t even know where the borders,’ between the West Bank & the rest of historic Palestine are, she despaired in the interview above, filmed back in 2011.
“Seven years on from the book’s publication, things have only got progressively worse.
“As Israel’s violent oppression of an entire indigenous people becomes more & more blatant for the world to see, so public opinion is increasingly shifting against Israel – even among the previously supportive voter & activist base of the Democratic Party in the US…”
One of the most horrific articles I’ve ever seen here. I’ll grant the author wrote it in good faith. ===
“Israel could plead that its rule in the West Bank is a temporary occupation that will end imminently and that meanwhile it has been observing the Geneva-Convention prohibition against changing the legal and political status of an occupied territory and its population.”
Yeah it could plead that the Martians have slowed them from doing the right thing. This is just so ludicrous. How many govs, PM’s, ministerial people need to say no state. Not on my watch. Maybe a statelet. Maybe force them out.
They can argue temporary but not sincerely.
Not changed the legal and political status? Again not sincerely. If they hadn’t changed the legal status they didn’t need to pass laws to do it. But they did. Completely changed the status. That’s even with ignoring making Palestinians 2nd class citizens on their own land.
Atrocious article. Regardless of whether this gets through or not i will post more. The mere volume of … in this article is obscene.