{"id":2121,"date":"2006-02-16T14:39:38","date_gmt":"2006-02-16T21:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2121"},"modified":"2006-02-16T14:39:38","modified_gmt":"2006-02-16T21:39:38","slug":"the-comparison-between-israel-adn-apartheid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2121","title":{"rendered":"The Comparison Between Israel and Apartheid"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting two-part<\/a> article <\/a>in The Guardian<\/em> asking if modern-day Israel can be legitimately compared to South African Apartheid (curtsy: Behind the Surface<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I’m torn about this approach. Let me say, flat-out, that Israel’s policies – taken as a whole – cannot fairly be said to be the equivalent of Apartheid. (For anyone wondering where I stand on other very basic issues – does Israel have a right to exist, etc? – I completely endorse everything stated in this post at It’s All Connected<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The Guardian <\/em>series doesn’t conclude that Israel is an Apartheid state; on balance, I think the article makes a convincing case that Israel has racist policies but, despite some similarities, falls short of Apartheid-level discrimination. Here’s a couple of more-or-less representative paragraphs from near the end of the second article:<\/p>\n

Hirsh Goodman emigrated to Israel three decades ago after his national service in the South African army. His son moved to South Africa after completing his conscription in the Israeli military. “The army sent him to the occupied territories and he said he would never forgive this country for what it made him do,” says Goodman, a security analyst at Tel Aviv university. He says Israel has a lot to answer for but to call it apartheid goes too far. “If Israel retains the [occupied] territories it ceases to be a democracy, and in that sense it is apartheid because it differentiates between two classes of people and separates and creates two sets of laws which is what apartheid did. It creates two standards of education, health, of dispensing funds. But you can’t call Israel an apartheid state when 76% of the people want an agreement with the Palestinians. Yes, there’s discrimination against the Arabs, the Ethiopians and others, but it’s not a racist society. There’s colonialism, but there’s not apartheid. I feel very strongly about apartheid. I hate the term being abused.”<\/p>\n

Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli lawyer who is fighting Jerusalem’s residency and planning laws, says that he used to reject the apartheid parallel out of hand but finds it harder to do so nowadays. “My gut reaction: ‘Oh, no! Our side? My goodness, no!’ I think there’s a good deal to be said for that reaction to the extent that apartheid was rooted in a racial ideology which clearly fed social realities, fed the political system, fed the system of economic subjugation. As a Jew, to concede the predominance of a racial world view of subjugating Palestinians is difficult to accept,” he says. “But, unfortunately, the fact of the absence of a racial ideology is not sufficient because the realities that have emerged in some ways are clearly reminiscent of some of the important trappings of an apartheid regime.”<\/p><\/div>\n

So what is accomplished by making the comparison? Well, I suppose that more people will read it because of its controversial subject (witness this blog post). This might be useful, since the article includes information about discrimination in Israel that is not well-known – at least, not here in the States. (Admittedly, things may be different in Britain, where the story was published).<\/p>\n

“Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against Palestinians in Jerusalem,” says Scott Bollens, a University of California professor of urban planning who has studied divided cities across the globe, including Belfast, Berlin, Nicosia and Mostar. “In South Africa there was ‘group areas’ legislation, and then there was land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools. They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it’s fundamental to their project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known that since day one. They’ve been very explicit in linking the planning tools with their political project.”<\/p>\n

At the heart of Israel’s strategy is the policy adopted three decades ago of “maintaining the demographic balance” in Jerusalem. In 1972, the number of Jews in the west of the city outnumbered the Arabs in the east by nearly three to one. The government decreed that that equation should not be allowed to change, at least not in favour of the Arabs.<\/p>\n

“The mantra of the past 37 years has been ‘maintaining the demographic balance’, which doesn’t mean forcing Palestinians to leave,” says Daniel Seidemann, a Jewish Israeli lawyer who has spent years fighting legal cases on behalf of Jerusalem’s Arab residents. “It means curtailing their ability to develop by limiting construction to the already developed areas, by largely preventing development in new areas and by taking 35% [of Palestinian-owned land in greater East Jerusalem] and having a massive government incentive for [Jews] to build up that area.”<\/p><\/div>\n

The down side is that no one’s talking about these aspects of the article. Instead, by framing the article as a question about Apartheid, Israel’s defenders are given license to defend Israel by correctly pointing out that things in Israel are not the same as they were in Apartheid South Africa.<\/p>\n

That is of course true – but there’s a lot that falls short of Apartheid that is nonetheless terribly wrong. The moral lesson of South Africa should not be “anything that isn’t as bad as Apartheid is okay.” But somehow, that is where discussions of Israel tend to go.<\/p>\n

I’m also distressed by the Apartheid angle because Apartheid is one of our iconic images of “evil perpetuated by a state.” Using such an iconic, stark image of evil to describe the Israel\/Palestine conflict has the effect of covering up the extent to which some Palestinians – those that commit or support terrorism – are morally co-responsible for creating the current, appalling situation.<\/p>\n

In the States, extremely nasty political rhetoric (“objectively pro-terrorist,” wingnut, etc) co-exists with a crushing political timidity, in which only a tiny range of political opinions are considered acceptable. To seriously criticize Israel – or, for that matter, the U.S. – for the brutality of the occupation, and for the recent use of the security wall (which is a good idea) as an excuse for a land grab, is well outside of the tiny range of acceptable “mainstream” views in the USA. In that context, it may seem strange to object to fundamentally unfair attacks on Israel, such as equating Israeli policy with Apartheid. Since we’re going to be treated as intellectual pariahs no matter what we say, why not use extreme arguments and rhetoric?<\/p>\n

But we can’t know for certain that our arguments are irrelevant – indeed, at some level we must believe that political criticism has a hope of making a difference, or why else would we bother? But if we’re going to act as if we believe that our views and statements might contribute, in some way, towards changing the world, then probably it makes sense to try and express our views in a manner that is honest and responsible. Just in case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting two-part article in The Guardian asking if modern-day Israel can be legitimately compared to South African Apartheid (curtsy: Behind the Surface). I’m torn about this approach. Let me say, flat-out, that Israel’s policies – taken as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}