in this article I use repeatedly 3 initials:
WB - West Bank,
SA - South Africa
PA - Palestinian Authority.
Pro-Israel advocates always argue that accusing Israel of apartheid is false and antisemitic. A column by Amjad Iraqi, a writer and editor at +972 magazine, proves these accusations to be an understatement.
Amjad Iraqi titled his arguments under the headline,
“Palestinians are tired of proving Israeli apartheid exist.” This is a clear
acknowledgment of a failure; obviously. There could be many reasons for such a
failure. It could simply be not true. Israel is not an apartheid state. After
all, Amjad Iraqi himself is a Palestinian citizen of Israel. This means that he
can vote, speak, and work like all other Israeli citizens, Jews and non-Jews.
Like them, he can try and get elected to a public office, such as the Israeli
parliament, or the council of a major city. And there is nothing in the Israeli
legal system that prevents him, or any other non-Jewish citizen from becoming
the Prime Minister, or the President of Israel.
There are other possibilities. They could be doing it
wrong. Or maybe it’s a trust issue. It is possible that some people have a hard
time believing the intentions behind such accusations. They see the corruption
and internal divisions of Palestinian politics, and begin to suspect that
Israel is being scapegoated to cover up these failures. There are probably more
possibilities. But Amjad Iraqi does not need to explore any possibilities,
these or others. He already has an answer. It is the target audience that is
the problem. The world public opinion is the problem. Not the Palestinians, not
even Israel. The world itself is the problem. According to Amjad Iraqi, the
world does not understand what apartheid is. The world expects Israel to become
an apartheid state in a specific moment in time, while in fact it is a process.
That moments in time was supposed to be the annexation of parts of the WB on
July 1st 2020. As of the time of the writing of these words, this
hasn’t happened. Whether it will take place or not, I do not know. After the
declaration of open relationships between Israel and the UAE, doubt is the
dominate assessment. I do think that attempting to predict the outcome of such
a move is a fool’s game. And it does not matter who is doing the predictions.
As for
Amjad Iraqi, he tries to prove his thesis by outlining the main points in the
development of the Apartheid regime of South Africa. According to him,
apartheid, tyranny, and Zionism, are all processes. And he is right about that.
Apartheid in SA was a process, and tyrannies across the world and across
history are processes. And so are those that oppose them. Democracy and
anti-apartheid are also social and political processes. Industrialization is a
process. Environmentalism is a process. Education is a process. Fashion is a
process. The changes a spoken language goes through is also a process. Amjed
Iraqi had found a common denominator between apartheid SA and Zionism that is
so wide, it includes apartheid and anti-apartheid forces.
Another wide common denominator that he points to is
that both movements were founded by people that found home in a new land; “made
this new land their home,” he quotes from the history of SA. Putting aside the
fact that the land of Israel is not new, not for Jews, and not to western
civilization. The statement, “made this new land their home,” can be said on
every immigration movement. This includes the Indians of SA. They also suffered
under the apartheid regime. Not as much as black South Africans, but they too were
systematically, legally, and socially discriminated. And like the
discrimination of black South Africans, it has a history that goes back to earlier
years of Afrikaners politics and ideology in South Africa. This common
denominator, binds the apartheid regime not only with Zionism, but also with
the Mahatma Gandhi. After all, he lived
in SA for 21 years. Those years are known to contribute to the formation of his
world view and the nature of his political activism.
These wide common denominators are a good explanation
why the Palestinians have been failing to prove that Israeli apartheid exists.
These are bad arguments. They are truly horrendous. Lies are worse. And Amjad Iraqi does use lies.
As the old rational from terrorist organizations goes, the aim justifies the
means. He states: “Like South Africa, Israel’s complex regime was not created
by a single dramatic moment: it was meticulously designed over decades, fueled
by an ideology that rejected equality between the natives and the settlers…”. The
first lie is about SA. Equality was not simply rejected in Apartheid SA. It was
not some vague statement against equality, with a policy of jobs discrimination.
In Apartheid SA inequality was glorified and imposed rigidly, and brutally. In
all walks of life. That regime not only actively, and forcefully discriminated
against people in every aspect of life. It also went after their thoughts on
the matter. And punished them for those thoughts. Especially when they were not
white. No one in Israel is going after Amjad Iraqi’s thoughts. He diminishes
the horrors of that regime, in order to narrow down the differences between Israel
and the apartheid regime of SA. Thus, creating the illusion that the two are
similar. The aim justifies the means. He doesn’t say it, but he practices it.
Israel does not have a policy of rejecting equality
towards the Palestinian Arabs. To begin with Israel and the Zionist movement
never had a policy towards the local Arab population. Most of this “policy” was
reaction to murderess violence coming from the Palestinian side. Occasionally,
dotted with attempts of rapprochement. The most famous example, is the WeitzmanFeisal agreement of 1919. It was a mutually agreed framework to prevent the
conflict from taking place in the first place. And it was signed by the leaders
of both sides. But the Palestinian leadership chose not to enter into this
framework. They made that decision on May 4th 1920 in a classical
pogrom, known as the Nebi Musa riots. The first in a serious of pogroms that
got worse and worse. Another Zionists attempt in rapprochements was during the
1920’s. The Histadrut, tried to help Arab workers unionized. The Histadrut is
the biggest labor union in Israel. It is an umbrella for trade unions from many
fields. Before the creation of Israel, it was the de facto government of the Jewish
Zionist community in the land of Israel. They were also Socialists that
believed in the international mission of Socialism; unionizing and unifying
workers around the word. Therefore, they tried to help Arab workers unionized
and improve their working conditions. This
early rapprochement is a struck contrast to the history of apartheid SA. During
the first decades of the 20th century, trade unions of white
Europeans in SA, turned against sharing joint cause and equal pay with black trade
unions (see the 1919 mark on the timeline).
And the contrasts continue. When SA became separated
from the British Empire, it imposed the Apartheid system, where black Africans
had no political representation. When Israel became independent, it had Arab
parliamentarians in its first legislative assembly. And in each and every elected
legislative assembly since. This is why apartheid was more than just
inequality. It denied political representation from entire ethnicities,
especially the majority black population. In Israel all major minorities have
political representations. They include Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Jewish
ethnicities, and various branches of Judaism. Israel is, a one person, one vote
political system.
A luck of
political representation is another form of oppression. And another key
contrast between Zionist Israel and apartheid SA. Historically, and
continuously, Zionism and Israel acknowledged the equality of the Palestinian
Arabs. This was done on two levels, on the individual level, with equal rights
to all the citizens of Israel. And on the collective level, by accepting the
principle of the two states solution. A Palestinian nation state, alongside a
Jewish nation state.
Even the much maligned, Israel’s “National State Law”
does not denies it. It says that the state of Israel is the nation state of the
Jewish people. It does not forbid the establishment of another nation state on
the same land. This Basic (constitutional) law has its problems. But saying
that this law forbids national self-determination for Palestinians is false. Thewording of this law is very clear. “(b) The state of Israel is the nation state
of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious,
and historical right to self-determination. (c) The exercise of the right to
national self-determination in the state of Israel, is unique to the
Jewish people.” While Amjed Iraqi declare in a question, “what about the Jewish
Nation-State law, passed two years ago, which decrees that self-determination in
this land belongs solely to the Jews?” With the change of just one word,
land instead of state, he created a gross lie. And the article his “decree” links
to, is nothing but a failed attempt to make a duck look like a pig.
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