The Apartheid Canard

I wasn’t going to write about the latest Amnesty International report on the Middle East, the one that smears Israel yet again as an “apartheid” state, because it seemed so uninteresting to me: ho-hum, another Amnesty report veering into rank anti-Semitism, one that ignores the facts on the ground, that puts forward the same tired lies about Israeli society that even they themselves must know not to be true, that adheres to a kind of Marxist orthodoxy according to which living Jews are acceptable only as pre-dead ones, as creatures whose right to exist rests on their willingness to deny their right to exist. So what, I thought—another hate-filled screed to forget about as quickly as possible. But then I had second thoughts.

The definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is any effort to “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is [by its very nature] a racist endeavor.” The British government has formally accepted this definition. Amnesty International is headquartered in the U.K. Why do I not expect the Brits to undertake legal action against Amnesty for promoting anti-Semitism precisely according to the definition formally accepted by its own government? Maybe I’ll be surprised. But I don’t think so.

There’s something weirdly fantastical about the whole apartheid canard, actually. Derived from the word in Afrikaans for “separateness,” the term was used in South Africa to denote the large complex of laws intended to keep the races apart. Black and white children could not swim in the same pools or play in the same parks. Interracial marriage was forbidden. There were no mixed schools in which children of all cultures and races could have attended class together…presumably because that could possibly have led to children of different races learning to like and respect each other. The thorny problem of people with dark skin but Caucasian features, like people from India, was solved by the bureaucratic invention of a third race, one almost benignly called “colored” but intended actually to make sure that the “real” white people were allowed to live their lives out without contact with people who were deemed white only on a technicality. It was, by all accounts, a pernicious system intended specifically to guarantee that numbers wouldn’t ever matter, that the roughly 8% of the population descended from Dutch or British Europeans would not be voted out of power by some lethal combination of the 80% of the population formally characterized as Black and the 8.8% labelled, as noted above, “colored.” Do I have to add that Black people were not enfranchised and could not vote at all, let alone as the powerful voting bloc they would have naturally constituted?

The use of “apartheid” to smear Israel goes back a long way and not just to Jimmy Carter, a man I once respected (and, yes, voted for), who viciously promoted it in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. And now I get to my point: since there are no obvious signs of apartheid culture in Israel to which any unbiased observer can point (Arab Israelis are allowed to vote, to attend university, to mingle freely with Jewish Israelis at swimming pools and in shopping malls, etc.) and since there are no Bantustan states that Israeli Arabs are forced against their will to populate, where does this whole fantasy come from? That is a far more interesting question to me than the details of the Amnesty International report, all of which we’ve seen before and none of which reflects the reality I see on the ground in Israel.

As an example of just how crazy its authors are, they point to Gaza as an example of how Israel segregates Arabs and makes them live in their own enclaves. The fact that Israel took Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, attempted to rule over it as occupied territory (which is precisely what it was), and then formally withdrew to the pre-1967 line in 2005 seems unknown to the report’s authors. Nor do they seem to know that there is no Israeli military presence in Gaza and no civilian presence there either. There are, in fact, no Jewish residents in Gaza at all. Nor does the fact that the Arab residents of Gaza voted in a Hamas-led government devoted not to the welfare of its citizenry but to the pursuit of an endless war against Israel in which civilians are specifically targeted seem to be known to the authors of the Amnesty report. Or could it be that they know but just don’t care?

The situation on the West Bank is even less fairly represented. The Palestinians there, also living on Jordanian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, have elected government after government led by Fatah. They hardly require Israel’s permission to declare their independence: since more than 120 nations in the world have already recognized Palestine as a state, all they really need to do is to get to work building their nation and taking their place in the family of nations. That hasn’t happened, of course…but only because doing so would require coming to terms with the neighbors and living in some sort of peace with Israel. To describe Israel’s lack of interest in incorporated the West Bank into Israel as a kind of apartheid is to ignore the reality on the ground and, in fact, to cross the line into rank anti-Semitism.

Far more important to the future of Israel than having to deal with yet another hostile report by Amnesty International is the apparent willingness of a significant number of Arab and Muslim states to enter into peace agreements with Israel. Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrein, the UAE, and (sort of) Sudan lead the way. There’s constant chatter that the Saudis or the Omanis could be next. These people are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians but they seem more than aware that the Palestinians are their own worst enemies, and that if anyone is responsible for the West Bank and Gaza continuing to exist in political limbo it is the Palestinian leadership itself. This part of reality is, of course, anathema to the kind of people who support Amnesty. As also is, of course, the fact that Israel is a functioning democracy, that all citizens are enfranchised, and that the Arab citizens of Israel have far more freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly than do their co-religionists in any number of very populous Muslim nations.

What the Amnesty Report was really about was the right of self-determination. Contrary to popular opinion, the Jewish people didn’t learn any startling new truths from the Shoah. That the position of Jews in the nations of the world, including the most liberal ones, is at best precarious is an unpleasant fact known to all. (That Franklin Roosevelt was afraid that vigorously attempting to rescue the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe would make the war effort less, not more, popular is a fairly good illustration of just how true that point is.) In fact, the notion that Jewish people have a natural right to live freely in a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland—a right awarded without a moment’s hesitation by the world to the Finns of Finland, the Japanese of Japan, and the Estonians of Estonia)—that notion is what the Amnesty Report is all about: at its core lies the notion that Jews lack the basic right to live in peace in their own space and according to their own lights, a right awarded without a moment’s thought to the citizens of any other nation (including those founded by European imperialists who simply seized other people’s property and invented countries for themselves in those places).

We are not without friends. The Biden administration formally rejected the report as biased and false. The British government formally rejected the report and specifically the use of the term “apartheid” to characterize Israeli policy towards its Arab citizens. The German government responded similarly, as did any number of other nations. Not at all surprisingly, I have not been able to find any formal response from the United Nations.

In the end, Dara Horn was right in her recent book, People Love Dead Jews. The world can’t get enough of the Shoah. But dealing with a dynamic, vigorous Jewish state populated by living people who do not seem to require the approval of others before doing what it takes to make their own children safe and to safeguard the future of their own country—that is something those very same people find intensely irritating. To wave the Amnesty report away as obnoxious and false is simple enough. Addressing the underlying prejudice that motivated its composition, on the other hand, is an entirely different challenge.