Anti-Israel groups and individuals in about 14 countries are currently caught up in what they crossly call “Israel Apartheid Week.”
According to these outraged organizers, their purpose is “to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system.”
They hope to increase sanctions and boycotts against Israel, to economically and politically force the Jewish state to convert into a one-man-one-vote democracy.
Like they did with South Africa.
Luminaries who promote the idea that Israel perpetrates the same sins South Africa once did are former US President Jimmy Carter and Liberation Theology ‘Christian’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Together with United Nations investigators and human rights groups have all rallied around this ‘sexy’ lie: Israel is an apartheid state.
Really? Is there any justification for this? Any at all?
What was apartheid?
In 1948, the year Israel declared independence, South Africa’s white government began enacting laws to enforce the segregation of different races.
Known as the “Apartheid Laws,” they would apply to people who, until that time, had all been South African citizens; they would solidify the power and dominance of the whites.
Like carefully placed bricks in a wall, the legislation established an enduring edifice of institutionalized racial discrimination. It would persist for 46 years and wreck tens of millions of lives with massive injustice and suffering. The minority whites, for our part, directly benefitted from the system, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Dismantled in the early 1990s, largely due to intensified international pressure, its painful legacy wracks that nation until today – a woe for which there is no anticipated cure.
I am a South African who was born into – and lived through nearly half of – the apartheid era. During my childhood and teenage years my family relocated repeatedly, living in every corner of that country. I changed schools 13 times and in three years as a member of the South African Defense Forces I was stationed in five different military bases across the land. I know South Africa well. I know apartheid well.
And believe me, no factual or accurate comparisons can be drawn between that South Africa and this Israel.
None whatsoever.
Let me tell you what Israel would have to do to qualify as an apartheid state. But first, a couple of clarifications:
The charge is that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian Arabs is similar to White South Africa’s treatment of South African black citizens (which included full-blood ‘Africans,’ mixed-race ‘coloreds’ and the descendants of immigrant Asian laborers).
The whole argument collapses right there, because the Palestinian Arabs have never been Israeli citizens. Nor did/do they have any national history as ‘Palestinians’ – neither in Israel nor anywhere else. They are Arabs – their country of origin is Arabia.
For starters, then, it is fallacious to compare Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian Arabs in any area to the apartheid governments’ relationships with their black South African citizens.
Let us then turn to the Israel’s Arab citizens. Most are also Palestinian Arabs, but unlike the majority of their people – who remain stateless – they were willing to take citizenship and be integrated into the country of Israel.
(To clarify: Before the rebirth of Israel, the area known as Palestine was home to Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Palestinian Jews became Israeli Jews on May 14, 1948 – Israel’s independence. Those Palestinian Arabs who fled the land and would subsequently live outside of Israel are what are today called simple ‘Palestinians.’ Those Palestinian Arabs that stayed inside what became Israel and agreed to become Israeli citizens are known as Israeli Arabs.)
Israeli Arabs comprise a little over 1.7 million of Israel’s eight million citizens – a little less than 20 percent of the population. They are, therefore, a minority.
They largely live in 15 towns and cities, mostly in and around the Galilee. They have full voting rights. Five Arab political parties are represented in the Knesset, and there are 14 Arab members of Knesset: one has attained to a ministerial portfolio, one is a former and another is a current deputy Knesset Speaker. An Israeli Arab judge sits on the bench of the Supreme Court – the highest court in the land.
Israeli Arabs live with complete freedoms in their country. They can live study and work where they choose. They have national health coverage and enjoy the same benefits as their fellow Jewish citizens.
What they do not have to do is serve in the IDF (although some Druze and some Bedouin choose to do so and have served with distinction, some laying down their lives.)
The majority of Israel’s Arabs identify their nationality as ‘Palestinian.’ Many, including some of the parliamentarians, openly support the PLO goal to destroy Jewish Israel and replace it with a Muslim Palestine.
Looking through a list of the above-mentioned “Apartheid Laws,” we see how it could be for Israel’s Arabs were the Jewish state an apartheid state:
* Arabs would be required to be classified and registered in accordance with a racial classification (Population Registration Act).
* Arabs would be forced by law to live in Arabs-only residential areas and work in Arabs-only business areas (Group Areas Act).
* Arabs would have their names systematically removed from the voters’ roll until they were all deprived of their voting rights (Separate Representation of Voters Act).
* By law, Arabs would be deported from wherever they lived in Israel and forcefully settled in designated Arabs-only areas (Bantu Authorities Act).
* Arabs would be evicted and have their homes destroyed if they tried to remain in Jews-only areas (Prevention of Illegal Squatters Act).
* Arabs-only areas would be transformed into fully-fledged independent Arab homelands (Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act).
* A denaturalization law would change the status of the inhabitants of the Arabstans (Arab homelands) stripping them of their Israeli citizenship and all its privileges and benefits (Black Homeland Citizenship Act).
* Most developed urban areas in Israel (all the established and economically thriving cities and towns) would be deemed ‘Jewish,’ and Arabs wanting to be in those areas would have to live in ‘compounds’ and carry permits called ‘passes on them at all times (Native Laws Amendment Act).
* The Arab population would be required to carry these pass books with them whenever outside their compounds or designated areas. Any Jew, even a child, could ask an Arab to produce his or her pass. Failure to produce a pass would result in the person being arrested (Pass Laws).
* Once Arabs-only areas are modernized and developed, Arabs would be moved out and the area declared a Jews-only area (Group Areas Development Act).
* Arabs would be deprived of the right to appeal to courts of law by means of an interdict or any legal process (Natives (Prohibition of Interdicts) Act).
* Arabs would be restricted to studying in Arabs-only institutions. None of Israel’s schools or universities would be allowed to enrol Arab students (Bantu Education Act). The ruling political party in Israel would declare that it viewed education as a key element in its plan to create a completely segregated society. Emulating the words of South Africa’s ‘father of apartheid’ Hendrik Verwoerd, an Israeli prime minister would declare: “There is no place for the Arab in the Israeli community above the level of certain forms of labor … What is the use of teaching the Arab child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.”
* Arabs would be allowed training in skilled labor, but would be restricted as to where they were allowed to work (Bantu Building Workers Act).
* Public places and services like beaches, playing parks, national parks, buses and trains, restaurants and hotels, theaters and cinemas etc would be segregated, with Jews getting the best and most well-equipped places and Arabs banned from entering or using those facilities (Reservation of Separate Amenities Act).
* Arabs could be labeled ‘communists’ – a criminal offense – for doing anything that promoted disorder and disturbances or encouraged feelings of hostility between Arabs and Jews (Suppression of Communism Act).
* Any Arab suspected of involvement in terrorism—broadly defined as anything that might “endanger the maintenance of law and order”—could be detained for a 60-day period (which could be renewed) without trial and on the authority of a senior Jewish police officer. There would be no requirement to release information on who was being held, making it possible for people so detained to simply ‘disappear’ (Terrorism Act).
* Jews and Arabs would be prohibited by law from intermarriage (Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act).
* It would be illegal for an Arab man to even show romantic interest in a Jewish woman; or for a Jewish boy to indicate an interest in an Arab girl (Immorality Amendment Act).
* Also, to qualify as citizens of a state like the South African apartheid state, Israel’s Arabs would have to comprise the vast majority of the population and would be kept under the cruel and exploitative thumb of a minority Jewish population.
South Africa’s blacks were mostly Christian and animist. Very, very few were Muslim. Except for a radical fringe group, they never called for the Whites to be driven into the sea. Israel’s Arabs are 99 percent Muslim and their avowed goal is to turn Israel into an Islamic country called Palestine.
They won’t succeed, thank the Lord, but if they did, we can be sure there would be no “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” here, just Shari’a show trials and public executions.
I could go on and on about just how miserable daily life would be for Arabs if Israel was run by an apartheid regime. The truth is that these Arabs enjoy an incalculably higher standard of living than any of their fellow Arabs in the states around Israel.
To suggest that Arabs in Israel live lives in any way comparable to the miserable existence endured by black South Africans is to do a terrible injustice both to Israel and to apartheid’s victims.
Apartheid week – a fiction enthusiastically embraced by those ignorant of history and died-in-the-wool Hebraphobes.
They do not merit attention, just scorn and perhaps pity.
Perhaps.