But will there be consequences for Israeli apartheid?
JVL Introduction
Tony Karon wonders why it has taken Human Rights Watch so long to recognise that Israel is an apartheid state.
It’s not just that the A-word has used by senior public figures like Jimmy Carter, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and John Kerry – but in the future tense as a warning about where Israel might be heading.
More interestingly, it was already invoked, reluctantly, in the 1970s in Karon’s left-wing Zionist movement in South Africa, where parallels were already being drawn.
“The factors that make it an apartheid state have been a half century’s status quo” – these are now obvious:
- Both South Africa and Israel were democracies, but also states that denies the democratic rights of citizenship to millions of people they ruled.
- Both societies, in fact, were products of settler colonialism.
- Both systems were created by the systematic, violent dispossession and subordination of the indigenous population.
The fig leaf that has concealed the apartheid reality for so long – the rigid separation between a good green-line Israel and a rogue occupier – is finally being stripped away…
To translate that recognition into a reality with bite will involve the same mass mobilisation of civil society as it took to break Western societies’ support for apartheid South Africa in the seventies and eighties.
It is already underway.
This article was originally published by Rootless Cosmopolitan on Wed 28 Apr 2021. Read the original here.
But will there be consequences for Israeli apartheid?
Designating Israel an apartheid state draws attention to the illusions of a ‘peace process’ used to rationalize the international community’s coddling of Israel’s systemic oppression of Palestinians
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We MUST all end Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, if they want to stay where they are then Palestinians must have there share of their land and be able to live their lives free from Israeli oppression and its disgusting apartheid system.
SOLIDARITY
The Israeli lobbying machine is so powerful that it has blinded the Western World which needs to wake up and work towards the eradication of the apartheid system so prevalent in Israel. Currently, criticism of Israel’s policies is labelled as anti-Semitism.
Keir Starmer said he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Now that both human rights organisations B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have joined the UN Commission for West Asia the ESCWA in a report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley condemning Israel for the crime of Apartheid, does that not make Starmer a supporter of Apartheid?
I do agree with most of this article, but it’s extremely unhelpful to the Palestinians and their allies to describe either white South Africa or Israel as democracies.
We all need to say loud and clear that Israel is NOT a democracy and to point out the support the Israeli government had for apartheid at a time when the rest of the world was waking up to the realities of the SA regime. This should be a major part of any campaign to explain to the apolitical and the ignorant exactly what is going on in Israel/Palestine.
Very few people would now feel comfortable about praising the originators of apartheid, so it’s common sense for us to show how clear the similarities are – and why.
The Israeli treatment of Palestinians may indeed be lamentable , but in my not uninformed opinion to equate it with Apartheid is a convenient and lazy comparison .Like beauty Apartheid is in the eye of the beholder. All members of JVL will believe that Israel is a clone of pre Mandela South Africa whilst the Zionist lobby with think the opposite.
The truth is perhaps in the middle.
The continued existence of the state of Israel depends on a system of apartheid and the denial of the right of palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. When more people can see this, it will be easier to challenge this rogue state and the Zionist ideology which underpins it. The establishment and the Israeli Lobby understand this. This is why they have to dismiss accusations of apartheid made against Israel even though they know them to be true. For them, the defence of Israel trumps any concerns about the injustice of the system of apartheid imposed on the Palestinians. Clearly they will never admit to this. Instead they will hide behind a meaningless “peace process” to achieve an illusory two state solution. We need to be absolutely clear. There is nothing remotely democratic about the Israeli settler colonial regime! We owe it to the Palestinians to build an international solidarity campaign to support their struggle against it.
I have a question for DJ .When Ben Gurion declared the establishment of Israel in 1948 five Arab countries attacked it.As we all know this led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. At the same time ,hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were forced to flee from Arab countries where they had lived happily for centuries ..(This fact is totally ignored by many members of JVL. Indeed some of my own family members escaped from Egypt in 1956 .)So in other words there was a virtual exchange of populations as happened in in the Indian subcontinent a year before that.That seemed to be ok.
So why shouldn’t the Jewish refugees also be entitled to some sort of compensation ?