'Most Israelis do not believe it is right to control the Palestinians'
Reactions from other experts and from readers
Wednesday February 8, 2006
The Guardian
Is it racist to worry about a Jewish majority?
· Tova Herzl, Jerusalem
Oprah Winfrey and I are fiftyish dieting women. Therefore I expect the Guardian to declare that we are identical. Never mind our differing citizenship, race, occupation and, alas, bank account. Ignore details that spoil the required picture, and start writing, editing, embellishing.
Take the security fence/wall/barrier. Chris McGreal describes difficulties encountered by Palestinians, but omits that the murder of hundreds of Israelis drove its construction. Israeli actions (no, we are not perfect) do not occur in a vacuum. Yet almost no information on the conflict or the region is provided. Thus, security concerns are relegated to "Israel spent the first decades of its existence fighting for its life". Shall we now shrug away Hamas ideology? Iranian threats? Others?
There is an ongoing national conflict involving territory and requiring mutual compromise. To seek simplistic comparisons to an evil regime while ignoring intrinsic differences between the situations and their causes is unhelpful and intellectually dishonest. Describing one party to the conflict as racist (hence immoral and wrong) absolves the other of any responsibility. Ah, if not for these Jews/Israelis, everything would be just fine ...
Lest you think I overreact, note the derogatory references to Israel's "demographic threat". Yes, we worry about a Jewish majority. We want and need our country (as the Palestinians should have theirs). Is that racism? Perhaps "racist" better describes those who would deny us - only us - that right?
· Tova Herzl, a career diplomat, is a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa. She was born in Israel and educated both there and in South Africa under apartheid. This conflict is about Israel's - not the Arabs' - survival
·Professor Benny Morris, Li-On, Israel
Chris McGreal appears to have dropped in from outer space, not spent the past four years in Israel/Palestine. Otherwise, there is no explaining how he doesn't know that the Jews and Arabs have been fighting for the past 120 years, or that the past five years have witnessed particularly vicious bloodletting, with Palestinian suicide bombers devastating Israel's buses and coffee shops, and Israel retaliating - with praiseworthy discrimination, incidentally - against the killers and their dispatchers.
This conflict is the context within which any fair person would view the discrimination, restrictions on movement and occasional injustices suffered by the Palestinians in the semi-occupied territories and in Israel proper. For example, the construction of the barrier - in very small part, actually a "wall" - running more or less along the West Bank-Israel border, a structure McGreal so laments and which inevitably will cause some Palestinians discomfort, was a direct response to these suicide bombers (who don't really exist in McGreal's universe). If this barrier will also prevent Palestinians from crossing the line to work in Israel, so be it - they have only themselves to blame.
Ultimately, this conflict is about Israel's - not the Arabs' or even the Palestinian Arabs' - survival.
Israel's one-million strong Arab minority has, over the past years, consistently and vociferusly rejected all proposals that they, along with their lands and houses, be placed under Palestinian Authority rule. They overwhelmingly prefer Israeli democracy and cultural norms (and standards of living) to anything their Palestinian brothers or the Arab world have to offer. Curious, isn't it?
· Benny Morris is professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a prominent member of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged their country to confront its role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. He was jailed for refusing to do military service in the West Bank. The situation in the West Bank doesn't occur in a vacuum
· Dr Shimshon Zelnicker, Jerusalem
Because I reject this analogy, when I'm asked about it, I am taken to be unsympathetic to Palestinians. Of course I know occupation is a disaster for them. The issue here is whether the comparison is intended to depict a reality one wants to alter peacefully, or part of an arsenal of slanderous weapons used maliciously by people who largely have bigoted themselves. Most people who use this analogy mean apartheid as a generic term for any type of discrimination or partially colonial power relationship. But occupation is not even a classical colonial situation like you see in Africa. It may get there, but still it wouldn't be apartheid. British colonialism in west and east Africa, for example, didn't lead to apartheid.
The situation in the West Bank doesn't occur in a vacuum. It must be seen as part of a systematic campaign of violence against Israeli civilians. You cannot talk about a policy, even if it is pernicious (and the occupation is a disaster) while denying the social and political context in which this policy is being exercised. Whites in South Africa regarded black people as inferior and systematically disenfranchised them. However misguided, evil or violent the occupation is, we must remember that the bulk of Israeli society does not believe that governing, controlling and permanently dominating the Palestinians is the feasible or moral thing to do.
One of the things we did during apartheid was bring black activists to Israel to see a society different from their own. So many of them came with the view that Israel was an apartheid state. After the trip, though, they universally rejected that analogy, some even publishing on the matter. That tells you something.
· Shimshon Zelnicker, who brought hundreds of South African anti-apartheid activists on visits to Israel during the apartheid era, is head of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a progressive thinktank that conducts projects with Palestinian counterparts. Israeli apartheid is akin to South African apartheid
· Dr Uri Davis, Sakhnin (a mainly Arab city in northern Israel)
Israeli apartheid is closely akin to South African apartheid - one enforcing segregation and discrimination in law between "Jews" and "non-Jews", one between "Whites" and "non-Whites". At the height of South African apartheid, 87% of the land was reserved in law for the settlement, cultivation and development by "Whites" only, whereas in Israel to date, 93% of the land is reserved in law for settlement, cultivation and development by "Jews" only.
In that respect, the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli apartheid is a conflict between a settler-colonial state and the indigenous people of the country of Palestine, the Palestinian Arab people. Unlike apartheid South Africa, however, there is no petty apartheid in Israel.
The Israeli parliament strategically set up an apartheid state right from its founding decade: beginning with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, then the Law of Return, the Absentees Property Law and the Development Authority Law and through the Covenant Between the Government of Israel and the Jewish National Fund of 1961. This was well before the 1967 war and the subsequent illegal Israeli occupation and annexation of additional territories, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights - all in blatant violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
Let us hope that a worldwide boycott of Israeli institutions, joined by UN sanctions against the government of the state of Israel, can be as effective in getting Israel to nullify the apartheid laws as such boycotts were in getting South Africa to give up its apartheid.
· Born in Jerusalem, Uri Davis is founder and chairman of the Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine. A Jewish citizen of Israel, he has written Apartheid Israel and Crossing the Border: an autobiography of an anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew. Palestinians must have the same rights as Israelis
· Richard Burden, Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield and Chair of the Britain-Palestine All-Party Parliamentary Group,House of Commons, London,
Arab neighbourhoods in the Jerusalem municipality are being systematically severed from the city and there is even a reluctance to acknowledge the numbers of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem itself. I was an international observer at the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections. Although there were estimated to be around 125,000 Palestinians eligible to vote in urban East Jerusalem, Israel insisted that only around 6,000 would be allowed to cast their votes there. The remainder had to travel outside, through checkpoints, and usually beyond the new separation wall, if they wanted to vote.
The lucky 6,000 were required to cast their votes over the public counters of post offices rather than in polling stations. The fiction was that they were sending postal votes. It was as if they were absentee voters in their own city. For them, voting was not a democratic right but a privilege that had to be agreed by the Israeli authorities.
Under international law, half of Jerusalem is Israeli. The other half is occupied territory. Israelis rightly insist that their democratic rights are non-negotiable. A lasting peace requires that Palestinian Arabs have the same rights. Israel must end the crippling occupation
· Dr Gary Sussman, Tel Aviv
I grew up on a farm in rural and conservative South Africa. The whites in the nearby village [Vryburg] and its surrounds were very racist. Farmers beat their labourers. Blacks could not enter a white persons' house through the front door. When I was in Habonim [a socialist-Zionist youth movement], I always passionately felt there was a strong difference between South Africa and Israel. Hence, the comparison makes me feel very queasy.
I think the analogy is too harsh. The very coarse racism of my childhood in Vryburg is my understanding of apartheid. I have yet to see that in Israel. That said, the depth and detail of the article was a real wake-up call.
Though a lot of people will write Chris McGreal off without reading into his article, Israelis need to look beyond the uncomfortable parts of the comparison. He is merely the messenger. Many of the subjects he interviewed are Zionists. McGreal holds up a mirror to Israeli society. He says this is what you look like to me, to many in the international community and to the Palestinians. The challenge is to make Israel a better place and address the real problems that he raises. Israel not only needs to end the crippling occupation but nurture a more inclusive society. I remain optimistic that we can defy this analogy and save ourselves from becoming another South Africa.
There is one thing that makes me less optimistic. Israelis have fallen in love with unilateral disengagement, not as a means to an end but an end in itself. When I hear the high priests of unilateralism speak, I am troubled by their smugness, their supreme confidence that the Palestinians will behave in whatever way we Israelis want them to. It's a chilling reminder of the white South African constitutional engineers and leaders who spoke about imposing solutions, drawing lines and maps and engineering the country, all in the naive hope that it would ever work. This mindset is the single greatest threat to Israel.
· Dr Sussman is the Director of Research and Programme Development at the Hartog School of Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University. · It is no coincidence that some of the strongest opponents of South African apartheid, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have themselves drawn links between between South African apartheid and the current Israeli policies towards the Palestinian people. Nelson Mandela himself has shown strong support for the rights of the Palestinians.
Dr Stephen Leah, York
· I am writing as an Israeli Jew to commend you for publishing the reports on Israel and apartheid - carefully researched. Precise and a much-needed analysis about the life of millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, almost 40 years after it started, and with no end in sight. The fact that Jews and Israelis are among the reporter's many interviewees, only enhances its credibility and enormous value. Unfortunately, not many Jews in Israel, and even fewer abroad, are prepared to face the illegality, immorality and ignomy of the continued occupation.
Prof Haim Bresheeth, chair of cultural and media studies, director of research, University of East London.
· In South Africa, apartheid was enshrined in its constitution and supported by its legal system. But in Israel, all citizens have equal rights, regardless of their gender, religion or ethnic origin. This is clearly spelled out in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Of course nobody can deny that there is discrimination in Israel against its Arab citizens. Knowing Israel's history, this unfortunate fact is easily understandable. Many in Israel strive to abolish that discrimination and progress is being made. But such discrimination is found in many countries. From England (ask the Muslim Council of Britain) to France, and from Italy and Belgium to the Scandinavian countries. But McGreal would never find any parallels between those countries and apartheid South Africa. By using the highly charged term "apartheid" with all its negative connotations, McGreal shows his very strong anti-Israeli bias. In the last several years the outrageous comparison of Israel with the South African apartheid regime is being used by those who constantly clamour for a universal boycott of Israel, both cultural and economic. Their true aim is not the abolishment of discrimination in Israel but the abolishment of the Jewish state itself.
Dr Jacob Amir, Jerusalem
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1704784,00.html
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