Denying Israeli Apartheid is Absurd

Is Israel an apartheid state? Renowned human rights experts say it most certainly is. But ask Zionists, who often bring a pronounced bias to this subject, and they’re likely to tell you it isn’t – and perhaps even get pissed at you for asking.

So, let’s take a clear-eyed look at what apartheid is, what it looks like, what top experts say about the Israeli version, and why many defenders of a “Jewish State” with exclusive rights for Jews remain in a peculiar state of denial.

Apartheid, defined.

Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines apartheid as “inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

Though not identical to South African apartheid, Israeli oppression undoubtedly meets the ICC definition. Who says so? I’m glad you asked.

What experts say.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter personally negotiated the Camp David Accords and won the Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. After leaving the White House at age 56, President Carter had the lengthiest – and, arguably, most impressive – post-presidential career ever. This included conflict resolution work via The Carter Center, construction of affordable housing through Habitat for Humanity, and decades as a Sunday school teacher at the Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

The deeply religious ex-President, who promised American voters, in the aftermath of the Watergate era, “I’ll never lie to you,” wasn’t one to avoid difficult subjects. In fact, Jimmy Carter wrote a book on Israeli apartheid called, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” knowing full well he’d enrage Zionists. When asked by NPR why “apartheid” was the best word to use in the title, President Carter said, “This is a word that's a very accurate description of the forced separation within the West Bank of Israelis from Palestinians and the total domination and oppression of Palestinians by the dominant Israeli military.” 

Following the 1976 killing of more than 175 Black students by police in apartheid South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu got behind an economic boycott of his nation. About two years later, as General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Tutu became a spokesperson for the rights of Black South Africans. After the fall of apartheid in 1990, Nelson Mandela selected this longtime proponent of nonviolent resistance to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Like Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu received a Nobel Peace Prize. Few individuals could speak about apartheid with greater knowledge, authority, and moral clarity than the Anglican cleric. Listen to what this South African anti-apartheid icon – who briefly lived in East Jerusalem – said about Israeli apartheid, and his hopes for the future.

When we lived in the Boston suburbs, I was part of a small group that heard Noam Chomsky – the MIT linguistics professor voted the world’s top public intellectual – speak about Palestine-Israel in Cambridge. Dr. Chomsky said he didn’t think the term “apartheid” fit Israel very well … because Israeli oppression was much worse than what took place in apartheid South Africa.

Professor Chomsky told us a crucial difference between the two situations was the fact that South Africa’s white minority needed the Black majority to maintain their economic engine, but Israelis feel they have no need for Palestinians. The professor told Days of Palestine, “The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.”

Widely respected human rights groups have also characterized Israel as an apartheid state. Amnesty International said, “Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory), and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.”

Download Amnesty International’s 280-page report, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.”

Human Rights Watch added, “Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Download Human Rights Watch’s 218-page report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.”

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group (repeat: Israeli human rights group), summed up the situation in a detailed piece called, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

Where does the UN stand on this? Michael Lynk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, said, “There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

Lynk added, “There are more than three million Palestinians living under an oppressive rule of institutional discrimination and without a path to a genuine Palestinian state that the world has long promised is their right. Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as an ‘open-air prison,’ without adequate access to power, water or health, with a collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel to the rest of Palestine or the outside world.”

In his report to the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur wrote, “Apartheid is not, sadly, a phenomenon confined to the history books on southern Africa.” 

Why we’re outraged.

In the West Bank today, apartheid Israel forcibly confines Palestinians behind prison walls with guard towers and checkpoints for the “crime” of not being Jewish. This fact hits home with me. In the 1940s, my family members in Poland were forcibly confined by Nazis in the Lodz Ghetto for the “crime” of being Jewish. It’s offensive to see Zionists exploiting the suffering of my family and using the Holocaust as a pretext for the ghettoization of a people based on religion and ethnicity.

According to UNICEF, Palestinian children placed in Israeli detention – often for throwing stones at the notoriously brutal Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) – are subjected to practices that “amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture.”

Among other forms of child abuse used by Israelis are night raids. This form of terrorism – where hordes of heavily-armed IOF members invade Palestinian homes in the middle of the night – is traumatic to young victims in particular. When Palestinians have taken to the streets to protest Israeli oppression, some have become permanently disabled after being shot in the eyes or knees by the IOF.

Have these catastrophic injuries resulted from accidental shootings? An IOF sniper stationed along the Gaza Strip told Haaretz, the Israeli publication, “I know exactly how many knees I’ve hit.” And in a deleted 2018 tweet regarding the shooting of unarmed Palestinian protesters, the IOF (which goes by the “IDF” or “Israel Defense Forces”) said on Twitter, “… we know where every bullet landed.”

Breaking the Silence, an organization consisting of IOF veterans, has documented a large number of atrocities committed by apartheid Israel against Palestinians in Occupied Territories.

Palestinian adults in Occupied Territories are degraded, subjugated, and beaten by the IOF – right in front of their own kids. They’ve been held as political prisoners without being charged or tried … for years.

In the West Bank, Palestinians suffer the indignity of not being permitted to drive on certain roads used by Israeli Jews. As a form of collective punishment, they’ve had their bodies and homes sprayed by Israeli authorities with a putrid liquid that reportedly smells even worse than raw sewage. The disgusting concoction – created by Odortec, an Israeli firm – is known as “skunk water.”

On a related note, apartheid Israel causes water scarcity by rerouting it from Palestinians in Occupied Territories and ensuring water abundance for Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian land just meters away. Amit Gilutz of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, stated that according to the Joint Water Committee (JWC) created by the Oslo II Accord, “80% of water extracted from joint Israeli-Palestinian sources was allotted for Israeli use, while the remaining 20% went to Palestinians.

Palestinian victims of Israeli oppression also face an extreme form of housing insecurity – again, due strictly to religion and ethnicity. Many Palestinians have had their homes demolished by apartheid Israel to build communities for Jews only. A common means of justifying this crime: the lack of permits Palestinians are rarely able to obtain from Israel’s apartheid government.

Israeli authorities have even forced Palestinians to demolish their own homes or pay a hefty fee for the demolition. Imagine having your house reduced to rubble simply because you’re a member of the “wrong” religion in the eyes of people behaving like a master race – and then being forced to write your oppressor a large check for committing the atrocity.

In apartheid Israel, cruelty seems to be the point.  

Under this apartheid system, Israelis and Palestinians residing in the same area experience two very different legal systems. Illegal Israeli settlers live in the West Bank under Israeli law, but Palestinians from families that called that land home for centuries are forced to live under a brutal form of martial law. As I pointed out in my introductory post, Jews from Brooklyn with no traceable connection to the region benefit from the Israeli “Law of Return.” But Palestinians from refugee families are denied the right of return guaranteed under international law.

Many Palestinians have only known refugee camps throughout their entire lives. Nearly one-third of registered Palestine refugees – more than 1.5 million individuals – live in 58 recognized Palestine refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Inside apartheid Israel’s walls – including Bethlehem, considered the birthplace of Jesus – Palestinians face a lifetime of harsh restrictions that include humiliating checkpoints. And unlike voters in real democracies, victims of Israeli oppression have no remedy available at the ballot box. The 55-year-old Palestinian in Occupied Hebron has never been allowed to vote for Israeli officials who control his destiny. This is true of more than 50% of the population under apartheid Israel’s control. That’s right – over half the people controlled by the “Jewish State” are denied the right to vote.

While overseeing an apartheid system, Israel audaciously claims to be a “democracy” with equal rights for all its citizens. This, like so many other Zionist claims, is false. Adalah, “the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel,” maintains an online database of more than 65 Israeli laws that “discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel and/or Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) on the basis of their national belonging.” And remember, the Jewish “majority” in the “Jewish State” is artificial and a result of discriminatory practices – including apartheid.

A review of this crime against humanity wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the Occupied Territory long known as “the world’s largest open-air prison”: Gaza (yes, because apartheid Israel controls Gaza’s land, sea, and air, under international law, it’s still Occupied Territory).

One of the world’s most densely populated areas, with more than 5,000 inhabitants per square mile and approximately two million confined residents in total, Gaza has repeatedly been the scene of gruesome aerial attacks referred to by Israeli officials as “mowing the lawn” – including the sadistic 51-day bombardment of overwhelmingly unarmed civilians in 2014 that left around 550 Palestinian children dead.

After decades of enduring the presence of illegal Israeli settlers and the IOF, in 2005, those two components of Israeli settler-colonialism were no longer visible on the ground in Gaza. Following the election of Hamas by voters in 2006, apartheid Israel, with an assist from the Egyptian dictatorship, launched a suffocating blockade of Gaza. As a quick exercise to make this act relatable, imagine if, after the election of Donald Trump – who was (and is) widely considered a threat to the global order – nations that didn’t like the result closed off America’s entrances and exits.

More than two-thirds of Gaza’s inhabitants are from Palestinian refugee families. Some have experience with Israeli oppression dating all the way back to 1948 and the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Victims of this supremacist system have endured the trauma of Israeli oppression for as long as 75 years. Over the last 15 years, they’ve been forced to experience a hell on earth that warrants, in the view of many, trials at The Hague for those responsible.

A UN report predicted that Gaza would become unlivable by 2020 if the blockade wasn’t lifted. Over the years, human rights groups – including the Free Gaza movement, co-founded by my friend Greta Berlin – have desperately tried to partially fill the void. They safely arrived in Gaza five times before being attacked by apartheid Israel. In 2010, during an attempt to break the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, 10 activists in the Freedom Flotilla were killed and more than 60 were injured by Israeli forces. Every vessel was damaged, including some that sustained severe damage.

Fishing, which was the “backbone of Gaza’s workforce,” according to globalEDGE, has been decimated by this ongoing atrocity. Since the blockade began, the number of fishermen in Gaza has been reduced by more than half. The shortfall of fish to feed Gaza’s population was recently estimated at 12,000 tons. 

Gisha, the Israeli legal center for freedom of movement, said unemployment in Gaza reached 47% in the first quarter of 2022. To put this statistic in perspective, in 1933, U.S. unemployment reached 25%. Gaza’s unemployment is nearly twice as high as peak U.S. unemployment during the Great Depression.

They added these dire details: “According to the World Bank’s estimation, 59% of Gaza residents, half of whom are children, are living in poverty, and 64% suffer from food insecurity.” The organization said the electricity supply in Gaza is “now standing at less than 20% of actual demand,” according to The Jerusalem Post, which added that inhabitants only have electricity four hours per day.

The Bonyan organization said of drinking water in Gaza, “It is not suitable for drinking because of its salinity, the pollution of seawater with sewage water, the increase in the salinity of groundwater wells, and the scarcity of water that is not commensurate with the population density.” Only around 10% of Gaza’s inhabitants have direct access to clean water, and 97% of it is undrinkable.

Gideon Levy, who received Israel’s top journalism award, the Sokolow Prize, called Gaza a “concentration camp.”

A state of denial.

How do Zionists respond to the mountain of evidence indicating that Israel is indeed an apartheid state? Many engage in victim-blaming and say, in various ways, that long-suffering Palestinians deserve their plight. But the most common response may be denial – often at an odd level that appears to result from cognitive dissonance. 

The response from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the widespread use of the “A”-word by Israeli apartheid opponents is as strange as it is sad. Let’s look at what the ADL said on a website page called, “Allegation: Israel is an Apartheid State”:

ADL: “… the use of this inaccurate and highly charged label is … counterproductive to resolving issues related to injustices within Israeli society or the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” 

The label is entirely accurate. See the ICC definition near the top of this post. Why is it counterproductive to call this what it is? How is it productive to deny an ugly reality, which is precisely what the ADL is doing? Israeli journalist Gideon Levy put it very well when he said, “It is not complicated … it is about real estate.”

ADL: “Apartheid usually refers to the guiding policy of racial segregation in pre-1990s South Africa. Apartheid was a racist, repressive system, by which South Africa’s white minority enforced its domination, through a systematic framework of racist legislation, over black and other non-white racial groups …”

Have you seen Israel’s nation-state law? Talk about a systemic framework of racist legislation. I Googled “Israeli apartheid” as a phrase and received 496,000 results. Then, I Googled “South African apartheid” and saw less than half that quantity (240,000). So, “apartheid” doesn’t usually refer to the racist system that existed in South Africa decades ago. It usually refers to the racist system that presently exists in Israel.

Do you want “apartheid” to only apply to that dismantled system in South Africa? That would be like saying “concentration camp” should forever apply only to Nazi atrocities that occurred last century. Why wouldn’t you want “apartheid” to be used wherever it fits – now and 100 years from now?

ADL: “While there is no doubt that Israel, like every country, has tremendous societal challenges and must do better in dealing with issues of institutionalized bias, discrimination, inequity and racism, choosing to apply the apartheid label would seem to question the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state and its continued existence.”

“Every country” doesn’t oversee an apartheid system. Apartheid shouldn’t exist. Supporting its continuation is simply racist. What’s more, a “Jewish state” that privileges Jews and treats the non-Jewish “other” worse than animals shouldn’t exist in that form. It should be transformed into a truly democratic state that provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of religion and ethnicity – including human beings currently confined under a brutal lifetime occupation for the “crime” of not being Jewish.

ADL: “Within Israel, there are safeguards aimed at ensuring the equal treatment of all citizens, Jewish or Arab, and Israeli laws and democratic institutions, including the independent courts and robust free press, assigned to uphold and speak out for these rights.”  

Shireen Abu Akleh, the celebrated Al Jazeera journalist, was shot dead by the IOF while reporting on their raid in Occupied Jenin and wearing a vest clearly marked with “PRESS” in large letters. Since 2000, at least 45 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Information. Please don’t tell us apartheid Israel believes in a free press.

And Israel is a democracy for compliant Jews only. Rabbi Alissa Wise was barred from boarding a flight to Israel over her support of BDS. As for non-Jews in Occupied Territories, they live under martial law and are routinely denied basic human rights.

Those “independent courts” have, again and again, enabled the demolition of Palestinian homes and the theft of Palestinian land. They’ve shown themselves to be biased defenders of Israel’s supremacist system.

It’s an obvious mistake to praise the “democratic institutions” of an apartheid state. On the “equal treatment of all citizens” claim, once again, see the Adalah website.

Zionists like to point to Israel’s Arab citizens as proof that it isn’t an apartheid state. They omit the fact that Israel is overseeing an apartheid system in endlessly Occupied Territories.

A suggestion from this ex-Zionist: Next time you hear a Zionist deny Israeli apartheid by referring to the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens, tell them it’s wrong to pretend the millions of Palestinians struggling under Israeli apartheid in Occupied Territories don’t exist. 

ADL: “Israeli policies in the West Bank and related to the Gaza Strip, are still subject to dispute and negotiation by both Israelis and Palestinians. They are complicated, and, due to the lack of final agreement, there are indeed policies and restrictions – including limitations on movement and access to certain resources that can impose tremendous hardships on Palestinians. From an Israeli perspective, such policies are justified by security considerations, given the past and ongoing threats posed by Palestinian terrorist organizations targeting Israeli civilians, even within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. While Israel’s policies and practices can certainly be criticized, it is not factually accurate to say they are akin to a permanent and institutionalized system motivated and designed by racism.” 

The International Court of Justice and nations across the globe recognize the West Bank as Occupied Territory. This is now the longest-running military occupation in modern history. Just because apartheid Israel claims certain areas are “disputed” and “not occupied” doesn’t make it true.

Many of the earliest acts of terrorism in the Mideast were committed by Zionists. They ran a terror campaign during the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 (see: Deir Yassin, et al.) and even earlier (see: King David Hotel bombing). The IOF has continually engaged in terrorism against the Palestinian people since the Occupation began (see: Breaking the Silence). The IOF has, to a significant degree, operated as a terror enterprise. For the life of me, I don’t understand why more Israeli parents don’t refuse to let their kids become terribly damaged souls by entering the IOF.

It's been said that all ghettoized populations inevitably rise up against their oppressors. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a prominent example. When one considers the length and scale of Israeli violence – including terrorism – it’s remarkable that only a small percentage of distraught Palestinians have resorted to violence in response to constant Israeli violence over decades. If anyone has legitimate security concerns due to a long history of terrorism, it’s the Palestinian people.

After the endless list of crimes apartheid Israel has committed against the Palestinian people for decades, it’s shameful to see the ADL using “security considerations” to justify what amounts to collective punishment. Claiming the occupier needs protection from the occupied insults our intelligence.

ADL: “One must also ask what purpose is served by the accusation of apartheid.”  

Again, under international law – specifically, the Rome Statute of the ICC – apartheid is a crime against humanity. Thembisa Fakude, a, senior research fellow at Afraisd, who was born and raised in Soweto, South Africa, said, “Neither Soweto nor any other ‘Black’ township was ever bombed from land, air, and sea as Gaza has been.” Indeed, the Israeli version of apartheid is considered even worse than South African apartheid. How on earth is it beneficial for the ADL to deny the obvious?

Sunlight has often been called the best disinfectant. Sweeping a crime against humanity under the rug is immoral. That was true during South African apartheid, and it’s true in the Israeli apartheid era.

By defending this ongoing atrocity, the ADL only contributes to its continuation. This organization is also violating its mission, “To stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

Nothing is just or fair about Israeli apartheid. And as the ADL knows from its own data, Israeli oppression has been a major contributor to anti-Semitic acts. It makes Jews less safe.

Other groups apparently don’t want to embarrass themselves trying to explain why they object to use of the “A”-word in apartheid Israel’s case. When the Amnesty International report on Israeli apartheid was released, J Street – a group that seems devoted to making it OK for “liberal Zionists” to support endless Israeli oppression – simply said, “J Street does not endorse the findings or the recommendations of the report, nor do we use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the situation on the ground.” That was like saying, “We’re not denying Israeli apartheid; we’re just saying we won’t call it ‘apartheid.’”

As a Jewish adult raised in an extremely pro-Zionist community, I understand the root causes of the cognitive dissonance we’re seeing on display here. From the time many of us were small children, we were taught that Israel was a moral response to the most immoral regime in modern history. It’s painful and even heartbreaking for people who identify as members of my faith to come to grips with what legally constitutes a crime against humanity.

Many Jewish Zionists born during the Baby Boom who opposed the Vietnam War as young people and came out against South African apartheid a decade or two later are unwilling to accept the fact that they’re now enabling another version of apartheid: one run by Jewish Zionists. They see themselves as decent human beings who’d never support something as immoral as apartheid. So, when asked about Israeli apartheid, they respond in absurd ways. They even make the preposterous claim that two giants of human rights – President Carter and Archbishop Tutu – are Jew-haters. And very often, they deny Israeli apartheid when confronted with irrefutable facts.

In my next post, I’ll detail what I consider the best hope for ending Israeli apartheid.

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