The Apartheid Libel
Published in Detroit Jewish News, Feb 10, 2022
It was so absurd, I thought it might have been a prank. When Amnesty International released a report singling out Israel as an apartheid state on Rosh Chodesh Adar — the head of the month celebrating Purim — I had to check if I was reading The Onion or some other satirical news outlet.
Tragically, the untruthful report was real. Not surprisingly, the irony was lost on Amnesty International that their report targeting the Jewish State had been released just as the Jewish community was turning its attention to our holiday marking the singling out of the Jewish community for defamation and persecution.
The charge that Israel is the South Africa of the 21st century, and is somehow an apartheid state, has been one of the most effective arguments from the anti-Israel camp. This report from Amnesty International may be the most blatant and dishonest example yet, but it did not appear in a vacuum. From the former head of the Black Lives Matter movement to the Labour Party in England to countless college student unions, a frightful number of mainstream groups have amplified this lie.
Alarmingly, even our rabbinic seminaries are jumping on the bandwagon, with a recent letter signed by nearly a hundred students claiming that support for Israel was “enabling apartheid.” Many younger Americans have now heard this ugly distortion so many times that they take it as truth. A clear and vocal response is needed from any supporter of Israel who comes across the charge that Israel is an apartheid regime.
Counterarguments Against the ‘Apartheid’ Libel
First, the obvious: Apartheid was a government policy of segregation and discrimination against the nonwhite majority in South Africa. Israel’s approximately 1.9 million non-Jewish Arab citizens have every civil right that Israel’s Jewish citizens enjoy. Non-Jewish Arab Israelis serve in parliament, work in every profession, can own a home anywhere in Israel, vote in every election, and even have an Islamist party in the current ruling coalition. So, the comparison to apartheid South Africa is a lie on its face and to its core.
To highlight the fatuousness of the charge, the majority of Israeli Jews are, in fact, people of color. Only 44% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi. Many of us take issue with the stripping of Jews of our minority status in America and painting us as part of a system of white privilege. But extending that thinking to Israel — not even a white majority country — moves from the questionable to the surreal.
Some will ask: But what about the nearly 2 million Arabs living in the Gaza Strip as well as the just over 2 million in the other disputed areas? When Israeli Jews in West Bank villages, who are essentially governed by Israeli law and can vote in Israel’s elections, are living next to Palestinian towns that have no access to Israeli courts and no voting rights, isn’t that a form of apartheid?
Certainly not. Although that is the key argument voiced on campuses and think tanks, no country is obligated to extend citizenship to residents of a disputed territory — and undoubtedly not in the case where the local population has been militarily hostile.
Gaza is no longer under any kind of Israeli jurisdiction. It is free to hold its own elections and has zero Jewish residents since Israel itself withdrew in 2005. The West Bank has its own elected authority as well, who are free to hold future elections if their constituents truly insist. Furthermore, Israel is far from alone in maintaining an ambiguous arrangement around a disputed territory. The world is full of populations and regions kept in irregular statuses that raise no objection from those crying foul in the case of Palestinian territories.
Examples to Consider
Take, for instance, our own country. Our many undocumented residents are a hot-button issue, but I have yet to hear anyone label America an apartheid state. An estimated 10 million undocumented immigrants, mainly people of color, live and work in our land with no voting rights, limited access to government services and a precarious legal status. That is more than the entire population of Israel living in our country under decades of discrimination. Yet anti-Israel actors across the country will call for an end to “apartheid Israel” while eating food picked and processed by, living in homes built by or vacationing at a destination staffed by fellow residents of our country who live under a different legal system.
For an example of a country maintaining sovereignty over land without formal inclusion, we also need not look outside our own American borders. Puerto Rico, for instance, is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. It lacks the status of either a sovereign country or a state. Puerto Ricans cannot vote for the U.S. president or elect senators or representatives to congress. Yet they pay taxes and are a territory belonging to the United States. If we are willing to turn a blind eye to more than 3 million peaceful and loyal Americans who have lacked voting rights since America captured Puerto Rico in 1898, it seems farcical for us to libel the Jewish state for how it is managing its own territorial issues with a Palestinian population that has been continually hostile since the founding of Israel.
What makes this ugly charge even more Orwellian is that the Middle East does in fact have an apartheid problem — just not the manufactured one Amnesty International is falsely promoting. Many Arab states across the region had robust Jewish populations dating back centuries or even millennia. After Israel was established in 1948, Arab countries pushed their Jewish communities out through a combination of expulsions, antisemitic decrees and riots. Prior to 1948, about 800,000 Jews lived in Arab lands. Those communities have vanished, with a mere 3,000 remaining in Morocco and Tunisia combined, fewer than 100 in Israel’s neighbors Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, and others such as Libya and Jordan with not a single Jewish resident. Lest we frame this as simply an historical policy, the Palestinian Authority today also insists that any land created as an official state have no Jewish residents.
As progressive Jews, this assumption that Palestinian territory should be cleared of any Jewish population should alarm us. In any other contested area, a bedrock principle of our approach to human rights is that people born in a region should not be displaced. Somehow, however, when it comes to the disputed areas Israel controls, Jewish children born in a town to parents and even grandparents who have lived there for over half a century are not deemed residents who have a stake in whatever compromise is reached. If we in the liberal community are critical of bad actors in the settler community, we ought to find equal fault in the repressive notion that a Palestinian state has the right to evict generations of residents born in their very own towns and villages based on their religion.
That ongoing push to continue clearing land of Jews, however, is the very definition of apartheid, and even beyond, of ethnic cleansing. For the Arab world, who completely displaced their 800,000 strong Jewish community and still insist they have the right to remove all Jewish residents from any future state, to level the charge of apartheid at Israel, home to nearly 2 million non-Jewish Arabs, is beyond hypocritical.
There is a straight line running from our inability to immediately identify a radical gunman holding Jewish worshippers hostage as antisemitic, to turning a blind eye to physical attacks on Orthodox Jews, to dismissing decades of Arab wars and terrorism against the Jewish State, to actually labelling Israel — a country with a non-white majority — as an oppressive white institution.
In this emerging moral norm, antisemitism is only real if it comes from white supremacists while Israeli Jews of color defending themselves from wars of extermination can be labeled as apartheid. As Purim approaches, all of us can draw inspiration from Esther and Mordechai who pushed back at the highest levels to defend the Jewish nation from upside down lies and oppression. Distorting facts and history to single out the one Jewish state as illegitimate or apartheid is as vile as it is false. We, who are allies to so many in the progressive camp, should demand some allyship in return — or at the very least hold Amnesty International and other key organizations accountable when they become the latest purveyors of this oldest hatred.
Cantor Michael Smolash sits in the Stephen Gottlieb z”l Cantorial Chair at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, where he has served since 2004. His essay, “Left in Silence”, appears in the book “Fault Lines — Exploring the complicated place of Progressive American Jewish Zionism” edited by Rabbi Menachem Creditor and Amanda Berman.
