By Ira Sharkansky, Ph.D
JERUSALEM — On February 1, Amnesty International, claiming to be a movement of 10 million people, published a report headlined, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.”
A couple of days before then, Israel managed to obtain a copy, and began a campaign that termed the report antisemitic, and designed to disqualify Israel of its existence.
Other Jews took a different view. While not terming the report at all positive, they claimed that a campaign was misplaced. Ignoring it, according to their view, would allow the report to languish and die quietly.
The full report goes on for 278 pages of thick text. It’s highly repetitive, and hardly likely to be read thoroughly by anyone but those who are intensely curious.
It damns Israel from the beginning of its history until its current events. Historical context, the Holocaust, Arab opposition and violence hardly deserve mention. Nor is there serious consideration of the accomplishments, within Israel, of Israeli Arabs. Indeed, they are termed as Palestinians, and lumped with the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and elsewhere as the poor and benighted victims of Israeli “apartheid” and violence.
An Arab party in Israel’s government, and formal and not-quite formal relations relations with Arab and Muslim governments elsewhere? Not in this report.
The report’s use of the term apartheid assures distortion with respect to the complex Israeli and Arab setting.
As established in southern Africa, the term assured the complete segregation and differentiation in life and work. The races were separated by place and the work allowed. Sexual relations between the races were forbidden. Place and type of work and housing were defined as separate. There were clear lines of higher and lower races.
As used by Amnesty International, the term has been modified to include a broad conception of discrimination: “Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”
The report mixes Israeli treatment of the West Bank and Gaza with eastern Jerusalem and other Israeli Arabs. The issue of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is explored without mention of israeli judicial consideration of contending claims.
The right of return for Palestinians who fled Israel, and their descendents is assumed. Warfare? Hardly a mention. Likewise, the refusal of Palestinians to make concessions in the context of negotiations. As the report states, “Amnesty International has demonstrated that Israel has imposed a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians wherever it exercises control over the enjoyment of their rights – across Israel and the OPT and with regard to Palestinian refugees.”
It adds, “Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.”
There is no doubt that the overall picture is complex. It’s been marked by warfare and continued violence, as well as accommodation. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, but with substantial rights for the citizen minorities within its borders. Muslims as well as Haredim are excluded from the military draft. But Druze and Circassian males are subject to the draft.
Ethiopian migrants assert that they suffer from discrimination. More or less than American Blacks? Or European Muslims? They’re open questions.
And there are Jewish extremists, who do what they can to make life miserable for the Arabs living near them in the West Bank.
Israel, like most or all of the 193 countries in the United Nations, is not an ideal country. Yet unlike most, it lives on the edge of acceptance by its nearest neighbors. That is, the Palestinians. Jordan and Egypt have accepted Israel. Lebanon remains an open question.
Israel’s political success, as well as its economic and military power assure a place in the world. Palestinians of the West Bank are ruled by Mahmed Abbas, some years in office beyond the end of his term. Those of Gaza exist under the control of Hamas, which is also an adversary or enemy of the Palestinian government in control of the West Bank. Despite enmity at the government level between Israel and Palestines, more than 100,000 Palestinians of the West Bank, and several thousand from Gaza enter Israel on a daily basis for work.
And the Arabs of Israel have acquired positions as physicians, nurses, pharmacists, professors, and other professionals, all of which would have been forbidden under the dictates of Apartheid as practiced in southern Africa.
Israel’s Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense have met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Accommodation coexists with some degree of enmity. It’s not a simple picture, or one that is destined for a neat set of resolutions in the near future.
But to be condemned by Amnesty International?
By no means in the terms employed by that organization.
Shortly after the report’s publication, there came a spurt from Whoopi Goldberg, asserting that Jews were not a race, and that the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
That created a storm no less than the report of Amnesty International. Unlike that organization, however, Goldberg apologized more or less immediately. Largely in the context of the Nazi posture that the Jews were an inferior race that must be liquidated.
On we go.
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Ira Sharkansky, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted via ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com