Exchange On Israel As Apartheid And Related Issues

 I got this from M in response to Coleman Hughes dismantling the idea that Israel is an apartheid nation and I answered him:

M:

“Itzik I'm not sure if I have a counter argument per se, but it seems to me that there are two somewhat separate issues being touched on here.  One is whether or not Israel can be described as an 'apartheid' state and the other is whether African-Americans should line up with the Palestinians using the same measure as the civil rights movement in the U.S.

 

I think I'd mostly agree with Hughes on the first (although I'll add a rider below) and on the second -- whether black Americans should take the Palestinian side as a matter of racial solidarity against European colonialism -- I'd say that it's a difficult question to answer as it depends a lot more on feelings and emotional reactions than the first issue does.

 

So, leaving the West Bank aside here, I'd say this:  although I don't see Israel as an apartheid society, I do think that there are unresolved issues and an actual worsening of the situation in respect of Arab Israelis.  A few years ago the Netanyahu administration lowered the status of Arabic from being an official language of Israel (for 70 years!) to a secondary language, which was a noticeably contemptuous move to indicate to Arab Israelis that they are tolerated rather than standing on the same footing with Hebrew-speaking fellow citizens.

 

I've just begun reading a very interesting book by the historian Schlomo Sand called The Words and the Land, which looks at the relationship between Jewish writers and intellectuals and the creation of an Israeli national identity that developed exclusive rather than inclusive assumptions.  He says that the peculiar thing about Israel is that its Arabic-speaking inhabitants (presumably mostly Muslim with some Christians) aren't really represented by the nation that they are citizens of.

 

That doesn't make it an apartheid state, needless to say, but it does suggest a problem that is sharpened by decisions made at the beginning of the modern Israel e.g. the religious veto over marriage, exemptions from military service etc.  Can you be an equal citizen of a country that draws its circle of national identity in such a way as to emphasize that you stand outside that circle?

 ———

I answered him thusly:

“M, sorry for the delay. I meant to respond sooner but it slipped my mind till just now when I reminded myself to.

I think there are more than two issues. The context of all this recent focus on Israel has been generated by 10/7. It triggered and crystallized the outpouring of nearly global anti Israeli, anti Semitic vehemence. 10/7 cannot be separated from Hughes’ analysis. And in my view what underlies his piece is his outspoken rejection of Hamas and what it did, which is undergirded by his view of Israel as a liberal democracy, an imperfect one to be sure, with, presently, that exacerbated by the right wing extremists in her government.

But, in my view at least, what animates Hughes’ full throated dismissal of Israel practicing apartheid, being white supremacist, a colonizer needing decolonization, is that these canards are trotted out, nay galloped out, by many to sympathize with, justify, identify with, with Hamas’ 10/7 medieval barbarism. He’s confronting an ideological consensus, most prevalent on university campuses, held by academics and students alike, that sees "10/7 as the righteous apotheosis of Jews’ evil. 

So, I agree with you that Israel is not an apartheid state. And it as an ostensible ground for what I’ve just described amongst those cheering on Hamas must be rejected. It just ain’t so.

I note you say, “leaving the West Bank aside”. Why leave it aside? Here, a whole host of issue come screaming forth. It’s not part of Israel. It’s part of the occupied/disputed territory waiting for resolution, and brimming with wrong doing from both sides in its seemingly permanent state of intractable irresolution. 

The problems range from the blurry line between Fatah and Hamas, legitimate Israeli security concerns, the Hamasian spectre of what would happen if Israel didn’t maintain some sort of West Bank occupier status, deeply embedded and widespread Palestinian irredentism and rejectionism—there was in the West Bank much Palestinian cheering for 10/7 and next to nothing, if any, in the way of criticism of it, with apparently Abbas denying what Hamas did on 10/7 and raising conspiracist claims of Israeli complicity: once a Holocaust denier, then forever one, I guess—the fanatics in Netanyahu’s coalition and a rising numbers of incidents involving fanatical right wing Israelis against innocent Palestinians. 

So I say, it’s right to leave the West Bank aside, not because it’s a case of shadow apartheid or some such but because it’s irrelevant to the claim that Israel is an apartheid state. 

Now, only respectfully, it strikes me as an odd and unhelpful way to frame your second issue as you have: 

…and the other is whether African-Americans should line up with the Palestinians using the same measure as the civil rights movement in the U.S….

and 

…whether black Americans should take the Palestinian side as a matter of racial solidarity against European colonialism -- I'd say that it's a difficult question to answer as it depends a lot more on feelings and emotional reactions than the first issue does…

I say skin colour ought have nothing to do with anything here. Your framing replicates the general problem with racial identitarianism, the obsession with which now bedevils American society, and less so but Canadian society as well, and feeds into the false imposition of the terms of this American racial problem onto Israelis and Palestinians. 

Half or nearly half of Israelis are Mizrahi and are visibly indistinguishable from most Palestinians. Some Palestinians are whiter than many Israelis. So where does race come into it; and where does European colonialism come into it? After all, Jewish indigeneity to these lands goes back millennially and a big bulk of Israeli citizenry is the outgrowth of her neighbouring countries making themselves effectively judenrein after 1948. 

So to my mind African Americans as a racial bloc should feel nothing about whom they should line up with, and even putting it as “line up with” is reductive. The racial bloc should be an irrelevance. Individuals regardless of the hue of their skins should take their own positions on these issues, and should reject any pull coming from the fact of their skin colour. The “line up” way of seeing this only fuels a false divisiveness, where any resolution that is to come must be borne of some kind of a not-yet conceived of form of compromise that must needs beggar lining up, ie be in toto, with one group or another. 

I wasn’t aware of the devaluation of Arabic as an official Israeli language. If so devalued, then that is an internal Israeli issue to be dealt with internally. As are other issues involving Israeli Arabs. Every county has its problems. There is plenty enough to criticize Israel about, with of course much more to praise her for, without the former forming the basis of canards about what she is and what she isn’t, and certainly without raising what may be problematic in her internal politics to the heights of international obsession, let alone concern, and let alone the conflagrating pervasive anti Semitism generated by the international fetishizing of Israel as the paradigm of all that is evil, which, as noted, finds expression in the bizarre amplitude of support that 10/7 has garnered, all the while example after example of Muslims doing terrible things on grand scales to other Muslims, and other nations and groups doing terrible things on grand scales to others gets such relatively little mention.