NYT: False Charges of Apartheid

[shira]

LONDON — Ignorance of history is an invitation to relive it. But the glib invocation of history may be equally dangerous. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel sees Chamberlain, Munich and 1938 at every turn. He did in the 1990s when he opposed Yitzhak Rabin’s attempt to make peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo accords, and he does now in opposing a nuclear deal with Iran. He is wrong on both counts.

Opponents of Israel, by contrast, see apartheid everywhere in the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians. They, too, are wrong. I knew apartheid in South Africa. I saw how its implacable persecution was codified and applied. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians does not constitute apartheid reborn in the Holy Land, whatever the echoes of it in the West Bank.

Of late, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd founders, have been vociferous in invoking Israeli “apartheid,” criticizing a concert date in Tel Aviv for Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the other Rolling Stones lads. “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid,” they wrote. Waters calls Israel a “racist apartheid” regime and has more than once compared the situation of the Palestinians to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. “This is not a new scenario,” he told Counterpunch magazine last year, alluding to Berlin after 1933, “except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”

Jagger is right to play Tel Aviv, if for nothing else than as a powerful protest against such charges. Jews suffered systematic, industrialized Nazi annihilation. There is no parallel to this in Israel, period. To suggest there is amounts to something much worse than intellectual sloppiness; it is a form of moral calumny....

http://nytweekly.com/columns/intelarchives/05-30-14/

[4now]

1. Every day more and more people are talking about Israeli Aparthied

It is good to see that the discussion is happening at the DU.
It really surprises me that the topic is getting so much attention.

[Fozzledick]

2. There's nothing new about the Big Lie technique

or the motives behind it.

Interesting obsession you've got there.

[King_David]

3. You really are obsessed with the Jewish state and particularly labeling it as an Apartheid state

So much so that you have a "form " standard response to any post here in IP which mentions the word "Apartheid ".

Within 1 or 2 seconds of posting.

There is another poster here very similar to you and your style.

So help us out here , what's with this motivation and obsession with The Jewish State ?

[Igel]

4. "Apartheid" assumes a single state.

It doesn't just assert, it entails, that the West Bank has been annexed by Israel and that this isn't just the natural outcome but that it is the proper outcome. The "peace process" must therefore be between a rebel group that has seized at least partial control and the ruling government. Otherwise there should only be one government that has any legitimacy.

Yet nobody that wants to assert "apartheid" likes the implications of their view. It's a general term of abuse. It's like "communist" for some RWers, "fascist" for Russians, "kufr" for militant Islamists. It says little more than "I'm outraged at something somebody is doing and rather than be clear about my problem I'm going to call somebody a bad name."

The alternative is to call what the West Bank is undergoing "occupation." No occupied citizenry is accorded full rights equal to those of the occupier. That's rather what it means to be occupied--your country's conquered and you have no representation nor do you enjoy full rights.

Even then the word isn't quite right. It rather implies that there was a country there, and to the extent there is anything occupied it's "formerly Jordanian territory that the Jordanians have given up any claim to." Like the Shebaa Farms--something that we hear little about these days--it's mostly an attempt to create a problem.

[shaayecanaan]

6. Well it was Ottoman Palestine...

up until the British took over. The British created an entity called Mandatory Palestine. They handed out passports like this:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:British_Mandate_Palestinian_passport.jpg

Those who resided within were called citizens of Palestine. It certainly wasn't a sovereign state, probably only a vassal state, but then again, neither Canada nor Australia were independent until at least the Statute of Westminster in 1942. A vassal state is arguably still a state.

Funnily enough, those who insist that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is legal generally insist that its possession and annexation by Jordan in 1950 was illegal, although they very rarely go into detail on this point. For one thing, Jordan could not have invaded Israel in 1947 because Israel did not exist at that time. At the very most, Jordan could be accused of having invaded Palestine, although because they did so unopposed and with the blessing of most of its citizens, one wonders whether "invaded" is the proper term.

But more importantly, Jordan restricted itself to retaining the territory that was reserved for the creation of the Arab state, as well as moving into the corpus separatum that was set aside for Jerusalem, and even then only when it became clear that the Zionists were intent on taking it. Jordan never set foot in the territories reserved for the Jewish state, which calls into question the claims of pro-Israel advocates that somehow Jordan was the aggressor.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

5. Desmond Tutu: Israel guilty of apartheid in treatment of Palestinians

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Desmond-Tutu-Israel-guilty-of-apartheid-in-treatment-of-Palestinians-344874

Desmond Tutu, the noted civil rights leader who became the first black archbishop of Cape Town, compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the apartheid regime that discriminated against blacks in his native South Africa.

Tutu, the Nobel Peace laureate, told News24, a South African media entity, criticized Israeli policies toward the Palestinians in the territories as "humiliating."

"I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces," he said in a statement.

"Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."