It Isn’t Apartheid – It’s Worse
JVL Introduction
Lev Grinberg, president of the Israeli Sociological Association, takes Amnesty International to task for calling Israel an apartheid society.
Not because it is too critical, but because it is unhelpful, for two interlinked reasons:
- It blocks discussion because people are turned off by the word “apartheid” and simply dismiss its use as “antisemitic”.
- It makes bland what are in essence a variety of discriminatory regimes.
In other words, using the term apartheid, for Grinberg, “misses the first political goal: an understanding of the situation, which is the first condition for its repair”.
It misses the “upgraded apartheid” nature of the regime, one in which there is a separation between types of Palestinian, not a simple, uniform discrimination.
In our view, Grinberg is right – and wrong!
Calling Israel an apartheid regime may have led to condemnation of the Amnesty report as antisemitic (witness our very own Board of Deputies of British Jews).
But at least some people noticed it. How many hundreds and hundreds reports in the past, outlining the discriminatory nature of the regime, have simply faded into obscurity without anyone even seeming to be aware of them?
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Thu 24 Feb 2022. Read the original here.
It Isn’t Apartheid – It’s Worse
The Amnesty International report misses the point due to a single word: “apartheid.” People who didn’t read the report condemn it as “antisemitic,” or at least baseless compared to South Africa. Even those who support the condemnation of Israel and consider it an apartheid state don’t have to read the report – after all, almost everything written in it is known and familiar to us.
The problem with the concept “apartheid” is not that it almost certainly prevents the reading of this important, detailed report, but it also blocks the discussion of Israel’s regime, which is rife with discrimination. If you want to understand what’s going on here, you have to make basic distinctions, rather than creating one uniform regime of discrimination.
The success of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians is based on physical separation and a variety of discriminatory regimes. Although the Green Line, Israel’s 1967 border, is erased as far as Jews are concerned, that is not the case for Palestinians. The Palestinians in the West Bank would like to benefit from the civil and political rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the built-in regime of segregation and discrimination inside the Jewish state. And no Palestinian Israeli citizen is willing to have his village transferred to the West Bank, which is under military rule, similar to what existed in “Israel proper” from 1948-1966.
Here is the secret to the success of the discriminatory Israeli regime: It is an upgraded apartheid, if you wish, but not a uniform regime. I’m not opposed to the use of the term apartheid to emphasize the legality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. However, I think it misses the first political goal: an understanding of the situation, which is the first condition for its repair.
Israel’s regime succeeds in dividing and ruling the Palestinians with greater efficiency that the regime of racial discrimination in South Africa in its day. If the racial discrimination there created political unity among the discriminated-against blacks, and a political demand for equality – “one person, one vote” – the Jewish supremacist regime and the graded discrimination divides the Palestinians to such an extent that they cannot establish a national congress that would convene Palestinians from inside Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
Deniers of the injustices of upgraded apartheid say that there is no racial discrimination here, but rather a “national conflict.” If the conflict really is national, why can’t the Palestinians, who are scattered in regimes that differ from one another, establish a national congress? It’s true that the discrimination is not based on race, but neither is it purely a national conflict.
In any case, this is a conflict between settlers and the original local population. In such cases, the settlers’ goal is to displace and erase the physical presence and collective identity of the original population in order to take over more and more land. In the Israeli case they called it “a land without a people for a people without a land” – a slogan that expressed how Zionism tried to carry out two moves at once: to establish the Jews as a people-nationality, and to dismantle the natives of their shared identity.
As opposed to South Africa, where they wanted to keep the blacks as cheap labor lacking rights, the Zionist project is a settlement project, aka colonization, like the British settlement in North America, and Australia and New Zealand. Until 1967, the leading political force in Zionism, the Labor settler movement, rejected the typical colonialist economic interest of exploiting local manpower, and they sought to displace them from the labor market and from their land.
However, already by 1948 the Palestinian local population had become consolidated as a national movement, a result of their opposition to the efforts to push them out. Since the expulsion and flight of the Arabs during the 1948 War of Independence, the Israeli regime has been busy imposing physical segregation between Jews and Arabs, practicing “divide and rule” policies on them in order to tighten Israeli control and maintain a regime in which the Jews have greater rights.
It’s true that despite their segregation, oppression and discrimination, the situation of Palestinian Israeli citizens is better than that of blacks in the apartheid regime. But the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is worse than what happened during apartheid. The siege of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has created the largest prison in the world, and Israel’s presumed right to bomb from the air and kill civilians was not a common tool used by the whites in South Africa when they oppressed the black opponents of apartheid.
In upgraded apartheid there’s a separation between types of Palestinians: one group in relatively good shape, the others living in oppressive regimes of various gradations that are worse than what was imposed on blacks in the apartheid regime.
That is the problem of resorting to the concept of apartheid: It blurs the differences and blunts Israel’s success at continuing to divide and rule. This condemnation is the harshest one possible, but it prevents us from understanding why the oppression is so successful. According to my analysis, the present regime is worse than apartheid – because it does not enable the Palestinian to fight together for a shared goal.
There are five separate groups of Palestinians subject to various types pf discriminatory regimes, and they have varied political objectives: Within the 1967 border the demand is for equality, in the West Bank they are demanding an independent state, and in Gaza a lifting of the siege. The refugees are demanding the right of return, and the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are confused: They have freedom of movement and social welfare rights like other Israeli citizens, but like the West Bank Palestinians they are denied citizenship, and like them they are threatened by eviction from their homes, attacks by “settlers” and arbitrary killing.
If that is the case, what do all five of these groups have in common? What can we call this regime, which has succeeded in doing what the whites in South Africa were unable to do?
What they have in common is that everywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and outside Israel’s borders as well, the Jews have more rights than the original inhabitants. The regime is one of Jewish supremacy.
But the gap is not uniform: The Jews’ privileges in the West Bank are greater than those of the Jews inside Israel; the Jews, by means of the Israel Defense Forces, have total control over what enters the Gaza Strip, as well as who enters and who leaves; and outside Israel’s borders the regime of supremacy is most blatant of all: The descendants of the Palestinians who lived here for hundreds of years and became refugees in 1948 are not allowed to return to the county or receive compensation for their property. Whereas every Jew, though lacking a genuine connection to Israel other than at best prayers and Jewish holidays, has a full right to get Israeli citizenship and financial support from the government immediately after their arrival.
So here we have the unique regime established in Israel, as a result of a special historical development that differs from the situation in other places, and differs as well from the dream of the founders to build an ethical Jewish society, a “light unto the nations.” This regime is the opposite, it brings darkness, it fosters discrimination and injustices among Jews as well – a regime without borders that is incapable of stopping the nationalist-racist urge to continue pushing out the Palestinians.
The concept of apartheid is forcing us into a sterile semantic debate, and diverting attention from the Jewish supremacist regime, which deserves strong condemnation and is in need of radical change. The solution for apartheid in South Africa was simple: equal rights for all the citizens. A similar solution won’t work here, because it is far from dealing with the complexity of the Jewish supremacist regime.
The writer is the president of the Israeli Sociological Association and author of “Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine: Democracy vs. Military Rule” (Routledge, 2010).
Like Lev, I have come across Israeli Jews who have an emotional reaction to the term ‘apartheid’. It sounds German (even though it’s Afrikaans), so there’s an implied accusation of Nazism. When I have used the word ‘hafrada’ (Hebrew for apartheid) instead, their defensiveness becomes muted. As a BDS activist in the US, if it’s necessary to sometimes baby thin-skinned Israeli Jews to help achieve justice for the Palestinians, I’ll do it.
Very well said, thank you. The government of Israel is shaming.
And the Palestinian case for justice was going so well until the AI report branded the Israeli government as operating a system of Apartheid as the occupiers in Palestine. I’d like to know how many angels (precisely) he sees dancing on the head of his particular pin. AI has helped bring the plight of the Palestinians to the attention of MSM and may penetrate the indifference of a lazy, self-obsessed world.
This sounds like the appeals from some not to mention ‘Zionism’ as the root cause of the occupation of Palestine in case it upsets Zionists. The terms Zionism and apartheid must not be swept under the table. On the contrary, they must be placed fairly and squarely at the heart of the condemnation of the current actions of Israel against the Palestinians. Zionism is responsible for apartheid in Israel/Palestine but Zionists will never accept it, no matter how nicely they are addressed, therefore the outside world must bring pressure on them to behave, just as was done in South Africa.
“if it’s necessary to sometimes baby thin-skinned Israeli Jews to help achieve justice for the Palestinians, I’ll do it.”
The problem is that liberal West has been babying thin-skinned Israeli Jews for well over 70 years and the result ? The situation for Palestinians has got worse and worse.
To be honest I’m sick to death of Zionist Jews who are “deeply offended” when they hear the truth. I am rather more concerned about Palestinians who lose their homes, schools, limbs and lives to aggressive white Europeans who have no moral right to live in the Middle East.
This article is terribly confused and does not help our understanding at all.
Israel is an apartheid state. That is the accepted narrative today and to challenge that is to undermine the struggle to demolish the Zionists self-serving narrative.
Lev says that
‘The solution for apartheid in South Africa was simple: equal rights for all the citizens. A similar solution won’t work here’. Really? Why not? Because Israeli Jews won’t accept it? Neither did South African Whites until forced to do so.
I really don’t think this sterile and self-indulgent debate should be entertained if we are serious about supporting the Palestinians.
And incidentally
Lev also doesn’t seem to understand Zionist history. ‘the dream of the founders to build an ethical Jewish society, a “light unto the nations.” was the dream of only a handful of Cultural Zionists. The Labour Zionists had no such pretensions.
Of course no 2 oppressive or apartheid states are the same but as a matter of fact the Apartheid regime tried to do what Israel has done, to exclude the native Africans but their Bantusan policy failed. Also it was difficult to marry with the super exploitation of Black labour.
Lev asks ‘What can we call this regime, which has succeeded in doing what the whites in South Africa were unable to do?’
A settler colonial state. That’s what.
Yes there are different regimes for different Palestinians. That is because Israeli segmentation has become a far more formidable system than the Apartheid system was.
And within Green line Israel there is no petty apartheid or signs ‘Jews only’. But then in the West Bank there are also no signs ‘Jews only’ because Israel relies far more on discriminatory regulations and practices than South Africa.
Of course Apartheid will be attacked as anti-Semitic. So what? Everything is anti-Semitic in the eyes of the Zionists. But it has a powerful resonance which is why it is stupid to even suggest abandoning it. The Palestinian movement has struggled to gain acceptance for this term. Lev Grinberg, if he sincerely supports the Palestinians has no right to challenge this and divert attention into a fruitless and pointless debate that only the Zionists will b enefit from. This is Israeli Jewish privilege. It is not the job of Israeli Jews to undermine the Palestinian struggle whilst claiming to support them.
Lev says that ‘in the West Bank they are demanding an independent state’. No Lev this is no longer true and even when they did it was because the demand for one unitary equal state was seen as unobtainable. Today it is the only game in town
Saying it is not apartheid, it is worse is correct, but there is no legal implications associated with a worsen then apartheid. Apartheid is recognised as a crime by international law unlike a worsen than.
This may be changed when Zionism will be recognised as the worse than by international law (it was almost happen with a latter withdrawen UN resolution) but until then, and in order to avoid confusion, I would stick with the apartheid definition.
Is there something in the water that makes the Israeli population selectively blind to self evident truths or perhaps so secure in the knowledge that they will be protected by ‘Big Brother’ USA becoming the 51st State? Apartheid by any other name!
Grinberg’s criticisms are misconceived, for two reasons. Firstly, South African apartheid did not simply distinguish ‘black’from’white’. There were other categories for Asians and ‘coloureds’ and the Bantustans were designed not only to create physical disjunctions between black people but to set, for example. Zulu against Xhosa. Creating divisions within oppressed groups is an absolutely standard tactic of apartheid regimes.
More important, saying that the Israeli regime is worse than apartheid misses the central point. The report encourages us to set aside the major atrocities such as the bombing of Gaza and focus on ‘normal’ apartheid. Apologists like the Board of Deputies imply that all the problems are due not to the Israeli regime but to Palestinian resistance to it. It is worth asking; suppose the Palestinians ceased to resist and Israel could simply do whatever it wanted; what then? It is to this situation that the word ‘apartheid’ would apply most precisely. If there were no struggle the resulting situation would still be one which any civilised person would find intolerable.
I really don’t think this sort of article is at all helpful. You can play with words as much as you like, but the reason “apartheid ” is used in relation to Israel is that it’s the most appropriate one: there is no doubt at all that Israeli policies fall within the accepted definitition of apartheid.
What other word might be more suitable, or indeed acceptable to Israelis who don’t want to be accused of emulating the white regime in South Africa? Fascist? Racist? Inhuman? Would that sound any better?
Grinberg is asking people to believe that Amnesty would have avoided being accused of antisemitism if its report had said that Israel is not imposing apartheid but a system worse than apartheid. Has he not noticed that virtually any criticism of Israel is labelled antisemitic by its apologists?
Not sure how useful the term ‘aparthied’ is in regards I/P, and am especially sceptical about Amnesty Internationals involvement. As an ngo, aren’t they at times complicit with imperialism ? I say that because they were running some adverts a few years ago thanking nato for apparently liberating women in Afghanistan, or something along those lines.