JustASC

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen defends Israel during “Israel Apartheid Week”:

The Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. In South Africa, the minority white population harshly ruled the majority black population. Nonwhites were denied civil rights, and in 1958, they were even deprived of citizenship. In contrast, Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military, although most are exempt from the draft. Whatever this is — and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy — it cannot be apartheid.

The West Bank, more or less under Israeli military rule, is a different matter. But it is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan — including those proposed by Israeli governments — almost all of it will revert to the Palestinian Authority and become the heartland of a Palestinian state.

Cohen is critical of a recent op-ed on Israel in the Financial Times by Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, who uses the apartheid label. Here’s Siegman:

The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.

Siegman and Cohen appear to be arguing over two different time frames. Siegman is looking to the near future and, under the assumption that it is all but too late for a two-state solution, does not see how Israel continues to rule over a majority Arab population without it looking indistinguishable from apartheid. Cohen is arguing from the present and near past, in which Israel’s conflict over the future of West Bank and Gaza is rooted in security issues, not race, and in which the two-state solution is both alive and points to a better future.

Cohen is right about the current dynamic: Because Israel’s worst critics have already painted Israel with the apartheid brush, and refuse to grant Israel its legitimate security concerns orto find fault with its adversaries, Israel has become “tone-deaf to legitimate criticism and exasperated with any attempt to find fault.”  Siegman may think he is giving Israel “tough love” in issuing his apartheid warning, but by placing the blame for the current stalemate exclusively on Israel’s shoulders, he only reinforces the legitimate sense of siege that makes any thinking Israeli wary of making further concessions. 

(And Siegman’s parenthetical “mostly” above is just tendentious –a way to scoot past the inconvenient fact that one-fifth of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. That would muddy his “apartheid” argument, and he seems to know it.)