Jewish Critics Of Israeli Policies Are Using The
Term "Apartheid" To Describe Them
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
April 2021
Increasingly, Jewish and Israeli critics of Israel’s policies in the
occupied territories are using the term “apartheid” to describe them. In
January 2021, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a statement
which declared that the Israeli Government was an “apartheid regime.” It
stated that, “A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to
establish and maintain the supremacy of one group over another is an
apartheid regime.”
B’Tselem argues that the Israeli regime “of apartheid” rests on four
pillars: citizenship, land, freedom of movement and political
participation. Virtually any person of Jewish ancestry anywhere in the
world can claim Israeli citizenship; immigration to Israel is all but
impossible for Palestinians, and only a minority of Palestinians—-about 1.6
million out of seven million—-who live on land controlled by Israel are
citizens of Israel and even their rights are limited compared with their
nearly seven million Jewish counterparts.
This report has been largely ignored in the media and by mainstream American
Jewish organizations. One who paid close attention was Rabbi Brian Walt, the
founder and rabbi emeritus of Congregation Mishkan Shalom, an activist
congregation in Philadelphia. He was the founding executive director of
Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and is a member of the Rabbinical
Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. Rabbi Walt grew up In South Africa and
knows a great deal about apartheid.
Rabbi Walt recalls that, “When I first heard that B’Tselem was saying
matter-of-factly that Israel and the lands it occupies constitute an
apartheid system, I immediately flashed back to 2008, to the moment when the
truth became clear to me when I led a Rabbis for Human Rights-North America
(Truah) trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank. We arrived in Hebron.
Michael Manikin, a leader with the Israeli human rights group Breaking The
Silence, gestured to Shuhada Street, the street our group was about to walk
down, and told us “it was a ‘sterile street’—-a street forbidden to
Palestinians, only Jews and other tourists were permitted to walk down the
street.”
Writing in Truthout (Feb. 17, 2021), Rabbi Walt remembers that, “I was
horrified. My heart beat fast as tears rolled down my face. As a child
growing up in apartheid South Africa, I was intimately familiar with
separate beaches, buses, cabs, entrances to post offices and public benches
with ‘whites only’ signs. But even in Apartheid South Africa, there were no
‘sterile streets’ that only white people could walk on. In South Africa, as
a student at the University of Cape Town, I had fought against apartheid. I
worked on issues of economic justice for domestic workers and founded and
edited a Jewish student newspaper dedicated to ending apartheid. Throughout
my anti-apartheid activism, Israel was always an essential part of my Jewish
identity. I was a committed progressive Zionist. Creating a just,
democratic Israel that reflected the highest moral values of Judaism was—-
and remains—-a core commitment.”
Over decades, Rabbi Walt engaged in political activism on the West Bank with
groups such as the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions and
encountered disturbing realities. He witnessed the demolition of
Palestinian homes, the expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish
settlements, olive orchards uprooted by settlers, and Palestinians uprooted
from homes in Jerusalem that they had owned for generations.
“Those experiences were so shocking,” notes Walt, “that, if I hadn’t seen
them with my own eyes, I would never have believed they were true. These
experiences reminded me of very similar injustices that I had seen in South
Africa... At that moment in Hebron I felt a new determination to name what I
saw as apartheid. We, the Jewish people, must tell the truth. We can no
longer cover up the shocking systemic discrimination and oppression of the
Palestinians by the State of Israel—-a state that relies on our support and
acts in our names and in the name of our tradition.”
More and more Israelis have been using the term “apartheid” to describe
their country’s occupation. Professor David Shulman of the Hebrew
University notes that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds have
been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the occupation is a
crime. It is first of all based on the permanent disenfranchisement of a
huge population... In the end, it is the ongoing moral failure of the
country as a whole that is most consequential, most dangerous, most
unacceptable. This failure weighs... heavily on our humanity. We are, so
we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in
Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice,
ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all
people, have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.”
In 2019 in a position paper entitled “Our Approach to Zionism” Jewish Voice
for Peace stated: “Jewish Voice for Peace is guided by a vision of justice,
equality, and freedom for all people. We unequivocally oppose Zionism
because it is counter to those ideals... While it had many strains
historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-
colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more
rights than others. Our own history teaches us how dangerous this can be.”
Hagai El Ad, the director of B’Tselem, declares that, “Calling things by
their proper name—-apartheid—-is not a moment of despair, rather it is a
moment of moral clarity... People of conscience must reject apartheid in
Israel just as clearly and forcefully as we reject white supremacy in the
U.S... ” **
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