Is Israel Moving Toward the “Apartheid” Which
Yitzhak Rabin Feared?
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
December 2015
In a previously unpublished recording of a 1976 interview, Israel’s fifth
prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, can be heard calling the still nascent West
Bank settler movement “comparable to a cancer,” and warning that Israel
risked becoming an “apartheid” state if it annexed and absorbed the West
Bank Arab population.
The recording is being publicized for the first time in the documentary of
Rabin’s November 1995 assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist who
opposed Rabin’s efforts to achieve peace with the Palestin¬ians.
According to The Times of Israel (Sept. 25, 2015), “Rabin’s imperturbable
monotone betrays increasing anger as he complains about the settlements
growing in number and size … ‘I see Gush (‘The Bloc of the Faithful’ the
ideologically driven founders of the settle¬ment movement) as one of the
most acute dangers in the whole phenomenon of the State of Israel. Gush
Enunim is not a settlement movement. It is comparable to a cancer on the
tissue of Israel’s democratic society. It’s a phenomenon of an organization
that takes the law into its own hands. I don’t say with certainty that we
won’t reach the (point of) evacuation, because of the (Palestinian)
population. I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term. If we
don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half (more) Arabs inside a
Jewish state.’”
In an editorial, “Israel Is Destroying Its Own Freedom,” written on the
occasion of the Jewish New Year, Haaretz (Sept. 13, 2015) declares: “The
last colonial state which today celebrates the 48th Rosh Hashanah of the
occupation, continues to believe that controlling another people ensures its
victory. This superstition, which in the past vanquished great powers such
as France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire, was shaken a few days ago by a
terrifying symbolic picture. In the small village of Nabi Saleh, near
Ramallah, an armed and masked Israeli soldier set upon Mohammed Tamimi, a
12-year-old boy with an arm in a cast, his mother and additional female
relatives then set upon the soldier, trying to free the boy from the
soldier’s choke hold.”
Haaretz continues: “If there is a symbol that summarizes and distills the
reality of the State of Israel in the territories, it is the photograph from
Nabi Saleh, which spread around the world like wildfire. In Israel some
people were angry that the soldier did not shoot the boy, and some were
astounded at the humanity of the soldier who decided, on the basis of either
his conscience or the presence of television cameras not to shoot. This is a
distorted dichotomy, which would not exist if Israel understood the
occupation and morality, occupation and heroism, occupation and democracy
cannot coexist … As long as Israel persists in the occupation, it condemns
itself to destroying the freedom of the Palestinians and of itself.”
Columnist Bradley Burston recently wrote an article with the headline, “It’s
time to admit it, Israeli policy is what it is: Apartheid” (Haaretz, Aug.
15, 2015) He states that, “What I’m about to write will not come easily for
me. I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of
apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be
counted on to argue that, while the country’s settlement policies were anti-
democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not
apply. I’m not one of those people any more, not after the last few weeks.”
Burston continues: “Not after terrorists firebombed a West Bank Palestinian
home, annihilating a family, murdering an 18-month old boy and his father,
burning the mother over 90 per cent of her body — only to have Israel’s
government rule the family ineligible for the financial support and
compensation automatically granted Israeli victims of terrorism, settlers
included. I can’t pretend any more. Not after Israel’s Justice Minister
Ayelet Shaked, explicitly declaring stone-throwing to be terrorism, drove
the passage of a bill holding stone-throwers liable up to 20 years in
prison. The law did not specify that it targeted only Palestinian stone-
throwers. It didn’t have to. Just one week later, pro-settlement Jews hurled
rocks, furniture and bottles of urine at Israeli soldiers and police at a
West Bank settlement, and in response Benjamin Netanyahu immediately
rewarded the Jewish stone-throwers with a pledge to build hundreds of new
settlement houses.”
In the end, laments Burston, “This is what has become of the rule of law.
Two sets of books. One for us, and one for them. Apartheid. We are what we
have created. We are what we do, and the injury we do in a thousand ways to
millions of others. We are what we turn a blind eye to. Our Israel is what
it has become. Apartheid.”
Criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu for his failure to confront Jewish
terrorism, columnist J.J. Goldberg, writing in The Forward (Aug. 14, 2015)
declares: “There’s all too much room in Israel for these creeps. As the Shin
Bet security agency is now acknowledging, settler violence against
Palestinians in the West Bank, largely discounted for years, is becoming a
crisis. Property vandalism, burning of fields and cutting down olive trees
have long been endemic. Most perpetrators are never caught. Most of those
arrested are let off with a slap on the wrist or less. Now, though the
agency says it is morphing into an armed conspiracy. Law enforcement
authorities recommended stepped up measures a year ago, but Netanyahu vetoed
then.” •
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