Columnist Asks, “If Israel’s Occupation Is Permanent, Why Isn’t It the Same as Apartheid?”

As Israel continues to build settlements on the occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem, prospects for a two-state solution appear to be receding. Forward columnist Jay Michaelson (Sept. 2, 2016) asks, “If Israel’s occupation is permanent, why isn’t it the same as apartheid?”

Citing a poll in August that showed that only 58% of Israelis still support a two-state solution and, notes Michaelson, “that’s counting those who support it in principle but not in practice,” he declares, “I’m not clear how a one-state, Jewish-state-controlled solution isn’t apartheid. … For two-state Zionists, the status quo in the West Bank is temporary, and thus cannot be truly analogized to apartheid, which was intended to be permanent. (Of course, the occupation has now lasted 49 years, more than the 46 years of apartheid). The occupation is unjust, but it is meant to end once both sides’ concerns about security, borders, autonomy, water, justice and so on are addressed. … But for the 43% of Israelis who no longer believe in two states, the status quo must be regarded as the permanent status … Thus, we must ask anew what, if anything, differentiates the occupation from apartheid.”

In Michaelson’s view, “Israel’s occupation, like South African apartheid, restricts movement, land ownership and other rights. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot enter Israel freely, and can travel through the West Bank itself only by negotiating a maze of checkpoints and inspections. Towns cannot expand, and indeed, land that had for decades been part of Palestinian Arab villages is regularly expropriated for Jewish settlement.”

While there are differences between Israel’s occupation policy and South African apartheid, and Israel has genuine security concerns, the most important difference between the occupation and apartheid which Michaelson points to, is one which will soon be coming to an end, demographics.

Michaelson writes: “From its inception, apartheid was minority rule. Whereas, by the time Israel acquired (or conquered) the West Bank in 1967, there were more Jews than Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, thanks to decades of immigration … Within a few decades, however, that will no longer be the case. Without a two-state solution, the Jewish state will, like the white South African state, be a system of minority rule — the very opposite of democracy. Without a two-state, solution, only through the permanent disenfranchisement of 5 million people can the ‘Jewish state’ even exist. And that is where the final difference finally falls apart. Contrary to the left’s slogans, Israel isn’t an apartheid state today. But without a two-state solution, it will soon become one. As a temporary policy, the occupation is unjust. As a permanent one, it is apartheid.”

In an interview with In These Times (May 5, 2016), Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who now teaches at the University of Exter in England, was asked, “Can one be a liberal and a Zionist or is this a contradiction in terms?” He responded: “Of course, it is. It’s like Jewish democracy. They’re oxymorons. Zionism is the last remaining active settler-colonialist movement or project. Settler colonialism is, in a nutshell, a project of replacement and displacement, settlement and expulsion. Since this is the project, that you take over someone’s homeland and you’re not satisfied until you feel you’ve taken enough of the land and you’ve gotten rid of enough of the native people, as long as you feel that this is an incomplete project, you will continue the project.”

Such a project, states Pappe, “… is based on dehumanization and elimination. It cannot be liberal. It cannot be anything universal because it is an ideology that wants to get rid of another group of people. In most of the universal values, we’re trying to offer guidance of how human beings should live together rather than instead of each other.”

Prof. Zeev Sternhell, former head of the political science department at Hebrew University, and a specialist on the history of fascism, was asked if Israel was now on the verge of fascism. He replied: “It’s a gradual process. We have yet to cross the red line, but we are dangerously close. We are at the height of an erosion process of the liberal values on which our society is based. Those who regard liberal values as a danger to the nation … are the ones currently in power. They are striving to delegitimize the left and anyone who does not hold the view that conquering the land and settling it through the use of force are the fundamental foundation of Zionism. That’s why universal values and universal rights are enemies of the state, in their view. …” •