Is Israel Moving Toward the “Apartheid” Which Yitzhak Rabin Feared?

In a previously unpublished recording of a 1976 interview, Israel’s fifth prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, can be heard calling the still nascent West Bank settler movement “comparable to a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.” •