By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, May 18,
2021
The charge of apartheid is the new
blood libel.
As Hamas rains rockets down on Israel,
members of the Squad in Congress and other left-wing enemies are using the
occasion to amplify their accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
This is a transparent attempt to
delegitimize — and isolate and ultimately destroy — the Jewish state by
associating it with a racist regime that the world united to squeeze out of
existence.
Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic
congresswoman from Michigan, says that Israel is “promoting racism and
dehumanization” under an “apartheid system,” and Representative Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota refers to “Israel’s apartheid government.”
The charge is given a patina of legitimacy
by Human Rights Watch, which recently issued a 213-page report devoted to the
allegation, and other anti-Israel organizations that understand the
accusation’s potential power to define Israel out of the circle of advanced
democracies.
It doesn’t take much moral discernment to
understand, even if one takes a harshly critical view of how Israel conducts
itself, that it is nothing like an apartheid regime in South Africa that
depended on a rigorously enforced system of racial repression.
The Arab minority in Israel (about 20
percent of the population) may face obstacles, but it is not treated like black
South Africans were.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of
New York and her ideological compatriots tweeted the other day, “Apartheid
states aren’t democracies,” which nailed the point, just not the way they
intended.
Israel is a democracy that affords its
Arab citizens full rights. They vote in elections, and Arab parties sit in
parliament. These parties obviously have a profoundly different worldview than
the Zionist parties, which has been a barrier preventing cooperation between
them. But this year, in a first, Arab parties were part of the negotiations
over forming a new government before they broke down.
Arab Israelis are full participants in
Israeli society. There are Arab justices on the Supreme Court. About 20 percent
of doctors in Israel and about half of pharmacists are Arab. Roughly 17 percent
of students seeking an undergraduate degree are Arab, a number that has roughly
doubled over the past decade.
As Steve Kramer of the Times of
Israel puts it, “They arguably are the most free Arabs in the Middle
East.”
Then, there are the Palestinian
territories, where there is a marked lack of democracy, courtesy of the
Palestinians themselves.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who
is still serving a four-year term that began about 15 years ago, canceled new
elections scheduled for May 22. He found a way to blame Israel for this move,
of course, but the bottom line is that his party, Fatah, feared Hamas would
win, as it did in the last Palestinian election back in 2006.
The Palestinians have made postponing
elections into a high political art, in keeping with the lack of democratic
accountability in other neighboring Arab states.
How Israel should handle the threat of
another terror state devoted to its destruction arising on its borders is, any
fair-minded person should concede, an inherently difficult question.
It has offered the Palestinians a state
twice, in 2000 and 2008, to no avail.
Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip entirely
in 2005. It can’t be blamed for Hamas winning the elections in 2006, taking
over Gaza in a coup against Fatah a year later, and misgoverning the territory
ever since, with an emphasis on using it as a base from which to wage war
against Israel.
Much is made of Israel’s border controls
in Gaza and the West Bank, but a border isn’t a denial of citizenship rights,
rather a demarcation between two societies. If the Palestinians would ever
accept the right of Israel to exist and embrace a program of peaceful
development, they’d get their own sovereign state.
Instead, they want to wipe Israel from the
map and are getting an assist from purveyors of the malicious lie that Israel
is morally indistinguishable from the old, racist South Africa.
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