Countering the False Apartheid Narrative

By Robert Cherry

Sunday, February 13, 2022

 

When the Abraham Accords were announced three years ago, left-wing organizations ridiculed them as a fantasy that would be repudiated everywhere. Instead, the accords have been very successful in transforming Israel’s relationships with a number of Arab-dominated countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa, dramatically increasing trade and tourism.

 

Rather than focusing on the accords’ impact on Israel’s growing regional acceptance, 29 left-wing organizations signed a joint statement demanding that the U.S. reject the Abraham Accords and “end support for Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights and apartheid rule.” Notable signatories were the Progressive Democrats of America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and a number of Jewish leftist organizations, including Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow. This statement followed an unprecedented Amnesty International report demanding that “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.”

 

This extreme rhetoric is quite distant from reality. It ignores the dramatic advances made by Israeli Arabs in the past decade, the numerous initiatives taken by the new government to temper conflicts in the occupied territories, and the substantial abuses perpetrated by Palestinian misleaders in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

Israeli Arabs make up 20 percent of the country’s population and have moved into the Israeli mainstream, particularly in high-tech and medical fields. They are a growing number in high-tech, driven by their being 20 percent of the graduates from the Technion — Israel’s MIT. Aided by government funding, Nazareth has become a center of high-tech firms, many having Arab ownership. In the medical area, 17 percent of doctors, 24 percent of nurses, and 47 percent of pharmacists are Arab. More generally, Arab share of undergraduate enrollment has increased from 10 percent in 2008 to 17 percent a decade later.

 

These improvements have enabled Israeli Arabs to have an increasingly positive attitude toward the Israeli state. A recent report showed that 81 percent of Israeli Arabs prefer to live in Israel over living in the U.S. or in any other Western country. In 2016, 73 percent of the Arab public disapproved when Arab Knesset members boycotted Shimon Peres’s funeral. More than three-quarters supported the Arab party Ra’am’s joining the ruling coalition this past year.

 

Yes, there are still significant barriers, but at least a part of the reason for disparities is due to traditional Muslim values holding back female advancement. There are still severe restraints on the freedom of a small share of Arab women. More widespread is the unwillingness to allow daughters to reside outside the family village.

 

In the Bedouin south, a group of Arab professionals founded a science high school. With much effort, they were able to recruit a significant number of Bedouin girls, many of whom excelled. However, their choices after graduation were limited. Whereas the male graduates could attend college anywhere, including the most selective ones, the female graduates had to remain local, going no farther than Beer Sheva for higher-educational opportunities, so that most had a goal of becoming science teachers in their village high schools.

 

Things have improved further with the new government. Ra’am secured an unprecedented multibillion-dollar budget for the Arab community: $10.3 billion in funding was allocated for a wide range of improvements, dwarfing the $3.8 billion allocated five years earlier in the first attempt to redress funding disparities. At Ra’am’s behest, the government has moved to authorize some unrecognized Bedouin villages in the southern Negev desert and connect thousands of illegally built homes to electricity. It stopped government tree-planting on land claimed by Bedouin in the Negev. Ra’am has also stopped efforts to extend a law that prevents Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from obtaining residency rights.

 

The new government has also substantially changed policies toward the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In East Jerusalem, where 300,000 Palestinians reside, long-standing property disputes threaten the housing of a dozen families. Rather than follow the legal eviction ruling, the new government arranged with the Jewish owners so that the current residents could live in their homes for at least 15 years at a nominal rent. When a few of the families showed a readiness to accept this compromise, they were harassed by Palestinian nationalists, including the Palestinian Authority, until they recanted.

 

This effort at “shrinking the conflict” has led to similar attempts at accommodation in the West Bank. The government has substantially increased work permits for Palestinians and has eased onerous checkpoint practices. It has allowed an unprecedented construction of new Arab homes and has continued to restrict Jewish population increases to only the approved settlements that would be part of any two-state solution.

 

In another attempt to reduce conflict, the government is considering allowing an “illegal” encampment of a small group of Jahalin Bedouins to remain on the E1 corridor despite the demands of the settlers’ community, which wants that area to be part of the large Ma’aleh Adumim settlement. And the government is finding ways to improve the financial situation of the Palestinian Authority. Even Palestinian nationalists now believe that the new government’s determination to enact policies to better the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank is real.

 

Contrast these improvements with the actions of Palestinian authorities. According to a Human Rights Watch report, “Hamas authorities routinely used torture and other ill-treatment with impunity.” Amnesty International reported: “Women and girls . . . were inadequately protected against sexual and other gender-based violence, including so-called honour killings.” In 2019, “nineteen women died in the West Bank and 18 in Gaza as a result of gender-based violence.” The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms recorded “97 incidents of attacks against journalists: 36 in the West Bank and 61 in Gaza.”

 

As for elections, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 17th year of his four-year term and has repeatedly postponed elections. In Gaza, too, democracy is a dirty word. And yet the political focus of the U.S. Left is to vilify Israel. Hopefully, their efforts will only further expose how little they care about the well-being of the Arab populations of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.