By Shuki Friedman
In recent months, the State of Israel has been repeatedly denounced in this very newspaper as an apartheid state. The analogy of Israel to an apartheid state – namely to late 20th-century South Africa – has been seeping into the public discourse, and politicians and spokespeople have been turning it into a familiar idiom that is gaining in popularity.
An answer to these claims was provided by the Pet Shop Boys, which, in response to calls in Britain not to appear in “Israel, the apartheid state,” sent protesters to do their history homework. Well, here is that history lesson, and it shows that the British band was right. The description of the inequality between groups in Israel as apartheid is a travesty of reality and history.
Apartheid in its modern version emerged in 1948. While Israel’s founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the state to be established would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” the prime minister of South Africa, Daniel Francois Malan, lay down the basis for apartheid – a word originating from Afrikaans and meaning racial segregation.
Malan’s government passed a series of racial laws, including prohibition of marriage between whites and members of other races, and a census law designed to classify all citizens according to race.
Until apartheid’s final collapse in 1994, South Africa had passed dozens of laws of racial segregation in almost every imaginable sphere – from separate street benches for whites and others, through segregation in the schools, on public transportation, on beaches and in other areas, and up to the implementation of separate and different systems of rights for whites, coloreds and blacks.
The difference between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the situation in Israel and the occupied territories is so clear that there is no point in even stating all its nuances. Even if, on the margins, there are cases in Israel that are reminiscent of phenomena in apartheid South Africa, I suppose that even the most radical critics do not consider these cases as institutionalized, calculated, ideological racial segregation.
Neither does the Israeli situation comply with the definition of the crime of apartheid as it appears in the Rome Statute. The statute states that the crime of apartheid is seen to be committed when there is an institutionalized goal and action taken to discriminate and oppress another people. This is not the case in Israel, nor is it the case in Judea and Samaria.
The comparison of Israel to an apartheid state began in academic papers from the late 1980s. It then became popularized following the breakdown of the Oslo Accords. The approval of the international war crimes tribunal treaty – which stated that apartheid is a crime against humanity – brought a surge of calls to prosecute the State of Israel at the court in The Hague.
Finally, since 2005, Apartheid Week has been observed around the world, with Israel’s most extreme critics preaching the gospel of Israel as an apartheid state. The success of this campaign is so great that many of the critics of Israel and its policies have adopted the analogy. The idea has seeped in so deeply that the second result when Googling the word “apartheid” is “Israel and apartheid.” When the situation on the ground is complex, and facts can be manipulated, even serious people are tempted to believe this narrative.
Having been branded with the “apartheid” label, the facts have become almost irrelevant to the Israeli situation. Every phenomenon, every law, every statement by a politician or a public figure having to do with Jewish-Arab relations is immediately tagged as another layer in the apartheid regime supposedly at work here. Now, how can you disprove a fabrication?
In this case, though, proof exists. True, there are differences between groups in Israel. In some cases the differences are expressed along an ethnic-religious divide. And true, Israeli control of the territories, where Israeli law does not apply, creates a complex legal reality that includes characteristics of inequality and impairment of the rights of part of the residents.
On the other hand, there are checks to these phenomena and factors that critique them within the political and legal system. There may be bills tainted by discrimination and inequality, but they are not meant to create an apartheid regime. This includes the proposal to reward those who serve the state. If, by chance, these bills are passed into law, the Supreme Court can review them using powerful constitutional instruments. And so it does, including actions in the occupied territories. Moreover, the Israeli legal system does not contain a single law, regulation or military order in which racial segregation serves as a basis, or is the desired outcome.
The State of Israel is not free of injustice. It is not free of inequality, mistakes of judgment and, sometimes, deliberately evil policy. But a chasm lies between these phenomena and what can be called an “apartheid state.”
Dr. Friedman is a lecturer at the Law School of the Peres Academic Center.
