By Khaled Ali Beydoun
I commend the University of California professors who have taken
a moral stand against Israeli occupation demonstrated by their call
for divestment. The sociopolitical reality and circumstance of
Palestinian innocents in the West Bank, on numerous planes, mirrors
the South African apartheid paradigm and, in some respects, even
transcends it in degree of violence and suffocation.
To exemplify the parallel, examination of the 13 isolated West
Bank cantons, which comprise 287 enclosed areas, is functionally
equivalent to the apartheid design of South African Bantustans.
Although the analogy is vehemently discredited as too tenuous or
absurd by sympathizers of Israel, it has been echoed by the likes
of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who have endured
South African apartheid) as well as other intellectuals and leaders
across the globe.
True, the occupation of the West Bank is not perfectly congruent
with its South African precedent, but fundamentally cosmetic and
political-specific differences do not exhaust the applicability of
the comparison: Palestinians in the West Bank are enduring a
reality where they are severed from their families in
geographically neighboring, but politically inaccessible, villages
and subsequently have no mobility or freedom, much like the
indigenous Africans of South Africa.
Nevertheless, supporters of Israel will argue that its
championing of democratic ideals ultimately precludes the
applicability of the apartheid comparison. This challenge, which
logically invites another theoretical challenge is: if relating
South African apartheid to Israeli occupation is ill-fitting,
consequently, the comparison between the Israeli brand of democracy
with universal democratic precepts is exponentially bizarre.
Rabbi Norbert Weinberg compiles a list of moral/democratic
transgressions that the Arab governments have violated, many of
which I echo, but he also selectively overlooks Israel’s own
engagement in such practices. Israel is no novice to de facto or
even institutionalized racism; examining its history and
contemporary civil society reveals that not only Palestinians, but
also ethnic Jews (Falasha and Safardic Jews), are third and
second-class citizens, at best to Ashkinazi, or European Jews.
Such stratification along racial lines is derived from
ethnocentric political and cultural roots, and is hardly
democratic. Further, Israel’s founding was facilitated by
rag-tag terrorist organizations, including the Haganah and its more
extremist offshoot, the Stern Gang, who were responsible for
bombing the King David Hotel and intimidating Palestinian innocents
out of their homes. Further, Israel’s military practices of
the 1980s, most notably the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, as well
as the current oppression of Palestinian civilians is, in shape and
consequence, government-executed terrorism.
Democracy does not function so militaristically. In order to
superficially legitimize and market its democratic guise, Israel
will boast that Arabs are allowed to vote and even serve in
government, but that is only 20 percent of the entire Arab
population, and the result is the handful of Palestinians serving
in government wield no influence and are alas merely tokens.
However, raising these flawed counterarguments is finally
irrelevant to what is actually taking place in the West Bank: a
government design to systematically isolate, exhaust and ultimately
displace the Palestinian people. It is not the South African
apartheid, but monopolizing that concept to a single historical
experience is intellectually stagnant, and refusing to accept the
analogies is morally irresponsible for any person of
conscience.
Archbishop Tutu observed, “If apartheid ended, so can the
occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will
have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the
first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that
direction.”