The ‘apartheid slur’ - links that mention the term

The Canadian Jewish News - The apartheid slur
Dec 1, 2004
The apartheid slur
By LAWRENCE HART
Wednesday, 01 December 2004
Apartheid, in its literal translation from Afrikaans, means separateness, and as applied within the unique context of 20th century South Africa, it embraced racial segregation as the cornerstone of government policy and practice. From cradle to grave, skin colour was the sole determinant of where you lived and worked, what job options you had, where you went to school, how you travelled, and which health care and sports facilities were available to you. A comprehensive and rigorously enforced set of laws and prohibitions ensured that transgressors would be severely dealt with. And they were.

With the transition to majority rule under Nelson Mandela in 1994, the infrastructure of the apartheid state was dismantled and its long-hated ideology of systematized racism was dispatched to the dustbin of history. But while apartheid no longer has legal tenure in South Africa, accusations that it has found new application in Israels dealings with the Palestinians have become increasingly prevalent. Thus, we all too frequently see Israels law of return portrayed as just another instrument of a racist apartheid state, while the emerging seam zone is ominously referred to as the apartheid wall. The word bantustans connoting tribal homelands for black South Africans in the apartheid model is often used by Israels detractors to describe any emerging Palestinian state that doesnt include all of the Jewish one.

Such comparisons are fallacious. They are also calculated and malicious. Writing in the Guardian (Nov. 14), Benjamin Pogrund, one of South Africas most distinguished journalists and currently director of Yakars Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem, astutely notes that anyone who says that Israel is apartheid does not appreciate what apartheid was. He attributes clear purpose to those who are striving to make the apartheid stigma stick. That objective, he believes is to have Israel viewed as, and declared, illegitimate and to ensure that Israelis are made unwelcome abroad and that it becomes politically correct to boycott Israeli products and to discourage investment in the country.

Such punitive treatment, incidentally, is precisely what was imposed on South Africans during the apartheid era, so the trends in this propagandist charade are not that difficult to interpret.

In a world where Israel-bashing needs no calling card, the apartheid slur adds yet another weapon to an already replete stockpile. By overplaying the apartheid card at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, the anti-Israel lobby may have lost some momentum in its nefarious crusade. More recently, however, the security fence has provided that same lobby with a renewed opportunity to invoke its vile apartheid constructs as a basis for attacking Israel and Israeli interests. Promptly debunking the myths and misconceptions of these inherently false analogies, therefore, becomes that much more important.
http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7936&Itemid=86

(2002): Bishop Tutu: Compares Apartheid & NAZIs: Outrages Jews
Jun 20, 2005 Jewish allies of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to publicly protest. Tutu’s latest anti-Jewish and anti-Israel slurs.
http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=5267&;

Aftershock: anti-zionism and anti-semitism - Page 122 - David Matas - Dundurn Press Ltd., 2005 - 256 pages
Anti-Zionist slurs against Israel are not just overblown general accusations of genocide, apartheid, and so on. They are also very specific detailed accusations of alleged wrongdoing.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DYR7SqcMe9gC&pg=PA122

“Road apartheid slur” debunked | Anglican Friends of Israel
21 Oct 2005 - “Road apartheid slur” debunked. Truth and Lies... Thousands of Christians march in solidarity... On Sunday (Oct. 16), Palestinian terrorists killed three young Israelis in a drive-by terrorist shooting ...
http://www.anglicanfriendsofisrael.com/2005/10/road-apartheid-slur-debunked/

Guardian Promotes Apartheid Slur - honest reporting [February 12, 2006]
http://honestreporting.com/guardian-promotes-apartheid-slur/

Debunking Apartheid Slurs | HonestReporting
Nov 15, 2006 Debunking Apartheid Slurs. Stan. 12:12 am. Nov 16, 2006.
The analogy between apartheid and Israel is absurd. The revival of national sovereignty in the Jewish homeland is not a manifestation of European colonialism, in contrast to the white settlers (Afrikaans, English and others) who created Johannesburg and Pretoria. Jews are indigenous to the Middle East as is the Jewish national language, Hebrew. Anyone who has ever visited Israel knows that it is one of the most diverse multi-ethnic democracies in the world.
It is interesting how effective the use of buzzwords are...
http://honestreporting.com/debunking_apart/?replytocom=25432

CAMERA: Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
[2007]
A reviewer for the Washington Post charged Carter with “manufactur[ing] sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.” A reviewer for the New York Times called the book “a distortion.” According to a New Republic blog, the book is “tendentious” and “dishonest.” And CAMERA has meticulously documented and rebutted dozens of specific factual errors from Carter’s book and media appearances.

But the documentary glosses over these challenges to the accuracy of the book, and instead frames the controversy as mostly revolving about the Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in the title. Again and again, the film shows interviewers asking about the title. Again and again, we hear Carter’s rehearsed response. To be sure, the wrongheaded association of Israel with the racist South African regime elicited its share of criticism; but it may have been more interesting, not to mention educational, had the filmmaker also explored the specific challenges to the “facts” upon which Carter rests his apartheid slur.

Instead, the documentary propagates some these false facts by allowing Carter to repeat them unchallenged.

After Carter sketches a map of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, telling the camera that “this is how the holy land was divided after the 1967 war” (actually it is how it was divided after the 1948 war), he asserts that the “wall” (actually a protective barrier that is mostly fence) is “all built on Palestinian land.” Later in the film, Carter is seen repeating this assertion and pushing a reluctant CNN interviewer into parroting the claim, which originates on page 190 of Peace Not Apartheid. It is a complete fabrication. According to United Nations numbers, roughly 60 miles of barrier is being built not on “Palestinian land” but along the 200 mile boundary line between the West Bank and Israel, or in some cases inside Israel itself. Demme does not share this fact with viewers.

Even the sections of the barrier that veer into the West Bank are not built on “Palestinian land,” but rather on land claimed by the Palestinians. Despite Israeli willingness to hand over large swaths of the West Bank, this land especially territory along the barrier path remains for now disputed. In fact, sections of it would have officially become part of Israel under some international peace plans.

Carter similarly invents facts about the barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel, telling viewers that the Gaza Strip is surrounded by a “complete wall” (false) with “only two openings” (false) and that Israel controls both (false.)
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=46&x_review=31

‘Lobby’ Lies Make a Comeback
New version of anti-Israel screed finds discredited authors gaining unlikely allies
September 13, 2007 - Jonathan S. Tobin, Executive Editor
... Later in the year, former President Jimmy Carter stepped into the controversy by issuing his own anti-Israel tract Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, which, along with many of his own original slurs (the scurrilous title comparison of Israel’s presence in the territories to South African apartheid being the most notorious), supported the Walt-Mearsheimer conspiracy thesis, and also alleged that such critics of Israel were being “silenced” by the all-power “Lobby.”
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/14009/Lobby_Lies_Make_a_Comeback/

HNN
Gil Troy: Jimmy Carter’s no saint
[19 Feb 2007]
To the Editors:
According to your report about Jimmy Carter’s Brandeis University speech, he said: “This is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist.” The implication, along with previous self-pitying remarks, is that he is blameless and critics are overreacting to his Israel-Apartheid slur to squelch debate. In fact, in Carter’s bruising 1970 campaign for Georgia governor, the incumbent Carl Sanders called him “Jimmy the fabricator.” Carter was accused of bigotry when pamphlets picturing Governor Sanders with two tall, African-American basketball players were mailed to white barber shops and churches.

In 1980, fighting Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, President Carter announced the morning of the Wisconsin primary that the Iranians had made a “positive step” in solving the hostage crisis. No progress occurred but Carter won the primary. The president “no longer seemed decent and honorable, but manipulative” an aide admitted. That campaign Reaganite Republicans repeatedly condemned Carter’s foreign policy as cowardly.

“Saint Jimmy,” like all politicians, has never been above reproach. His Brandeisian amnesia simply slurs his opponents and dismisses their substantive critiques. Forty percent of Carter’s statement may be true – judging by the distortions in his recent book that seems to be his accuracy rate these days.
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35557.html

SPME: Gil Troy: Emboldening the Anti-Semites
1 Mar 2007 – ... to note the existence of initiatives such as the week in February devoted to perpetuating the apartheid slur, made the crowd restive...
http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=1891

HOW TO FIGHT CAMPUS ISRAEL-BASHERS
JERUSALEM REPORT,
April 30, 2007, p. 50
VIEWPOINT:
Gil Troy
[...]one Israeli academics 1991 article which popularized the apartheid slur.
I wish we could note these academics unpatriotic poison, applaud Israels vigorous democracy, toast Israels academic freedom, and leave it at that. But words can kill. The intellectual demonization of Israel has helped isolate Israel diplomatically, emboldening the terrorists. Moreover, I feel snookered when I hear university leaders entreating donors to build the Jewish state, without acknowledging that some of that money is used, even indirectly, to libel the Jewish national project. And I am outraged by reports of anti-Zionist intellectual bullying in some departments. We need vigorous, nuanced responses that preserve academic freedom. The flow of ideas, like blood flowing to the brain, cannot be restricted without causing harm. Academics must remain free to pursue foolish, subversive, distorted ideas, so that tomorrows wisdom can be born today. We should not starve or boycott Israeli universities. Investing in Israeli research and teaching pays great dividends, creating literate,
sophisticated, citizens and maintaining Israels leading role in todays information revolutions.
Still, a more balanced campus culture would combat educational malpractice in the classroom and promote national sanity. Universities should offer calm, broad-minded, civil alternatives to Israels bruising, polarizing political culture, not replicate it.
Paradoxically, while fighting intolerance and indoctrination, universities should also cultivate pride, patriotism, altruism, democracy, and yes, Zionism, in Israeli society. Even as professors and students think freely, universities should act responsibly. Whether they acknowledge it or not, universities express their values through the projects they fund, the problems they pinpoint. If donations can attract scientists to brain research, business professors to information systems, scholarship to womens studies, strategic investments can shape a civics agenda too. Just as plants lean toward sources of light, professors and students will respond to visionary leadership.
Recently, Yeshiva University generously endowed a Center for the Jewish Future, an in-house, activist think tank harnessing the universitys different resources to build an exciting Jewish tomorrow. Imagine what Israeli universities could accomplish with similar entities. Historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists could develop an updated Zionist vision for today.
http://www.israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type=large_advic&advice_id=5147&page_data%5Bid%5D=176&cookie_lang=en&the_session_id=56a7b518587f0d05303e9832f40cf0b0&BLUEWEBSESSIONSID=b324035e01b59ef66708f9fb8ec4be9b

LGF Pages - UWisconsin: Israeli journalist spits apartheid slur
[Apr 4, 2008]
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?link=33120_UWisconsin-_Israeli_journalis

israelinsider: Views: Where Left and Right can meet
By Gil Troy May 21, 2008
[...]Just as they discount Israel’s Russian roots, many today ignore Zionism’s liberal heritage. The kibbutz, the Histadrut labor union, the collectivist sensibility, all once made Israel the darling of the left. The Palestinians’ propaganda assault against the Jewish state, libelous arguments such as the apartheid slur, politically correct anti-Americanism, along with — let us be frank — Israel’s capitalist revolution and prolonged presence in the disputed territories — triggered this switch. To the world, today’s Zionist poster child is more likely to be a religious settler, a neoconservative intellectual, or an AIPAC lobbyist rather than the pioneering kibbutznik wannabe, fulfilling Jewish-tinged universal dreams in Israel of Marxist revolution before the 1930s or student radicalism in the 1960s.
http://israelinsider.com/Views1/12863.htm

OBAMA AND THE WOODS FUND
Jennifer Rubin
[Sep. 2008]
[...]
Abunimah co-founded and operates the Electronic Intifada, a website replete with anti-Israel slurs and which declares Israel to be an apartheid state.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-and-the-woods-fund/
http://www.think-israel.org/sep08bloged.html#sep08.87

Combatting the charge of Israel as a racist state
by David Matas
[February 17, 2009]

(Remarks prepared for delivery to the European Union of Jewish Students, Geneva, Switzerland 8 February 2009)

Antisemitism is a mutating virus. Defeat the virus in one form; it appears in another. It is possible to stamp out one anti-Jewish libel or another; but antisemitism remains.

Jews are accused of double loyalty. To show their undivided loyalty, they join the military forces of their countries. So, in the case of French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, documents were fabricated to frame him as a spy for Germany.

Jews are accused of rootlessness, being cosmopolitan. So they form a state. Then antisemites demonize the state as a criminal state, mutating antisemitism into anti-Zionism.

Jews are accused of killing Christ, of killing Christian children to use their blood for the baking of matzoh. The various Christian denominations finally take a stand against these libels. So antisemitism leaps from Christianity to Islamic fundamentalism. Jews are accused of killing Palestinian children.

Antisemites killed Jews in such numbers and with such barbarity in the Holocaust that the very idea of antisemitism was discredited. So antisemites deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Racial typology in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a popular and scientific fad. Jews were called an evil, greedy race bent on world domination. In reaction to the racism run rampant of the Holocaust, the global community created anti-racist standards. Since the Holocaust, anti-racism has become as widely accepted as racism was before the Holocaust. So, now the Jewish state is accused of racism.

The constancy of antisemitism, its ability to mutate to overcome all defenses, means that antisemitism will always be with us. A bigotry which could survive as thorough a refutation as the Holocaust will survive anything.

We who would defend against antisemitism must be aware of its infinite adaptability. Fighting only against old forms of antisemitism will not get us very far. We have always to be prepared to identify its changed modern guises and combat those.

Here, I want to address one mutation in particular, the accusation of the Jewish state as racist. Labelling as racist the worst victims of racism both demeans the victims and stretches credulity. Yet, it has become a commonplace of modern antisemitic discourse.

We are approaching the review of the World Conference against Racism. The Conference was held in Durban South Africa in September 2001. The review is coming up in Geneva in March this year. Though the Durban review is nominally supposed to be against racism, you can be sure it will inundated by bigots attempting to pin the racist label on the Jewish state.

What I would propose to do here is to attempt to describe three of the forms the charges against the Jewish state for racism would take and suggest answers to those charges. In doing this, I am well aware that antisemites and anti-Zionists will not be convinced. Refute one form of antisemitism and they will simply move on to another. But there will be some people who do not follow these matters closely and will be bewildered by these strange accusations. To them, explanations must be given.

1. The Law of Return
It is said that the Israeli Law of Return is racist because it allows Jews admission to Israel on the basis that they are Jewish. One answer to that is that the Holocaust was possible because there was no state to which the Jews could flee. If Israel had existed before World War II, the Holocaust would not have happened. Indeed, if Israel had existed before World War II, it is possible that World War II would not have happened. Lucy Davidowicz, in her book The War against the Jews 1933-1945 writes that, in the minds of the Nazi German Leaders, World War II was a cover for its planned murder of the Jews .

Even after the War, it was easier for the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust to get out of the displaced persons camps and find resettlement than it was for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Before the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish survivors sat in refugee camps in Europe with no relocation in sight.

A right of refuge is recognized in the Israeli Law of Return. The Israeli Law of Return is more than righting a historical wrong. By providing a haven to survivors of the Holocaust, it realizes a fundamental principle of refugee protection, that it is inhumane to require a severely persecuted refugee to return to live in the country of persecution .

Moreover, the Law of Return has contemporary relevance because of the wave of antisemitism unleashed in the Middle East by the wars against Israel and in Central and Eastern Europe by the collapse of Communism and its replacement by chauvinism. Only Israel offers an escape to every single victim of continuing antisemitism.

The United General Assembly passed a resolution in 1975 which said “Zionism is racism”. The resolution was repealed in 1991. The phrase is a blatant form of language distortion. Its repeal did not mean that the desire to obliterate the State of Israel and right to self-determination of the Jewish people has ended. The desire rather takes other more indirect linguistic forms. At first in addition to, and subsequently, instead of calling Zionism a form of racism, member states of the United Nations have called the Israeli Law of Return racist.

This bandying about of the charge of racism, throwing it at Israel, the state of the survivor community of the most vicious racism this planet has ever seen, aside from its perversity and cruelty, ignores what racism is. Race has no objective, scientific, anthropological meaning. There are no human races, only one human race. Race exists as a persecutory concept only. The concept of race survives only to identify discrimination and persecution, and to provide protection against it.

The United Nations Convention on Refugees obligates signatory states to provide protection to those who have a well founded fear of persecution by reason of five listed grounds. One of those grounds is race. To fit within this ground, the person does not actually have to be of a certain race that is targeted for persecution. Such a requirement would be meaningless, since objectively there are no races. Rather, the person has to be perceived by the persecutor to be of a certain race that the agent of persecution has decided to victimize. Race is what ever the persecutory agent thinks it is.

The concept of a race has to be distinguished from the concept of a people. The concept of a people is the exact opposite of the concept of a race. A race is defined by the other, by the persecutory agent. A people is self defined, by the people themselves. Integral to the right of self-determination of peoples is the right to determine their own membership. Once outsiders can say who is and who is not a member of any given people, the right to self-determination of that people is gone.

The Israeli Law of Return is an integral part of the exercise of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people, because it is an expression by the Jewish people of who are their members. Labelling the Law of Return of Israel as racist is yet another form, like labelling Zionism as racism, of delegitimization and denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people.

Just as anti-Zionism is a form of racism, by denying to the Jewish people the right of self-determination, so is opposition to the Israeli Law of Return a form of racism, by denying to the Jewish people the right to determine their own membership. The right to self-determination can not exist without the right to self definition. To say that the Jewish people do not have the right to self definition is to say that the right of self-determination exists for other peoples, but not for the Jews.

It is also said against the Israeli Law of Return that is racist because it is based on ancestry or blood lines. But the law is not based on blood.

The Israeli Law of Return considers a person as Jewish if the person has become converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion . Judaism is a religion which anyone can join. Judaism does not proselytize, but does accept converts. It is impossible to call a law racist when anyone who chooses, by converting to Judaism, can take advantage of the law.

Race is sometimes identified with colour. Yet, Jews come in every colour. There are black Jews, Falashas, who were granted the benefit of the Law of Return, and indeed airlifted from Ethiopia to Israel by the Israeli government. It is impossible to consider a law racist that encompasses all races.

Every citizenship law of which I am aware allows parents to pass on their citizenship to their children. For instance, a child born of a Canadian parent is Canadian, no matter where in the world the child is born. The child can maintain Canadian citizenship throughout his or her life without ever entering Canada, provided that the person establishes a substantial connection with Canada . A citizenship law cannot be racist simply because it is based on birth.

The basic law of Germany allows anyone to become a citizen who is the descendant of a person who was a German citizen and was deprived of that citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 . The person does not have to be a first generation descendant. This German law is itself informally called a Law of Return. No United Nations resolution has ever suggested that this German Law of Return is racist.

The Israeli Law of Return distinguishes between those who are Jewish and not Jewish, but does not discriminate against those who are not Jewish. Not every legal distinction amounts to discrimination. A prohibition against discrimination does not encompass any law that has as its object improving the lot of the disadvantaged, including those disadvantaged because of race or religion .

The Israeli Law of Return exists as a protection against the racism Jews have suffered and continue to suffer. The law is a form of affirmative action, affirming that Jews who are at risk elsewhere around the world can seek and obtain protection in Israel.

In principle, every person who is the victim of antisemitic discrimination should be considered Jewish under the Law of Return, whether, objectively, the person has any cultural or religious ties with Judaism or not. If racists target a person as Jewish, then a law and a state created to protect Jews should offer protection to that person. Offering protection to the victims of racism does not make the helpers racist. Acknowledging the existence of racism and the need to defend against it is the antithesis of racism.

The Law of Return encompasses within its definition of a Jew those that had been targeted by the Nazi race laws. The Law or Return includes in its definition of a Jew every person who was born of a Jewish mother . The Law further provides that the rights of a Jew are vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and who has voluntarily changed his religion .

The Jewish community has learned through bitter experience who the people are that are likely to be targeted by antisemites for their hatred and destruction. The State of Israel, accordingly, through the Law of Return, offers protection to all such people. It confounds logic, language and common sense to argue that a law designed to protect targets of racist persecution is itself racist.

Calling the Israeli Law of Return racist means rejecting the notion that Jews have been disadvantaged and, in many countries, are still disadvantaged. This sort of labelling of the Law of Return is Holocaust denial or Holocaust trivialization in another form.

2. Discrimination
There is constant criticism that, in Israel, there is discrimination against Palestinians or Arabs or Moslems, or non-Jews. Despite that criticism, Israel is committed to equality in principle and the vocation of Israel as a Jewish state does not change or temper that commitment to equality. The Israeli Declaration of Independence provides that the State of Israel “will establish equal social and political rights for all its citizens without distinguishing on the basis of religion, race or gender.” One of the five books of Moses states: “you shall have only one law, the stranger shall be as a citizen” .

Israeli Justice Aharon Barak, in a speech given to the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University in June 2000, in Toronto said:

“Zionism was born to negate racism. It learned to know the extent to which racist treatment, dictated by religious or national belonging, can degrade human character. This Zionism is opposed to any patterns of discrimination on the basis or religion or nationality.”
The Asian preparatory meeting for the Durban World Conference against Racism, held February 2001, in Teheran, said nothing about the imprisonment in Iran of thirteen Jewish community activists for no other reason than that they are Jewish. Nor did it condemn or comment on racism in any of the countries that actually attended the Conference. Israel, though physically located within the region from which countries were invited to the Teheran conference, was not allowed to attend. Yet, Israel, at Teheran, was criticized as being racist.

Israel is the only Jewish state. For the regional gathering for the area of the world that includes Israel to deny admission to Israel, to condemn racism in Israel and to say nothing about racism in any other country, is blatant discrimination not only against Israel as a state, but against Jews generally.

No state should be judged only by its professed ideals. It should as well be judged by its practice. It is legitimate to criticize discriminatory practices wherever they are found, whether in Israel or elsewhere. However, to criticize racial discrimination only in Israel and in no other country of the world becomes a political act of selective criticism, itself a form of discrimination against the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Moreover, Israel is a democratic state which lives by the rule of law. There are internal remedies for discrimination – an independent judiciary, access to the courts, a free media.

The principle of equality has, in Israel, the force of law. Any minority subject to discrimination in Israel has access to the courts and a legal remedy available to counter that discrimination. As noted by Court President Barak in a 2006 Supreme Court case:

“It has therefore been held, in a long line of cases, that discrimination against Israeli Arabs merely because they are Arabs violates the equality that is enjoyed by all Israelis.”
Here is one example, amongst many. The government adopted a decision to establish national priority areas in outlying parts of the country. The towns and residents of these areas were to be given benefits, including in the field of education.

Petitioners attacked the legality of the government decision on the the basis that hardly any Arab towns were included in the national priority areas. The government argued that the criterion for determining the national priority areas was purely geographic and that there were few Arab towns in the outlying parts of the country. The government also argued that other measures had been adopted to improve education in Arab towns. The Court held in February 2006 that the government decision should be set aside because it was discriminatory in its result.

When domestic remedies are available, international remedies are unnecessary. Accessing the international remedies for claimed Israeli breaches of the principle of equality without first exhausting domestic remedies is an abuse of these remedies.

3. The charge of apartheid
The attacks on Israel as an apartheid state, for anyone who knows both Israel and apartheid, have to be, at least, superficially, bewildering. Attacking Israel as an apartheid state is similar to attacking the Jewish community for using the blood of Christian children to make matzos.

The suggestion that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzos is disgusting. But it is more than that. For anyone who knows Jews and matzos, the attack is odd. The accusation is so obviously at variance with reality, one has to wonder how or why anyone could possibly come to that conclusion. The same can be said for the apartheid libel.

Basic to apartheid was the denationalization of blacks, because they were black and allocation of nationality in state created bantustans or homelands. Blacks assigned to bantustans were subject to influx controls and pass laws. The objective of apartheid was to denationalize all blacks, to assign every black to one of ten bantustans. Blacks were forcibly removed from where they lived to their designated bantustans.

Israel has not since its inception taken away vested Israeli citizenship of even one person on the basis of identity. Israel has not created designated territories within its borders to which it has forcibly removed its own citizens who are different. Indeed, when one starts to look at what apartheid really was, any comparison between Israel today and South Africa at the time of apartheid becomes ludicrous .

The facts which critics of Israel marshal in support of the charge that Israel is an apartheid state are facts common to every state. Israel chooses its citizens. Israel has a nationality law. Some people under that law are citizens. Others are not. Some can become immigrants, residents and citizens. Others may not. Those who are or can become Israeli citizens can enter and remain in Israel. Others who have no right of entry must stay out or leave. Citizenship and the right to citizenship can be inherited or passed down from parents to children.

Every state in the world, to my knowledge, has principles like these. Calling Israel an apartheid state because it distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens means every state in the world is an apartheid state.

The charge of Israel is an apartheid state is not just a slur against Israel; it is a devaluation of the whole apartheid movement. To make a charge of apartheid against Israel, aside from its wild inaccuracy, its incitement to hatred and its hurtfulness, is a disrespect, a trivialization of the suffering of the true victims of apartheid. The fact that some are prepared to devalue the struggle against apartheid in their anti-Israel monomania shows how little regard those who levy this charge have for human rights.

Given its disconnect with reality, why is the charge of apartheid being laid? One can ask the same about any slur against Jews or the Jewish state. Why is the blood libel made against Jews? The answer of course is antisemitism, a hatred of Jews.

Once we refute unanswerably the accusation that Jews use Christian baby blood to make matzo or that Israel is an apartheid state, antisemites do not become philosemites or even tolerant. They just move on to other antisemitic slurs.

What matters so much is not the specifics of the slur as the fact that it is a slur. If one slur loses traction because it becomes to the public at large so obviously silly and refuted, antisemites just try on another slur for acceptance.

The slur that Jews use Christian baby blood to make matzo used to be common. But now it is less so because on its face it is implausible.

We are a more sophisticated world today than when the slur of Jews using Christian baby blood to make matzo held sway. But that does not mean that so much that antisemitism has disappeared as that it has taken more modern, more sophisticated forms.

The agenda of those who utter slur that Israel is an apartheid state and those who claim that Jews use Christian baby blood to make matzos is similar, a power agenda. In both cases, the purveyors of hate seek power on the backs of the Jewish community.

With the older antisemitic myths, the hate mongers seek power in a state where Jews are a minority by trying to solidify around themselves a coterie of hatred drawn from the majority. In the case of the newer antisemitism, centred on the Jewish state, in which Jews are the majority, the aim is the destruction of the state. Anti-Israel, anti-Zionist slurs aim to win public support for dismantlement of the Jewish state.

The traditional antisemitism demonized Jews as individuals, as a faith, as a community. The new antisemitism demonizes Jews as a people. The Jewish state is charged with every crime known to humanity. The Jewish people are indicted as actual or presumed abettors of these imaginary crimes.

Apartheid is a South African Afrikaans language word meaning apartness. The apartness to which anti-Zionists refer when they charge Israel with apartheid is not a separation between various Israeli citizens. It is an apartness between Israelis and non-Israelis. To be specific, the apartness to which anti-Zionists refer is the separation between Israeli citizens on the one hand and the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza on the other.

Those who say Israel is an apartheid state are saying that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are being kept apart from Israel. Yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens of Israel. When Israel keeps Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza out of Israel, it is acting no differently from any other state which keeps out non-citizens. Giving Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a right of entry into Israel would allow entry into Israel of a massive population different in religion, language and culture from the majority, ending the character and identity of Israel of a Jewish state, terminating the right of the Jewish people to self determination.

In South Africa, the ending of apartheid did not mean the end of South Africa. It did not mean introducing a huge foreign population with a different language, religion, and culture, a population larger than the local population. Yet, that is what those who say Israel is an apartheid state are advocating.

The attack on Israel as an apartheid state then is another way of saying there should be no Jewish state but a larger state including the West Bank and Gaza where Jews are in the minority. It is another way of saying that there is a right of return, that Palestinians have a right to move en masse to Israel and render Jews a minority within the current boundaries of Israel.

The advocacy of Israel as an apartheid state is not just an advocacy against the existence of Israel. It is also an advocacy against Israeli self defense. What are the primary exhibits in the case for Israel as an apartheid state? They are the check points and the security barrier. Yet the checkpoints and security barrier exist because of terrorism. If terrorist attacks, suicide bombings against Israel stopped, the security barrier and checkpoints would come down.

Checkpoints exist at every airport in the world, for the same reason, to prevent terrorism. No one anywhere else claims that the existence of these checkpoints is akin to apartheid. Criticising Israeli checkpoints or the security barrier means saying that Israeli self defense is illegitimate.

The checkpoints and security barrier at least are real, though their purpose is misdescribed. Another element in the charge of apartheid is not real, the charge that Arabs can not buy land in Israel.

80.4 % of the land in Israel is owned by the government, 13.1 % is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and 6.5 % is privately owned. There are no state restrictions based on identity on the sale of private land.

None of the public land can be sold to anyone. The phoney charge of apartheid is based on the claim that 93.5% of land in Israel can not be sold to Arabs; a claim which ignores that this land can not be sold to Jews either .

The JNF, acting according to its charter, purchased land for the settlement of Jewish immigrants. JNF lands are administered by a government agency subject, in principle, to the restriction that the land is for the settlement of Jewish immigrants.

In practice, JNF land is leased to Arab citizens of Israel, on both a short and long term basis. The land in question is traded from the JNF to the government so that it can be leased out on a long term basis to non-Jewish immigrants and the JNF receives other land in return. Far from discriminating against Arabs, Israeli land policy, in some cases, favours Arabs, under the guise of affirmative action .

It is closer to reality to accuse the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza of apartheid than to accuse Israel of apartheid. Arabs and Muslims live in Israel proper in safety. It is impossible for Jews to live in the West Bank or Gaza except under armed guard. When Israel pulled out of Gaza, the Jews who lived there had to be evacuated for their own safety. The hatred against Jews in Gaza was so intense that the economic installations they left behind for Palestinians to use, Hamas and its followers destroyed out of spite. Arabs who sell land to Jews have been murdered because of those sales.

The old antisemites said that the only good Jew was a dead Jew. The new antisemites say that the only good Jewish state is a dead Jewish state, one which no longer exists.

The charge of Israel as an apartheid state is one of litany of charges, one member of a cast of Halloween characters which includes genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing. Discredit the charge of apartheid and anti-Zionists will levy other charges. Discredit them all and the anti-Zionism remains.

The aim of these charges is not improving the behaviour of the Israel government in place at the time. The last thing anti-Zionists want is a better Jewish state.

The aim is rather delegitimization through demonization. Anti-Zionists want to show that Israel has no right to exist by showing that the very existence of a Jewish state means giving scope to evil.

Anti-Zionist condemnations of Israel work backwards. Anti-Zionists move from opposition to Israel to charges against Israel rather than from wrongdoings by Israel to anti-Zionism. Their starting point is the vocabulary of condemnation rather than the practices of Israel. Any unsavoury verbal weapon that comes to hand is used to club Israel and its supporters. The reality of what happens in Israel is ignored. What matters is the condemnation itself. For anti-Zionists, the more repugnant the accusation made against Israel the better, because the more that accusation supports the anti-Zionist cause.

The purpose of the whole enterprise can be seen in the draft document circulated before the 2001 NGO Forum against Racism held in Durban South Africa . The working draft circulated before the Forum called the State of Israel, and not any of its specific practices or policies, as “this barbaric and inhumane project” .

Amongst all the fanciful charges anti-Zionists throw at the Jewish state, anti-Zionists have decided to give pride of place to apartheid. Apartheid is universally condemned. Its onetime supporters, primarily in South Africa, have long since abandoned it. There was a global coalition opposed to apartheid which helped to bring about its downfall.

Anti-Zionists saw and remembered this global anti-apartheid effort. They dream of constructing a similar global anti-Zionist effort. The simplest and most direct way for them to do so is to label Israel as an apartheid state.

Anti-Zionists pursue the strategy of constructing a new anti-apartheid like coalition against Israel. The NGO Forum held at Durban South Africa in August and September 2001 set out this strategy plainly. The Programme of Action stated: “We the NGO Forum…Call for the launch of an international anti-Israel Apartheid movement as implemented against South African Apartheid through a global solidarity campaign network….”

Apartheid serves as a front, a come on, for the anti-Zionist movement. The universal abhorrence of apartheid becomes a means to introduce the gullible into the anti-Zionist agenda.

Anti-Zionism has bred two siblings – incitement to hatred and terrorism. Those who fall prey to these twin incitements, those who are imbued with hatred and prompted to terrorism, become destructive and even suicidal in their terrorist ambitions.

Those cognitively distorted by hatred are disadvantaged. The disadvantage is not just mental, because of their poor grasp of reality. It is also physical because of their self destructive terrorist tendencies and the defences the targets of their terrorism naturally put in place.

This disadvantage is in turn used by anti-Zionists to generate sympathy for the devil. Anti-Zionist propaganda generally and the apartheid slur in particular are decontextualized from the terrorist threat. If Israel had no need for self defense, if their were no terrorism, if their had been no suicide bombers, both the check points and the security barrier would have been unnecessary.

As noted earlier, this denunciation of the check points and the barrier is a rejection of Israeli self defense. But there is more to these denunciations than that. They are an attempt, through decontextualization, through the label of apartheid, to attract sympathy for those subject to the check points or interrupted by the security barrier.

Anti-Zionists have designed a vicious circle. Incitement to hatred and terrorism leads to terrorism. The targets of terrorism develop mechanisms of self defence. The decontextualization of these mechanisms, the characterization of these mechanisms as apartheid, makes them seem inhumane. This apartheid characterization then becomes part of the incitement to hatred and terrorism, fuelling the fires of terrorism already well lit.

The fact that there is no resemblance whatsoever between true apartheid and the State of Israel have not stopped anti-Zionists for a moment. On the contrary, the true anti-Zionist is one loyal to the cause no matter what the reality.
—
David Matas is a Winnipeg lawyer and senior honourary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada.
http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=9687

SPEAKER ON CAMPUS: Matas criticizes Apartheid Week
Lawyer argues event qualifies as hate-speech
By Bernard Rudny

Published: Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Updated: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 17:09

Human rights lawyer David Matas gave a speech at the Moot Court on Friday, arguing that Israeli Apartheid Week should be banned from university campuses.

Matas is the senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, and was recently awarded the Order of Canada for his work in human rights, immigration, and refugee law. His lecture, entitled “Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the New Anti-Semitism,” was co-sponsored by the Jewish Law Students’ Association and the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research’s Student Israel-Advocacy Program.

Oliver Moore, a fourth-year law student and head of the JLSA’s advocacy committee, explained that the lecture was a response to Israeli Apartheid Week at McGill and other universities.

“David Matas is a legal expert on legal questions relating to Israeli Apartheid Week,” Moore said. “The idea was to bring a little bit of hard legal expertise-especially given the fact that we’re law students-to bear on the issue.”

Matas argued that Israeli Apartheid Week demonizes Israel and the Jewish people, and is therefore a form of anti-Semitism. He called the comparison of Israel to Apartheid South Africa “ludicrous,” and suggested that such rhetoric qualifies as hate speech. Matas also repeatedly compared current criticisms of Israel to past anti-Semitic myths.

“The agenda of those who utter slurs against Israel for imaginary crimes, and those who claimed that Jews use Christian baby blood to make matzoh, is a similar agenda: a power agenda,” Matas said. “The aim of these charges against Israel is not to [change] the behaviour of the Israeli government. … The aim is rather delegitimization through demonization.”

However, Matas’s definition of “the new anti-Semitism” raised a few eyebrows at the lecture. Alexandra Dodger, a second-year law student, questioned whether Israeli Apartheid Week qualifies as hate speech under Canada’s Criminal Code.

“The term Israeli Apartheid Week might be inflammatory to some people,” she said. “But it’s a bit of a leap of logic, to me, to say that calling Israel any name is anti-Semitic. … I’m not confident that it crosses the line where it’s incitement to cause violence towards a specific group-and that’s usually the standard for hate speech.”

Matas was particularly concerned with the role of universities in hosting Israeli Apartheid Week events. He described these events as “self-contained propaganda exercises” which don’t represent the full diversity of viewpoints or promote open debate. Matas also compared Israeli Apartheid Week to the Institute of Historical Review, an American Holocaust denial organization, saying that both of them disseminate hate speech under the auspices of academic freedom.

“It’s not just advocates of the slur that Israel is an Apartheid state that gravitate towards universities,” he said. “All hatemongers do, because of the credibility it gives their propaganda.”

Although Matas asserted that Israeli Apartheid Week meets the standard of criminal hate speech,...
http://www.mcgilltribune.com/news/speaker-on-campus-matas-criticizes-apartheid-week-1.1627100

Do Arabs and Jews realize how much they look alike?
SETH J. FRANTZMAN
06/10/2009 23:43

Artist’s project asks: Can 2 people who look so similar really be enemies?

A new coexistence project entitled Enemies by Swiss artist Olivier Suter seeks to show how people define the “other.” Suter noticed that in many conflicts people come to hate and stereotype an “other” and ascribe all sorts of differences, particularly ethnic ones, to their enemy. He believes that if he can show that most people locked in deadly conflict look alike they will have no reason to be enemies. Towards that end he received backing from Charlatan, a Swiss-based artists collective, to publish an advertisement in March 2008 showing eight unidentified people and asking readers to submit photos of anyone who looked like them. He had chosen eight Palestinians and by publishing his “wanted” ad in Haaretz he was hoping to get pictures of Israeli Jews. Sure enough he received many of them. His final selection included a picture of an Israeli girl who remarkably resembles, almost identically, a Palestinian boy from Beit Hanina. The project is not limited to Israel. He intends to embark on a similar stunt in Belgium, showing that Flemish and French speakers look alike. Next he is going to Africa and will prove that Hutus and Tutsis, the latter the victim of the Rwandan genocide, look alike. The implication is clear: Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, look alike. Since we look alike there is no reason for a conflict. Suter asks, “Can two people who look so similar that they could be mistaken for identical twins really be enemies?” The project also seeks to show that by hating the other we are in affect hating ourselves since we are all the same. Those campaigning for a color-blind world have long championed this tune in their statement “one race: human.” But while this project theoretically should make us think twice about the way we view the Palestinian “other,” it also has a lot to say about accusations of Israeli racism and apartheid.

ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISTS and extremists who write about Israel in the West tend to portray its Jews as white and European, and Arabs as dark and “indigenous.” This is part of the rhetoric that wants to connect Israel to the policies of apartheid South Africa. The overtones of this racial lens of the conflict can often be found in anti-Israel material, such as Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children. It is perpetuated in more obscure ways by media outlets that often include pictures of headscarf-clad Palestinian women and very light skinned, even blond, Israelis. It is more blatant among fringe extremist groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Review, where Lauren Ray wrote in the fall of 2003 that they were “organizing and educating about the nature of Israel’s white supremacy and colonialism.” Tal Nitzan, a Hebrew University M.A. student, authored a 2008 thesis, supported by sociology professor Eyal Ben-Arie, in which she claimed that IDF soldiers don’t rape Arab women because they are racist. Olivier Suter’s project deserves attention for this reason. It shows the degree to which the “racist” and “apartheid” slur aimed at Israel is a myth. There are great differences between Jews and Arabs and Palestinians and Israelis, just as there are great differences within the two groups: between Yemenite and Persian Jews, between Hebronite and Jerusalemite Arabs, between Beduin and Druse. There are certainly elements of racism within Israel’s multicultured society, such as that which sometimes is felt between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, or even between Beduin with African ancestry and Beduin with Arab ancestry in the town of Rahat. But it is very far from a racial conflict.

In a 2003 article in the Gotham Gazette, an on-line magazine focusing on New York, J.E. Safa noted that “Arabs come in all shapes and sizes and colors; they are not all dark haired and dark eyed.” The same might be said of Jews. Surely Suter’s project reminds us of this. If only the Israel- and Jew-hating activists who recently assaulted Israel’s ambassadors to Spain and Argentina, barricaded Jews in Hillel at York University and rioted over tennis star Andy Ram in Sweden, all in the name of “anti-racism,” could see behind their own myths of Israel and the Jewish other. The writer is a PhD student in geography at the Hebrew University and runs the Terra Incognita Journal blog.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=145131

Center Field: Treat the apartheid slur the A-word like the N-word
By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 8-25-09
http://giltroyzionism.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/apartheid-slur/
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/troy/entry/treat_the_apartheid_slur_the

Cape Argus (South Africa) August 2009
Apartheid slur is an insult to Israelis.(News). August 13, 2009. Another missile fired from Gaza at the Israelis. Just a footnote at the bottom of the page, hardly noticeable. This apparently is the norm.

If the Israelis don’t reply, which they sometimes reluctantly do, the provocation will continue and indeed intensify - until hell breaks loose. What a tricky and horrid situation.

It’s easy to be an armchair critic and hurl stones at a man defending his sovereignty. It’s easy too to understand Palestinian anger and resentment. But to say that the situation over there is akin to apartheid is sheer mischief-making.

The Israeli state and indeed parliament (Knesset) consists of members from every ethnic group..
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-206994393.html

Israel’s equal rights for all - Letters, Opinion - Belfasttelegraph.co.uk ... (1 Sep 2009) ... sitting in the same parks, cinemas and theatres - so lets bin Eamonn’s apartheid slur straight away and address the very real issues of
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/letters/israelrsquos-equal-rights-for-all-14475869.html?startindex=0

Black Students Blast the “Israeli Apartheid” Slur
http://www.jewpi.com/black-students-blast-the-israeli-apartheid-slur/
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Israelated/~3/ZzIoEAj82jE/black-students-blast-israeli-apartheid.html

CAMERA: Simon’s Smear - Jan 30, 2009
In the January 25th episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes entitled “Is Peace Out of Reach,” correspondent Bob Simon teamed up with Palestinian politician and partisan Mustafa Barghouti to promote the Palestinian view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, heaping blame on Israel and exculpating the Palestinians for the absence of peace. In a caricature of Israeli villainy and Palestinian victimhood Simon presented a simple fable: a two-state solution, the key to peace, is thwarted by stubborn Israeli settlers.
... propaganda including the slur that Israel practices apartheid...
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_print=1&x_context=6&x_article=1619

The “Israel Apartheid” Lie
March 5, 2009
[...]
The comparison is so inapt that it would be laughable were it not so insulting. In apartheid-era South Africa, black citizens were totally disenfranchised, subject to oppressive laws that controlled every aspect of their behavior, and completely segregated from the ruling white minority. In Israel, on the other hand, both Jewish and Arab citizens have equal protection under the law, enjoy freedom of religion and speech, and full voting rights. In fact, Israels 120-member parliament, the Knesset, includes 12 Arab Israeli members.

What could be the possible motivation of those who apply this word, which has such evil connotations, to the Middle Easts only democracy? Benjamin Pogrund, a South African Jew now living in Israel who saw firsthand the horrible oppression and misery caused by the apartheid system in his native country, sums it up like this: Apartheid is used in this case and elsewhere because it comes easily to hand: it is a lazy label for the complexities of the Middle East conflict. It is also used because, if it can be made to stick, then Israel can be made to appear to be as vile as was apartheid South Africa and seeking its destruction can be presented to the world as an equally moral cause.

Pogrund also sums up the vast difference between apartheid-era South Africa and Israel in human terms. Two years ago I had major surgery in a Jerusalem hospital, he says. The surgeon was Jewish, the anesthetist was Arab, the doctors and nurses who looked after me were Jews and Arabs. Jews and Arabs share meals in restaurants and travel on the same trains, buses and taxis, and visit each others homes. Could any of this possibly have happened under apartheid? Of course not.
[...]
If they chose to do so, the Israel apartheid protesters could refocus their indignation on other countries and regions where real human rights violations are all too common. In Saudi Arabia, for example, there is no such thing as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, and women are second-class citizens under the law. In Iran, politically motivated killings and kidnappings are common, ethnic and religious minorities are harshly repressed, and freedom of the press is nonexistent. In Zimbabwe, government security forces regularly kill, unlawfully imprison, and torture opponents in order to suppress dissent. In Hamas-controlled Gaza, as well as parts of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, a small remaining population of Christians is regularly harassed, intimidated, and even murdered by radical Islamists.

Yet, the Israel Apartheid Week protesters have nothing to say about the gross human rights abuses that routinely occur elsewhere. Why? Because their real agenda is not to improve the plight of Palestinians, but to attack Israel. The apartheid slur is just another way for Israels enemies to try to delegitimize and undermine the Jewish state by comparing its self-defense measures to the brutal discrimination of an evil regime. The comparison is false. Those who make it reveal their own dishonesty, hatreds, and biases ... and nothing about Israel.
http://www.ifcj.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=26309&news_iv_ctrl=1481

WJC head urges Zuma to denounce unfair ‘apartheid - Jerusalem Post -
Aug 30, 2009 WJC head urges Zuma to denounce unfair ‘apartheid’ slurs against Israel ... to denounce comparisons of Israel to apartheid South Africa.
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=153333
WJC - WJC head urges Zuma to denounce unfair ‘apartheid’ slurs ...
WJC head urges Zuma to denounce unfair ‘apartheid’ slurs against Israel.
http://mail.worldjewishcongress.org/media_press_articles_2009/090831_jpost.shtml

Hate-Fest, Starring Jane Fonda - Op-Eds - Israel National News
Sep 16, 2009 They say “Apartheid” where there is no Apartheid. ... Noam Chomsky, who can always be counted on when it’s time to slur the Jewish State...
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/articles/article.aspx/9054

Worldview - Israeli Response: Accusations of Apartheid Slur Israel
[9/23/2009]
http://www.wbez.org/episode-segments/israeli-response-accusations-apartheid-slur-israel
http://osh-net-226-131.onshore.net/content.aspx?audioID=36968

Lost Worlds Year 2009 - 29 Jan 2010 - Then came remarks from former US President Jimmy Carter, ... rebuttal in Washington Post from Michael Kinsley on “Carter’s apartheid slur”.
http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/lostworlds/timeline/year2008.htm

Israel, Democracy, and the Apartheid Myth
by David Saks
[1 Jan 2010]
[...]
DISCRIMINATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel has its faults, but it remains the only true democracy in the Middle East, one whose laws bear no serious comparison not only with the late, unlamented white minority regime in apartheid South Africa but with practically every other country in the region.

Widespread discrimination exists throughout the Middle East. Primarily, this is religious in nature, with the dominant Islamic faith being used in various ways to deny religious minorities, including Jews, equal status with their Muslim compatriots. It can, however, also take racial-ethnic forms, such as legalized discrimination against the descendants of Arab refugees in Lebanon and against the Kurdish minority in Syria. Gender discrimination, of course, is both notorious and ongoing throughout the Middle East.

That being said, in a matter such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that so sorely needs a clear-headed, sober analysis to clarify the many issues involved, it does not help merely to respond to propaganda with equally one-sided counter-propaganda. Israel’s many virtues concerning its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities (especially when seen in the context of how such minorities are treated in other Middle Eastern countries) need to be publicized. This alone can go a long way towards dispelling the lurid images of a rogue racist state that its detractors have conjured up.

In conclusion, in order to disprove an accusation that someone is a villain, it is not necessary to prove that he is a saint. In other words, it should not be required to demonstrate that Israel is a faultless utopia in order to refute charges that it is an apartheid state. Suffice it to say that comparisons between the notorious apartheid system and modern-day Israeli society are baseless, and should be dismissed for what they are—a politically motivated slur against the State and people of Israel.
http://www.midstreamthf.com/2010winter/feature.html#f2
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Israel,+democracy,+and+the+apartheid+myth.-a0217604300

Let’s Launch “Arab Apartheid Week” - Fundamentally Freund ... [3/12/2010]
And so, as usual, the only democracy in the Middle East once again finds itself on the receiving end of yet another indefensible canard, accused of one of modernity’s greatest political sins without any basis or justification.

Simply put, this slur cannot be allowed to stand. It is an insult to Israel and its democracy, and dangerously analogous to asserting that Zionism is a form of racism. If allowed to take hold in the public’s consciousness, it could have far-reaching and extremely damaging effects on support for Israel in the near- and long-term.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4127

Israeli Apartheid Week’s Distortion of Reality
The campaign against Israel is about dehumanization and elementary prejudice
by Asher Susser
JPC Exclusive
March 15, 2010
The association of Israel with apartheid is a propagandistic fabrication. Anyone even remotely familiar with Israel and apartheid South Africa would immediately recognize that this is an ignorant defamatory comparison. It is made not to de-legitimize Israel’s occupation of the West Bank but to de-legitimize the State of Israel itself and to pave the way for a Middle East without Israel. This is what these people are talking about. Those who allow their activities, unwittingly, or not, are partaking in this war against Israel. This is sending the Middle East peace process back by half a century.

The comparison of the apartheid South African ruling minority with the Jews of Israel does not hold any water for many reasons, but firstly because of the diametrically opposed demographic reality whereby the Jewish Israelis are the overwhelming majority in their country, which the whites never were in South Africa. The Palestinians in pre-1967 Israel constitute about 17-18 percent of the total population. Whatever one may have to say about Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, and they are not flawless nor free of tensions and problems of inequality and discrimination, as in many multi-ethnic societies, they are not founded on a legal infrastructure of racial discrimination.

Moreover, as is well known, the Arabs in Israel are equal citizens of the state by law and have equal access to the political process, the courts, the education system, universal health care and social welfare. One man one vote was an essential component of the Israeli political system from the day it was founded. None of this applied in apartheid South Africa where the black majority, which was some 85 percent of the population, was lorded over by a miniscule white minority, had no vote and could not share the same hospitals, stores, universities, buses or even park benches. The comparison is preposterous.

The occupation of the West Bank is an anomaly and like so much else a product of war and conflict between Israel and the Arabs and not an ideology of racial discrimination. The two-state solution that should replace this anomaly is precisely what these enemies of Israel oppose. It is not an agreement with Israel that they seek but a world without Israel. Their campaign, therefore, has a sinister purpose. It is the preparation of world opinion for the undoing of Israel as the State of the Jewish people. Israel was founded on the basis of a UN Resolution that called for the establishment of two states in Palestine — one Jewish and one Arab. The Arabs elected to go to war to defeat the resolution and lost, but make no mistake, the objective of those who presently pronounce Israel’s fundamental illegitimacy is still the same, only to be obtained by other means, political, diplomatic and quasi-legal.

The apartheid slur is demonizing and dehumanizing. After the spate of suicide bombings in Israel at the beginning of this decade Israel built a security barrier which its detractors like to call the “Apartheid Wall.” That would suggest, as Israel’s critics naturally intend to do, that the barrier was constructed for racist reasons. The barrier/fence/wall was put up after eleven hundred Israelis had been slaughtered in the restaurants and the buses by suicide bombers. Referring to the fence as if it were a racist exercise ignores Israeli losses as if Israeli lives were worthless, no more than human dust. Placing the fence in a context of racial discrimination deliberately distorts reality, removing it entirely from its conflictual context, completely devaluing the lives of Israelis, as if their humanity was imaginary.

Moreover, the fence, as Israel’s detractors often complain, is an inconvenience to the many Palestinians who live on both sides of the barrier. While it saves Israeli lives, it is most regrettable that it also causes inconvenience to so many Palestinians. But if there are so many Palestinians on both sides of the barrier, it might inflict all sorts of impositions, but a racist apartheid wall it just cannot be.

This apartheid campaign against Israel is about dehumanization and elementary prejudice. Prejudice is recognized by its three constituent practices: it singles out its subject; it then applies a double standard to the subject’s behavior; which is, of course, forever guilty. Israel’s detractors, in many cases, and especially the proponents of the apartheid calumny are the epitome of prejudice. They single Israel out for special treatment, apply a standard to Israel that applies to no one else and pronounce it guilty as charged.

It is a sad state of affairs that reputable and otherwise enlightened liberal-minded institutions of higher learning allow these demonstrations of hateful prejudice and dissemination of falsehood to take place on their campuses. Their laxity flies in the face of the most fundamental principles of academic integrity that such institutions should uphold.

Professor Asher Susser is a Senior Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is presently a visiting Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/1625/israeli-apartheid-weeks-distortion-of-reality

Five Myths About Israel’s Security Fence | Stand for Israel
16 Jan 2010 - The “apartheid” slur is just another tool for Israels enemies to delegitimize and undermine the Jewish states right to exist.
http://blog.standforisrael.org/issues/world-opinion/apartheid/comment-page-1

More Proof of Obama’s Poor Judgment
March 4th, 2010 at 12:01 am David Frum
I see that President Obama’s one-time nominee as National Intelligence director has not only endorsed the “Israel apartheid” slur - but has taken to an explicitly Israel-eliminationist website to do so.
A reminder of how appalling the president’s foreign policy judgment can be.
http://www.frumforum.com/obamas-poor-judgment

making a difference around the world spring 2010 standwithus ...
... particularly our brochures that tackle the apartheid slur often leveled at israel by extreme groups...
http://www.standwithus.com/springnews/files/search/searchtext.xml

Does Jimmy Carter Deserve To Be Sued?

By Mona Charen

4 Feb 2011 - [...] And then there is Carter’s festering abhorrence of the Jewish state, which reached its fullest expression in “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” The title expresses his sympathies and antipathies succinctly. It’s a book about a land - Israel - that Carter would prefer become “Palestine.” How else to interpret the latter part of the title - “Peace Not Apartheid”? The leftist/Islamist slur against Israel is that it is a racist, apartheid state akin to South Africa and therefore lacking in legitimacy. Carter embraces this calumny.

And more. So much more. The book is a skein of falsehoods. Carter repeatedly gets history wrong - as when he suggests that Israel attacked Jordan in the 1967 war. In fact, Israel pleaded with Jordan to remain neutral as it fought off Egypt and Syria. But Jordan elected to join the other Arab states in attempting to obliterate Israel. It lost Jerusalem and the West Bank as a consequence.

The former president surely knew, when he wrote this sentence, that it was completely untrue: “The unwavering official policy of the United States since Israel became a state has been that its borders must coincide with those prevailing from 1949-1967.” In fact, no U.S. government, including Carter’s, insisted on withdrawal to what Abba Eban called “Auschwitz borders.”

Carter also repeatedly insinuates that U.N. Resolution 242 calls for such a withdrawal - another lie. The resolution does speak of withdrawal, but was carefully crafted (against the objections of the Soviets) not to call for such a total pullout.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen020411.php3?printer_friendly

Apartheid - Divestment Watch - Leading the battle against the illegal divest-from-Israel campaign

Apartheid

One suspects that if the word “apartheid” were eliminated from the vocabulary of Israel’s critics, they would be rendered nearly speechless.

The history of linkage between the Arab-Israel conflict and the struggle against Apartheid is an excellent illustration of the level of hypocrisy Israel’s friends must tolerate from its foes.

The “apartheid” slur began in the 1970s when the movement against racial discrimination in South Africa began at the same time the oil boom gave Israel’s Arab foes the resources to link their struggle against the Jewish state with battle for human rights in South Africa. Those same resources allowed Israel’s Arab critics to buy themselves a “Get Out of Jail Free” card with regard to any serious scrutiny of their own human rights abuses.

The Zionism = Apartheid mantra fixed on Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority, while avoiding the obvious fact that those who shouted “racism” the loudest were the rulers of some of the most racist states in existence, Middle East regimes whose treatment of minorities (from the expulsion of Jews, to the persecution of religious groups, to the enslavement of Black Africans) made even the crimes of South African apartheid pale in comparison. (Saudi Arabia has the distinction of having only legally banned human slavery in 1962, a practice that still continues today in the Arab League member state of Sudan.)

A second charge had to do with Israel’s trade ties with Apartheid leaders in Pretoria, trade that while real, paled in comparison to South Africa’s senior trading partners in Europe, the US, Japan and the Arab Middle East.

Carefully avoided during the anti-Israel/anti-Apartheid rallies of the 1980s was the never-discussed fact that while South Africa had no oil of its own, it managed to run an industrial, oil-based, first-world economy. Simultaneously, the oil-rich Middle East somehow managed to fill its vaults and shopping malls with ton after ton of South African gold. This particular alchemy points to one and only one conclusion: the Arab oil trade with South Africa, while carried on secretly, helped keep the machinery of Apartheid fueled for decades.

The half-tracks that swept soldiers through the streets of Sharpsville ran on oil, as did the generators that powered Nelson Mandela’s prison. And yet even now that Apartheid has been left in the ash heap of history, even as South Africa itself has undergone the truth and reconciliation process, even as the US and Europe have re-evaluated their historical mistake of “constructive engagement” with the Apartheid regime, the Arab oil-for-gold trade with Apartheid continues to be beyond the bounds of discussion, especially by those most eager to brand Israel an “Apartheid” state.

The language of the world-wide Israel boycott movement, including it’s recent incarnation as various divest-from-Israel campaigns, is the inheritor of the investments Israel’s Arab foes made over the decades to brand Israel a racist society, while ignoring both the rampant bigotry within their own borders, and the robust, hidden and hypocritical oil-for-gold trade with Apartheid. One would hope that this history would cause the Zionism = Apartheid crowd a small bit of reflection before continuing a tradition started by those who provided Apartheid the fuel it needed to continue year after year after year.

Sadly, reflection is not the strong suit of Israel’s critics whose self-righteous fury allows anything to be justified, no matter how unfair, hypocritical or false, in their single-minded quest that Israel must go.
http://www.divestmentwatch.com/cities/somerville-apartheid.htm

The Canadian Jewish News - IAW: a legacy of inaction - 3 Mar 2011 - In effect, what we see repeatedly is the slur of Israeli apartheid as a launch point in the abuse of podium that pervades the campus discourse not only during IAW, but year round. Portraying Israel as an apartheid state with all of its connotations of demonization, delegitimization, criminalization and dehumanization has been adopted as the weapon of choice for Israel-baiters and Jew-haters... Even if this assessment were correct although theres not a shred of measurable evidence to support it the damage has already been done. The canard of Israel as an apartheid state has become embedded in the lexicon of the academy, and, with each passing year, its imprint will become more indelible.
http://www.cjnews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20895&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=86

Delegitimization
[2011]
Among the slurs is the cry of racism. Israel has no moral right to exist because it is ... racism, and apartheid and international Israel Apartheid Week.
http://www.protectourheritagepac.net/Delegitimization.html

Lettera a un amico antisionista
Pierluigi Battista (Author)

Product Details
Hardcover: 119 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli (Jan 1 2011)
Language: Italian
ISBN-10: 8817047430
ISBN-13: 978-8817047432
[...]
Treason of the intelligentsia, Jun 9 2011
By Pieter “Toypom” (Johannesburg) - This review is from: Lettera a un amico antisionista (Hardcover)
Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend explores the fact that European and American élites are being contaminated by a bias against Israel regardless of logic or historical fact. The narrative of the intelligentsia, burdened down with studies and statistics, promotes the idea that it would be better if the State of Israel never existed. That it ought not to exist and that it will be destroyed. Demolishing this intellectual perversion of ant Zionist hatred in five blistering chapters, Battista reveals anti-Zionism for what it really is: Anti-Semitism.

In general, opinion shapers in the media, academia and the world of cinema are fostering a public opinion based upon silent agreement; a climate that delegitimizes Israel’s right to exist, libels it with the ‘apartheid’ slur and accuses it of war crimes. In the words of a previous French ambassador to London: “that shitty little country.” This warped mindset indulges in the most outrageous double standards that absolve the worst dictators while denying Israel’s right to life.

Battista shows how the United Nations and the European Union operate in a fever swamp of lies and deception. These and other multinational organizations protect the violators of human rights while ignoring human rights abuses in places like China, Chechnya and Sudan. Yet they criticize Israeli checkpoints that deter terrorist attacks by using pornographic adjectives like “Nazi”.

Battista assails this mindset on two fronts, (a) by pointing out the correspondences between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and (b) by highlighting the maniacal obsession that Robert Wistrich calls the lethal obsession. Battista demonstrates so convincingly that this obsession is rooted in anti-Semitism.

But there’s more to it, as the author explains. Israel is being judged by an ideological system that emerged during the Cold War, in which the poor are automatically “good” whilst westerners are automatically “evil colonialists.” This system of judgment has a logical flaw at its core: the double standard. There are millions of displaced persons around the world whose plight is ignored. Just consider the Uighurs, Darfur, Tibet, Kirghizstan and the cruelty that characterized the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Battista identifies the sources of the masked anti-Semitism by denouncing this double standard in a series of debates with prominent figures like Sergio Romano, Barbara Spinelli, Tom Segev and the late Edward Said. He makes it clear by analogy. Specific governments are criticized all the time but one seldom encounters blanket criticism of for example Italy or Sweden as a whole, whilst their right to exist is never questioned.

And this is the theme of Battista’s work, presented in lucid arguments and with moral clarity: that the despicable questioning of Israel’s right to exist derives from the mental virus of anti-Semitism. I also recommend the works of Robin Shepherd, Neill Lochery and Denis MacShane.
http://www.amazon.ca/Lettera-amico-antisionista-Pierluigi-Battista/dp/8817047430

Divest This!: Cost
Apr 18, 2011 As that series pointed out, support for the Apartheid slur among actual Apartheid survivors is mixed (Tutu yes, Mandala not really).
http://www.divestthis.com/2011/04/cost.html

Daily Kos: Arab-Islamic apartheid world bigoted ‘apartheid’ slur
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/24/988261/-Arab-Islamic-apartheid-world-bigoted-apartheid-slur-campaign-upon-multi-racial-democratic-Israel

The comment ‘rejected’ by pro-Arab racism of the HuffPost’s moderator
[30 June 2011]
[...] So much for your Arabic style of buzzwords like “graveyards” as if we don’t know who causes Arab civiian deaths. When is there going to be an outcry in the Arab world against Hamas/Hezbollah use of civilians to make sure Arab kids die in order to damn the Zionists? The same goes to the racist Arab “apartheid” slur on Israel’s true democracy where Arabs have more than equal rights, when you count the favoritism of the ‘affirnative action’ system in Israel.
http://conservativeamericannews.com/conservatism/the-comment-rejected-by-pro-arab-racism-of-the-huffposts-moderator

On CiF Watch and the fight against anti-Semitism
July 8, 2011
AL: Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany have been codified as anti-Semitic by the EU working definition of anti-Semitism.

When you compare Israel to Nazi Germany you’re saying, in effect, that, like Nazi Germany, Israel is morally beyond the pale and therefore has no moral legitimacy and no right to exist. It’s a way for those who seek her destruction to morally and politically justify their stance. Moreover, being asked to respond to such a hideous charge is not unlike asking the US to respond to charges by Iran that America is the great Satan.

In other words, such a charge against Israel is not a morally or intellectually serious argument, and it really shouldn’t be dignified as if it’s a serious charge. It’s simply abuse. The fact is that, by any measure (such as the annual country reports which are published by the highly reputable human rights monitoring organization, Freedom House), Israel is, by far, the nation with the best human rights record in the Middle East.

As far as the Apartheid slur, again, the main point of such a charge is to morally delegitimize Israel. The fact is that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy full civil rights (in housing, education, voting, etc.) which South Africa’s blacks were denied. There are Arab Israelis in every sector of Israeli societyand their rights are protected by an independent judiciary.

In fact there is a Christian Arab on the Supreme Court, and Arab parties in the Knesset. In South Africa under Apartheid, Blacks weren’t permitted to live in White neighborhoods, go to White schools, or even date (or marry) Whites. There is no policy in Israel which even approaches such prohibitions.

The related charge that Israel “ethnically cleanses” its Palestinian/Arab/ethnic minority population are easily contradicted by population growth of every major religious/ethnic minority, both in Israel proper, and in the disputed territories.
http://cifwatch.com/2011/07/08/on-cif-watch-and-the-fight-against-contemporary-anti-semitism/

Israel and the Apartheid Slur
[American Thinker - July 24, 2011]
By Michael Weinberg
[...] as a Jew, and an Israeli, I do not wish a return to apartheid, in practice, but rather to closer examine this loaded, grossly distorted, and extremely misunderstood term. Apartheid bears no resemblance to the reality of day-to-day life in Israel...

These efforts to demonize a nation of survivors, from the biblical to modern era, are baffling and reckless. Israel assists in countless life-saving rescue missions and disaster relief operations locally and worldwide. We care for neighbors and strangers by saving lives of the injured or sick such as in recently devastated Haiti, refuge for thousands of African refugees fleeing horrific conflict. At the cost of precious lives, Israel’s best intentions and expertise are often refused as did the Iranian government after a catastrophic 2003 earthquake or grossly manipulated via horrific and unsubstantiated slander such as accusations against Jewish surgeons of harvesting organs of dead or injured Haitians. Such baseless and libelous accusations are dangerous to Jewish and non-Jewish lives, alike...

I live amongst people of all nationalities, colors, creeds, religions, sexual preference, and political affiliation. On any given day a multitude of languages can be heard spoken on the streets: Farsi, English, Thai, French, German, Finnish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew. Together we share government offices, waiting rooms, hospitals, shops, eateries, holy sites, pharmacies, medical facilities, zoos, malls, grocery stores, post offices, universities, workplaces, and neighborhoods. We serve and share roles as varied as doctors, nurses, surgeons, mechanics, rail-workers, clerks, soldiers, elected officials, lawyers, journalists, and taxi drivers. We are an integrated society...

When Israel does not actively prevent or defend against provocation, murder and massacre people will die. This includes civilians within Israel and civilians within areas under PLO or Hamas auspices. The precedent above defies logic and justice and renders survival of Israel impossible...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/israel_and_the_apartheid_slur.html