I disagree with many of Israel's policies. I agree with many of Gerald Caplan's criticisms of the Netanyahu government.
I also can't stand some of Israel's supporters - like Alan Dershowitz - who support the state blindly and demonize its critics. Nor am I happy with the personal attacks on Richard Goldstone, even if I think there are legitimate criticisms to be made of his report.
But is Israel actually an apartheid state? I don't think so.
Benjamin Pogrund has a very good piece here. I am sorry I can't find the original and it only appears on a "Zionist" website. It's not where I originally read a few years ago. Still, worth a read. Pogrund is South African and fought against Apartheid there. And he certainly doesn't overlook the very real problems with Israel, and he opposes the Occupation.
On Israel proper:
"Arabs are a substantial minority, about 20 per cent of the population. In theory they have full citizenship rights. In practice they suffer extensive discrimination, ranging from denial of land use, diminished job opportunities and lesser social benefits, to reports of a family ordered off a beach and children evicted from a park. Only some 5,05 per cent of the 55 500 civil servants are Arabs. Arab villages are often under-funded and suffer from poor services and roads. Schools receive smaller amounts of government revenue, so their facilities are poorer.None of this is acceptable and especially in a state that presents itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. But is it comparable with pre-1994 South Africa? Under apartheid, remember, no detail of life was immune to discrimination by law. Skin colour determined every single person’s life, literally from birth until death: where you were born, where you went to school, what job you had, which bus you used, what park bench you sat on and in which cemetery you were buried. In Israel, discrimination occurs despite equality in law; it is extensive, it is buttressed by custom, but it is not remotely comparable with the South African panoply of discrimination enforced by parliamentary legislation. The difference is fundamental.
The Israeli situation can perhaps be better likened to the United States: blacks enjoyed rights under the Constitution but the rights were not enforced for decades; it took the Supreme Court’s historic judgement in Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 to begin the process of applying the law.
The difference between the current Israeli situation and apartheid South Africa is emphasised at a very human level: Jewish and Arab babies are born in the same delivery room, with the same facilities, attended by the same doctors and nurses, with the mothers recovering in adjoining beds in a ward. Two years ago I had major surgery in a Jerusalem hospital: the surgeon was Jewish, the anaesthetist 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 other’s homes."
On the Occupied Territories:
It is occupied by Israel. No occupation can be benign. Israeli harshness and misdeeds are reported day in and day out by Israeli media. Everyone is suffering, Palestinians as victims and Israelis as perpetrators. Death and maiming haunts everyone in the occupied territories and in Israel itself. Occupation is brutalising and corrupting both Palestinians and Israelis. The damage done to the fabric of both societies, moral and material, is incalculable.But it is not apartheid. Palestinians are not oppressed on racial grounds as Arabs, but, rather, as competitors — until now, at the losing end — in a national/religious conflict for land.
