By John Pickard
According to an article in the Jewish Chronicle, (November 16), newly-elected Labour NEC member, Gemma Bolton, is under ‘investigation’ for a two-year old Tweet about ‘apartheid’ in Israel. According to the Chronicle, Gemma even had the temerity to be defiant over it. “If I run the risk of getting suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state” she is reported to have said, “then so be it. Suspend me.”
This raises the question, of course, of how much Labour Party members are allowed to say and what opinions they are allowed to hold in relation to the Israeli state and its policies towards the large Palestinian population which it controls, mostly by military repression and economic strangulation. The total population controlled by the Israeli state is broadly divided equally between a Jewish half and a non-Jewish (mostly Muslim, the latter mostly Palestinians. Even within the boundaries of the Israeli state that is internationally recognised, around a fifth of the population are non-Jewish.
Discrimination against non-Jews
Through its legal system and through ‘informal’ processes where the law is insufficient, the state of Israel actively discriminates against its non-Jewish population, and particularly those in the occupied areas of the West Bank and the ‘open prison’ that is Gaza.
Israel’s longest-serving and current Prime Minister, in introducing a law to define Israel as exclusively a Jewish state, made it clear that it was not a state for other religious groups. Israel is “not a state of all its citizens”, he said. He alleged that Arabs had “equal rights” – although, in fact they do not, but added again that “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.” The state is defined, in other words, according to the religious beliefs of four fifths of its citizens and only a half of the population it controls. By inching towards the annexation of large swathes of the West Bank, the Israeli state is showing not the slightest inclination to relinquish control over that half of the population that is non-Jewish.
Israel compared to South Africa
This is the context in which Israel has been compared to the South African apartheid state of the past. Looking at what might constitute a definition of apartheid, the well-know charity, War on Want, says the following:
“There is overwhelming evidence that the system instituted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people meets the UN definition of Apartheid.
“In effect, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory constitute one territorial unit under full Israeli control. As of 2016, of the total population of people that live in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, around 6.45 million are Jewish Israelis and about 6.41 million are Palestinians.
“Under Israeli law, and in practice, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are treated differently in almost every aspect of life including freedom of movement, family, housing, education, employment and other basic human rights. Dozens of Israeli laws and policies institutionalise this prevailing system of racial discrimination and domination.
Palestinians governed by military law
“Segregation is carried out by implementing separate legal regimes for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians living in the same area. For example, Jewish Israeli settlers living in the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are governed by Israeli civil law, while Palestinians also living in the occupied West Bank are governed by Israeli military law.
* Israel carries out various acts that are prohibited by the UN Apartheid Convention including:
* Forcible transfer of Palestinians to make way for illegal Israeli settlements.
* Preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes and lands”.
* Systematic and severe deprivation of fundamental human rights of Palestinians based on their identity.
* Denying Palestinians their right to freedom of movement and residence.
* Murder, torture, unlawful imprisonment and other severe deprivation of physical liberty, especially of Palestinians living in Gaza.
* Persecution of Palestinians because of their opposition to Apartheid.
Israeli politicians often refer to ‘apartheid’
A quick Google of sources will show that many politicians in Israel and elsewhere freely use the ‘A’ word in relation to Israel, sometimes, as in the case of James Mattis, former US Defence Secretary, as a warning. According to the Times of Israel, (November 20, 2016), Mattis warned about the proliferation of exclusively Jewish settlements on land confiscated from Palestinians. “The current situation is unsustainable,” he said. He specifically warned about the way that the Israeli government’s settlements policy is making a ‘peace deal’ impossible. And he uses the ‘A’ word: “If I’m in Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there’s 10,000 Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to include them, either it ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote — apartheid,”
Proposed map of Israeli annexations
In June of this year, the Times of Israel reported on a visit to the West Bank by the leader of left-wing Meretz Party, Nitzan Horowitz. Speaking to reporters during a tour of the Jordan Valley and pointing to a proposed map of Israeli annexations, he said, “This is an apartheid map. It reminds me of South Africa.”
It is clear that comparisons with South African apartheid are not being made lightly, despite differences in the two examples. More than one South African anti-apartheid activist, including some who have spent the best part of a lifetime fighting the South African regime, have drawn comparisons to present-day Israel. Writing in the Guardian last year, for example, Ronnie Kasrils, a leading ANC activist and a former government minister, wrote in precisely that vein. “I fought South African apartheid”, he wrote, “I see the same brutal policies in Israel.” (Guardian, April 3, 2019)
Another South African anti-apartheid veteran, the journalist and author, Benjamin Pogrund, was an early ally of Nelson Mandela. He was among the first Jews to fight South African apartheid and afterwards moved to Israel. Since then he has used his experiences in South Africa to fight against the accusation that Israel was an ‘apartheid’ state, but now the seems to be changing his mind.
Regular columnist in Ha’aretz warns of apartheid
According to the Times of Israel again, Pogrund has warned that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with his plan to annex large parts of the West Bank, apparently without offering Israeli citizenship or rights to the Palestinians who live in these areas, “Israel will indeed turn into an apartheid state”
“I have argued,” he says, “uphill and down dale, and lectured about it in a dozen countries and books and articles, that this is not apartheid. There is discrimination against the Arab minority and there’s an occupation in the West Bank — but it’s not apartheid…if we annex the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop. There’s no question about it.”
A regular Jewish Israeli opinion writer in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Gideon Levy, is also free and easy with the comparisons between South Africa and Israel. Earlier this month he made some sharp criticism of the visit of Trumps Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo to a winery in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank.
“…If Pompeo had been secretary of state in the mid-20th century,” Levy wrote, “he would most likely have been happy to be a guest of a winery in South Africa, where he could have raised a glass of Shiraz in honor of his hosts, determining that South Africa’s apartheid is a just system that does not violate international law.”
Occupied land owned by tycoons in Florida
“Pompeo will now end his term with a trip to the thieving winery situated in the heart of another apartheid location, and the process of whitewashing the settlements will reach another international nadir…There is nothing like a visit to the Psagot winery – which has recently moved to the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone, and which belongs to Jewish tycoons in Florida – to signal a salute to Israeli apartheid.”
In some respects, the Israeli version of apartheid is worse than the South African one, because a regular feature of West Bank life is the ongoing encroachment of Palestinian village land for settlements and the terrorising of Arab farmers and villagers by armed Jewish settlers.
As far as we are aware, even in the worst days of South African apartheid, there were no ‘raiding’ expeditions of white racists into the African ‘townships’ or ‘Bantustans’, where the overwhelming majority of blacks were forced to live. In the West Bank it is different. The size and scale of land confiscation and settlement building has been such that the population of Jewish-only settlements is comparable with the population the Palestinians. Many of the settlers support a political ideology that would see the whole of ‘Eretz Israel’ – from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River – as exclusively Jewish.
Palestinians terrorised by settlers
They would be happy to terrorise Arabs out of their homes in the hope that they would flee elsewhere. So Arab farms are vandalised; olive trees that take generations to grow are rooted out, mosques are daubed with graffiti and so on. It is a slow-motion ethnic cleansing and it goes on more or less with impunity, with the Israeli Army unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, the Israeli version of apartheid involves the active harassment and terrorisation of local Arab villagers week in and week out.
According to B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, “Violence by settlers (and sometimes by other Israeli civilians) toward Palestinians has long since become part of daily life under occupation in the West Bank.
“These actions range from blocking roads, throwing stones at cars and houses, raiding villages and farmland, torching fields and olive groves, and damaging crops and property to physical assault, sometimes to the point of hurling Molotov cocktails or using live fire. Over the years, this widespread violence toward Palestinians has resulted in injuries to life and limb, as well as damage to property and land”.
Labour members denied freedom of speech
Readers of Left Horizons can research these issues easily for themselves, as can Labour Party officials and Labour MPs. They, like us, can find many, many examples of Jewish-Israeli politicians, former heads of Israeli military and security services, columnists in Israeli newspapers, former members of Trump administration, well-known charities like War on Want, all describing the Israeli state’s policies in terms of apartheid.
What all these people and organisations argue, day in and day out, is that Israeli policies towards the Palestinian population under its control constitute a new form of apartheid. It is for this reason that a widespread international BDS movement (boycott, disinvestment and sanctions) has developed and against with the Israeli government is fiercely and frantically defending itself, including by lobbying politicians.
Yet what these organisations and politicians argue is something that Labour Party members are not allowed to argue for fear of being charged with anti-Semitism. It is not a heresy that leads to burning, but it is certainly a witch-hunt that threatens expulsion and it is an intolerable denial of free speech in the Party that must be opposed by any means we can.
November 20, 2020
