Israel Apartheid: The Big Black-and-White Lie

What is it about Jews and race? In the 1930s, Hitler and others on the racist right demonized European Jews for being racially inferior. Today, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and others on the anti-racist left demonize Israeli Jews for acting racially superior. But injecting “race” into discussions about Jews is perverse. It clarifies nothing — and inflames everything.

Admittedly, Jews are confusing: not just members of a religious community, not solely members of a nation. But the Jewish people are by no means one race nor share a racial mindset. And because you can join the Jewish people by converting into the Jewish religion, Jews became one of the least biologically-based, blood-driven people — and one of the most permeable nations racially, especially after millennia of wandering.

These nuances are missing from Human Rights Watch’s recently-released hatchet job against Israel, titled “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” The report garnered headlines globally because, like the UN’s dastardly Durban conference, it accused the Jews — victims of the most racist crime in history, the Nazi genocide — of being racist themselves by practicing apartheid. The 213-page report mentions the “A-word” nearly 200 times. Nevertheless, it fails to make the case for Israel’s guilt on that score.

Apartheid and racism have specific meanings.  All nations draw boundaries, distinguishing between foreigners who are “out” and those who are “in” — whom democracies call citizens. That’s legitimate. Following the Nazi’s systematic war against the Jews from 1939 to 1945, racism was deemed particularly pernicious and deserving of the harshest penalties, including regime-change. Half a century later, white South Africa’s many race-based crimes against Blacks, “coloreds” and whites who dared dissent added “Apartheid” to the list of national crimes deserving of ostracism and ultimately elimination.

HRW, therefore, was wrong to claim that “The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context.” That term’s potency, and its sting to Israelis and Jews, stems from the South African analogy: From the oppressive, anti-democratic mechanisms required to enforce the crime to the regime’s well-deserved end.

While promising “detailed legal analysis” of the apartheid charge, HRW actually proved Israel’s innocence. According to the report, “The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.”

Nowhere does HRW prove that either Israeli Jews or Palestinians constitute a “racial group.” HRW simply assumes that in a world obsessed with race, those who seem weak and popular are “Black” or “Brown” while those who seem strong and unpopular are “white.” Yet Israel has never promulgated a law, regulation or military decree that defines people by the color of their skin or their blood or any way that constitutes “racial groups.” Moreover, Israel is at peace with some Arabs and at war with others, while granting full citizenship to some Palestinians (meaning Israeli-Arabs who live in, say, the Galilee) but not to others who live in an independent Gaza or an autonomous Hebron.

It took many Israelis years to acknowledge Palestinian nationalism. Suddenly, that characterization is politically incorrect. HRW treated this national conflict as a racial conflict. The only possible motivation is to besmirch Israel while clumping Palestinian nationalism with other race-based causes.

HRW’s failure to make the racism case proves its unfair motives. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) called the “Zionism is Racism” libel the Big Red Lie — emphasizing how the Soviets took the old Nazi Big Lie that Jews are inferior to accuse them of acting superior. This apartheid libel is the Big Black-and-White Lie.

When you racialize everything, you explain nothing — and distort a lot. This new blood libel isn’t really about race and apartheid, it’s simply the slur-du-jour, deployed to make Israel look bad in the eyes of the world. To prop up their false charge, HRW’s authors had to treat all Palestinians as one, minimizing the differences between Israeli-Arabs, who are citizens in a democratic Israel, Gazans, who are subjected to the Hamas regime, and West Bank Palestinians, most of whose day-to-day lives are controlled by Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Highlighting the absurdity is HRW’s invention of a fake group — “Palestinian Bedouins.” Most Bedouins would find that characterization not only inaccurate but also offensive.

This new blood libel isn’t really about race and apartheid, it’s simply the slur-du-jour.

By racializing this conflict, HRW sidesteps the awkward fact that its target audience — the other countries of the world — make many parallel distinctions, generating various criteria and special categories when drawing up immigration laws and citizenship processes, incentivizing different groups to live in different places or letting in some people and not others. More broadly, when others, from Durban anti-Racism conference attendees to some Black Lives Matter activists, treat this national conflict as racial, they distract from the broader fight against racism and diminish the particular dishonor genuine racists deserve.

While detailing all kinds of allegations against Israel — some admittedly disturbing — the report ignores the most basic context. The report never acknowledges that many Palestinians call regularly for Israel’s destruction, which encourages other Palestinians to target Israeli citizens at home and all Jews abroad. Overlooking those terrifying facts makes every action Israel takes in self-defense seem pointless and spiteful, which is how racists act. A more nuanced analysis would have acknowledged that the conflict involves many different actors, multiple forces and is most often, from the Israeli perspective, about a beleaguered democracy defending itself and managing impossible dilemmas, not a bunch of racists seeking to torture their neighbors.

Like any country, Israel makes mistakes. Reasonable critics could use many different words to denounce Israel. But accusing Israel of racism and apartheid fails the anti-Semitic smell test. Jews have long proved to be a most convenient target, making anti-Semitism the most plastic of hatreds — adaptable but artificial and often toxic. During the Middle Ages, in Christian and Muslim worlds obsessed with religion, Jews were the ultimate heretics. In the nineteenth century, in a Europe obsessed with the class struggle, Jews were the worst Marxists to the capitalists and the worst capitalists to the Marxists. Today, in a world obsessed with race, it’s convenient to make Jews “white” and “racist.” Ultimately, however, these charges say little about Jews (the accused) but much about the Jew-haters (the accusers), even when some of those flinging the Black-and-White blood libel are themselves Jewish.

Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American History and three books on Zionism. His book, “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People,” co-authored with Natan Sharansky, was just published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.