I hate phoney “awareness days”. I think it began with National No Smoking Day (today), which my father, a non-smoker, used to mark by smoking himself stupid.
Now there’s not a day of the year that isn’t marked by one of these fake, PR-created secular saints days – national sleep week, international day of wart awareness, National Masturbation Month (that last one is not made up either – most ailments, conditions and causes get a day or week – masturbation gets a whole month).
Now we even have International Israeli Apartheid Week, now in its sixth year.As the organisers explain:
IAW 2010 takes place following a year of incredible successes for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on the global level. Lectures, films, and actions will highlight some of theses successes along with the many injustices that continue to make BDS so crucial in the battle to end Israeli Apartheid.
Now the Israelis are a difficult lot. Just when you put your neck out to defend them at a western European dinner party, which is today a bit like admitting to being a subscriber to the Man-Boy Love Association monthly, they go and build a new settlement in East Jerusalem.
So I wouldn’t justify all their actions. But “apartheid”? The comparison of “bad things” with old South Africa is now as overused as “Nazi”, so much so that we’ll soon need to invent a Reductio ad Verwoerdem to categorise all the spurious uses of the term. People talk about “social apartheid” when complaining about house prices, “occupational apartheid” and “global apartheid”. Philippe Le Grain in his pro-immigration call to arms, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, describes all immigration controls as a form of apartheid. By that reasoning, by putting a lock on his door and not allowing any waif and stray to crash on his sofa, Le Grain has created his own form of apartheid.
Apartheid, as it is commonly understood, was a system of officially enforced racial segregation that operated in South Africa from the 1940s to the 1990s. Inter-marriage was banned, discrimination in jobs was institutionalised (that is, actually legally enforced, not “institutionalised” in the Macpherson Report sense), and sexual relations between people of difference races was a criminal offence. They even had to use different toilets. It was obviously morally wrong, a system that in retrospect seems so absurd it could have been created by a sci-fi writer to parody racism.
The argument that Israel is an apartheid state rests on the fact that Jewish settlers in the West Bank can vote in Israeli elections, and Palestinians can’t. But Jewish settlers, whatever the rights and wrongs of their living in the West Bank, are citizens of Israel, the West Bank Palestinians aren’t (just as my American neighbours can vote in US elections but I can’t).
This also ignores the fact that there are one million Israeli Arabs who can vote in Israeli elections because they are Israeli citizens. There were no “black-whites” in South Africa who could vote – if you were black, you were black.
So when did the apartheid tag come along? It was Jimmy Carter who popularised the analogy in his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. But Carter himself later said an interview: “I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonise Palestinian land.” Ah, that famous “non-racist apartheid”! What next, libertarian Stalinism? Pacifist Fascism?
Yes, they say, but Israel is apartheid because it won’t allow six million Palestinians, the exiles of 1948 and their descendants, “the right of return”. Ignoring the fact that almost as many Jews fled the Arab world as vice versa after the creation of Israel – they’ve just been busy getting on with their lives rather than being held in camps as political pawns – to allow in 6 million Palestinian Arabs would be the end of Israel, and probably with it the end of the Jews in the Holy Land. Anyone with a political mental age higher than 12 knows this. As we see in Northern Ireland, bi-national states just don’t work – and Palestisrael would be Ulster without the laughs.
Ah, they say, but Israel is apartheid because it defines itself as a Jewish state. This was the justification for the declaration at the World Conference Against Racism that “Zionism equals racism”. But almost all states, at least all successful ones, are defined by their nationality – Britain is the British state, France is the French state, Israel is the Jewish state. To believe in the right of self-determination for peoples is, by the logic of that conference, to be racist. The “Zionism equals racism” declaration was lead, incidentally, by Israel’s neighbour Syria or, to give it its official title, the Syrian Arab Republic.
Like I’m saying, I’m not justifying the Israeli occupation – being a believer in the Westphalian doctrine means being a Palestinianist as well as a Zionist – but these student and kidult protestors are stretching the definition of apartheid so much that it becomes a thin and meaningless term of abuse.