DALE SPRUSANSKY
A protester in London holds a sign charging Israel with the crime of apartheid, on May 22, 2021. (LOREDANA SANGIULIANO/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2022, p. 56
Waging Peace
WITH AN INCREASING number of human rights organizations labeling Israel as an apartheid regime, pro-Israel voices are working overtime to discredit this damning charge. On March 30, the Foundation for Middle East Peace held a virtual event to discuss how the growing recognition of Israeli apartheid is altering the public discourse surrounding the country.
Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, noted that most of the people dismissing reports from groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International offer only superficial rebukes. A lot of critics “are not actually interested in understanding the realities on the ground and the international legal frameworks,” he said. “What they’re interested in doing is giving people a way of not having to engage with those very, very painful and difficult realities.”
Knee-jerk dismissals of the apartheid reports are often based on accusations of anti-Semitism and bias, Beinart pointed out. Wielding these rhetorical crutches, critics seek to rouse fear and deflect from the in-depth analysis and data contained in the reports. “It turns the entire conversation away from the substantive claims that are made and the lived reality of Palestinians on the ground to the question of Jewish fears about anti-Semitism,” he noted.
If those denying the existence of apartheid in Israel were actually worried about hatred and anti-Semitism, Beinart said they wouldn’t silence an honest discussion about human rights. “The right way to deal with [concerns about anti-Semitism] is not to essentially say, ‘because we have fears of anti-Semitism, we’re going to try to shut down a conversation about the bigotry that Palestinians face on a daily basis,’” he opined. “There’s something actually deeply perverse about that move….The best way to fight anti-Semitism is through a struggle against all forms of bigotry, which has to include anti-Palestinian bigotry.”
Maha Nassar, a professor at the University of Arizona, said last summer’s “unity intifada”—which saw Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora all rise up against ethnic cleansing and settler violence in Jerusalem—helped bust the myth that Israel is a liberal democracy. While the violence experienced by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza was par for the course, the harsh repression of Palestinians within Israel revealed their status as second-class citizens.
Nassar noted, “It was those very Palestinians inside the Green Line, those who have been told their whole lives, ‘you are part of a liberal democracy’…those youth have come to the realization, ‘no we aren’t, we also suffer under Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid rule, just in different manifestations of it.’”
The reality of apartheid must inform and transform the approaches that outside actors take to build peace, Nassar insisted. In particular, she criticized the popular people-to-people peace-building framework, which stresses that the key to peace is getting Israelis and Palestinians to know one another.
“This approach completely ignores the structures of power and domination inherent in any Israeli-Palestinian encounter,” Nassar observed. “The conflict resolution framework posits the assumption that there are two equal sides—they both need to get to know one another, compromise a bit more, and if they just push a little harder, we can have peace.”
Rather than embracing such “peace-building” models, Nassar said young Palestinians are focused on naming and challenging structures of Israeli oppression, even if doing so draws strong rebukes from agents of the status quo, such as governments and lobbying groups in the West.
—Dale Sprusansky
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