A Lynching in South Africa

Starting tomorrow, a political action group will stage a peoples court in Cape Town, South
Africa, in which a carefully selected jury will declare Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid.
It would be easier to ignore this tawdry charade were it not playing out in District Six, that raw
scar of scrubland near the city center memorializing one of the cruelest episodes of the apartheid
era. For this so-called Russell Tribunal on Palestine is not only an affront to common sense
and an injustice to Israel, but it is an insult to the victims of apartheid, as offensive as if it were
convened on the ruins of Auschwitz to accuse the Jewish state of committing a holocaust.
It is ridiculous to give respectability to this accusation by answering it. There is nothing about
the apartheid analogy that will bear serious scrutiny, not the history, not the ideology, and
certainly not the practice. Justice Richard Goldstone, a former Justice of the South African
Constitutional Court and a man not afraid to criticize Israel, debunked the charge in a cogent
article in The New York Times entitled Israel and the Apartheid Slander as unfair, inaccurate
and malicious. In Israel there is no apartheid, he explains. Nothing there comes close to the
definition of apartheid . . . In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal.
The sizable minority of Arab Israelis have always enjoyed equal rights, and freedoms that were
not available to Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, including freedom of religion, of the
press and of speech. Arab Israelis and their leaders including Arab members of the Israeli
parliament vigorously invoke these freedoms to criticize their own country, sometimes sadly
even calling for its destruction. Even in the West Bank, the comparison is, in Justice
Goldstones words, superficial and disingenuous. The Palestinians there are not Israeli
citizens. Even if their treatment is sometimes harsh by Israeli authorities who are obsessed (not
without reason) with security, far from seeking to permanently oppress them, Israel has been
trying for decades to negotiate for an independent Palestinian state with their leaders, who have
preferred to resort to warfare and lawfare.
The saddest aspect of the Russell Tribunal is that the actors include several influential South
Africans, including serious people like Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and author Pumla
Gobodo-Madikizela who ought to know better. The participation of such prominent figures, the
veneer of dispassionate rationality, and the very idea of associating Israel with the policies of
apartheid are reprehensible. Israel is not perfect but it is an outrage against reason to suggest that
the mistakes it makes in dealing with its uniquely difficult circumstances merit the calumny of a
comparison with one of the most odious and racist regimes in modern history.
The real question is why the authors of this poisonous farce are not content to criticize Israel in
normal, even scathing, terms, but feel compelled to invoke this emotionally loaded aspersion.
The answer is that they are not seeking a peaceful solution to this difficult, painful dispute, but
are part of a global effort to isolate and delegitimize the state of Israel. The apartheid accusation
does not merely record a disagreement with some policy or a critique of some action, but carries
with it the implication that Israel, like apartheid South Africa, should be branded as an oppressor
and treated as a pariah among the worlds nations. The charge paints Israel in its essence as a
racist and illegitimate entity. It is not something that admits of polite disagreement or mild
dissent, but postulates a society so beyond the pale that any means of opposition to its policies is
legitimate, including isolation and boycotts and even violent resistance. Indeed, it forgives and
justifies horrific acts of terror commited against innocent Israelis, by condemning what is called
the apartheid wall as though that barrier was built to separate and subjugate the Palestinian
people rather than to (successfully) stop the incessant onslaught of suicide bombings and other
attacks that had terrorized Israels civilian population.
The indictment of apartheid declares that no reconciliation is possible with the Jewish state.
Indeed its unstated premise is that the very idea of a Jewish state is intrinsically illegitimate.
Like the United Nations 1976 declaration that Zionism (alone among historys national
movements) is racism, the apartheid assertion draws on centuries of racist hatred of Jews, who
alone among the worlds peoples are thought to be unnatural and evil in their creation of
communities of belief and practice.
The apartheid claims become even more glaringly offensive when one considers the larger
context of pluralism in the Palestinian Authority and wider Middle East. A Palestinian Authority
law demands the death penalty for selling land to a Jew, and numerous Palestinian officials have
declared that no Jews will be allowed to live in Palestine. Arab countries with large Palestinian
populations, such as Lebanon and Syria, practise extensive legal discrimination against
Palestinians such as denying them the right to work in many professions, citizenship, passports,
education, and freedom of movement that, insofar as the apartheid comparison is warranted,
may indeed be fitting. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are forbidden from practicing their religion
or so much as stepping foot in Mecca or Medina. Yet those who accuse Israel of apartheid seem
never to complain about these manifestations of official discrimination. Israel, as always, is held
to an entirely different standard, this one apparently motivated not only by antipathy to the
Jewish state but by the disturbing belief that Arabs should be held to lower standards than other
people. It is also a twisted irony that millions of dollars are being spent producing this spiteful
passion play while Syria is murdering thousands of pro-democracy activists
Sensible people of goodwill will treat the Russell Tribunal with the disdain it deserves. The
charge that Israel is an apartheid state is one that reveals much more about those who make the
accusation than it does about its target.
____
Trevor Norwitz is a partner at a New York law firm and teaches at Columbia Law School. He is a director of
several not-for-profit entities, including Advancing Human Rights, the UCT Fund, Friends of Ikamva Labantu and
Friends of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation.