Jew World Order

We were bound to talk endlessly about the April 27 Human Rights Watch report accusing Israel of the “crime of apartheid” — but the news justifies us being a broken record. The report is getting a lot of attention in ways that earlier apartheid findings have not, including in the New York Times, and it appears to be filtering into the U.S. discourse.

The report has the capability to build moral urgency about Palestine in U.S. politics, Omar Baddar said yesterday on a Jerusalem Fund webinar, because of HRW’s pedigree as a cautious, mainstream organization. “The fact that the HRW stuck their neck out and used the a-word, and supplied a mountain of evidence,” he said, is “incredibly significant” in demonstrating to Americans that “the U.S. is literally supporting Jim Crow-like policies somewhere else.”

Phyllis Bennis at Common Dreams also says the report will have political consequences:

[T]he report will make it much more difficult for reluctant mainstream Democrats to ignore Palestinian rights, and much easier for progressive Democrats, looking for evidence of broadening support for those rights, to take a stand. It will significantly strengthen our work to change US policy: winning support for the Palestinian Children and Families Act in Congress, moving forward on conditioning and eventually ending military aid to Israel, and mobilizing BDS campaigns against the kinds of corporations HRW calls on to stop supporting Israeli apartheid. 

And right on time yesterday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib spoke of U.S. aid to apartheid in connection with those Jewish settler arsons of Palestinian land.

Stealing Palestinian homes and burning their lands. The actions of an apartheid state. We cannot stand by and watch this happen. @SecBlinken, billions of U.S. taxpayers dollars support Netanyahu’s government and this racist violence. We must condemn this swiftly.

I always focus on the power of the Israel lobby; and the report is dividing the lobby.

Rightwing Jewish organizations are blasting the report as antisemitic. But liberal Zionists are issuing, We-need-to-look-at-this statements that reject HRW’s conclusion — “apartheid” — but do say that HRW is “sounding the alarm” about abuses in the occupation.

It is clear that J Street and Americans for Peace Now can’t come out against the Human Rights Watch report– because they know that doing so will instantly put themselves in the rightwing pro-Israel camp and alienate the younger generation of politically-active Jews in the U.S., who accept the report.

The young Jewish group IfNotNow has been praising the HRW report though even it defers to the Jewish community by saying many feel “discomfort” with the apartheid term.

Despite the discomfort many American Jews can experience with the label, it’s critical to recognize that the Israeli government maintains one regime of apartheid in all the land it controls. Apartheid is the daily reality for millions of Palestinians

The main tactic of liberal Zionists is to say, Yes the facts in the report are all accurate, but Israel is not South Africa. So we can’t do to Israel what we did to South Africa, and sanction it.

Partners for Progressive Israel, a group associated with left Zionist groups in Israel, said in a statement yesterday that while the occupation is clearly oppressive, the word apartheid is not very helpful.

Conjuring up the image of apartheid South Africa, or of the Jim Crow American South, might therefore mislead the general public as much as it illuminates. And the word “apartheid” itself often ends up providing fodder for those who would deny Israel’s documented human rights abuses by allowing them to redirect attention away from the abuses themselves and into a debate over terminology.

The PPI says there’s a good Israel wanting to come out.

It was not founded on a myth of racial superiority. Many in Israel continue to believe in the equal value of all human beings, and some Israeli governments have sincerely sought to resolve the conflict through just compromise. 

This statement reads a bit like fairyland when you consider that Israel just elected an overwhelmingly rightwing Jewish parliament after a campaign in which no one spoke of peace negotiations; and its leading human rights organization said in January that the whole country was built on Jewish supremacy!

Two critiques of the HRW report from leading Jewish writers also use the same tactic: Wait, Israel is not South Africa!

In the Nation, Eric Alterman concedes that Israel is guilty of apartheid and the report is a valuable piece of scholarship that is getting more attention than any such charge since Jimmy Carter used the word in 2006. Liberal Zionists could ignore B’Tselem’s apartheid charge in January. Not this time, Alterman writes.

But Alterman argues that the report will have no impact, because the BDS campaign is incapable of doing what boycott did to South Africa. Because, bottom line– Israel just isn’t South Africa.

 Leaving aside the myriad differences between the Israeli and South African versions of apartheid——such as the fact that you will find no “Jews only” signs on Israel’s beaches or restaurants, and that skin color is the not the determinative factor in how a person is necessarily treated or what legal rights and protections he or she may enjoy—the movement has so far failed spectacularly to demonstrate any positive policy influence whatsoever. While BDS has enjoyed some popularity on college campuses and among leftist organizations and publications since its founding in 2005, it has caused no discernible damage to the Israeli economy… This is, to put it mildly, nothing like the experience of the movement that ended apartheid in South Africa.

This strikes me as defensive/circular argument. Alterman is afraid that Israel will be ostracized in the manner that South Africa was, so the response is, This is nothing like South Africa, so you can’t ostracize it.

Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer make a related argument in Newsweek: HRW was wrong to “inject” apartheid into the Israel-Palestine conflict; because again, This is Not South Africa. And — Palestinians are to blame for the fact that it’s not South Africa!

External pressure helped end apartheid, but it wasn’t the major driver that ended the regime; Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk were. Without these two, especially Mandela, apartheid would not have ended.

HRW has a Q-and-A that directly addresses the question. Are you comparing Israel to South Africa? No, HRW says: every situation is different.

 Over the years… in international law, the international community has detached the term apartheid from its original South African context and developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice. Irrespective of where it is committed, apartheid is a crime against humanity with a definition set out in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the latter drafted after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Human Rights Watch has concluded that Israeli officials have committed the crime of apartheid under the legal standards set out in these instruments and not on the basis of any comparison with the situation in South Africa.

Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer’s piece is reflexively pro-Israel. It suggests that as the lobby divides over the apartheid label, some liberal Zionists are going to move right, and be indistinguishable from AIPAC. Miller and Kurtzer have liberal Zionist reputations. They worked as peace-processors for the White House — or lawyers for Israel, as Miller himself once said so cuttingly. Now they tell us that there must be no pressure on Israel because that’s not how Israel can change.

And rather than mobilizing support for Israel to change its policies, the HRW report will undercut political efforts by an already weakened Israeli left to effect changes in Israeli policies.

After all, Israelis know their faults as well as anyone else, but they also know that they are not an apartheid state – far from it – and have not committed crimes against humanity. The report will thus gut the Israeli center, and drive critics of the occupation and critics of the HRW into opposite corners. Faced with an unjust onslaught of criticism that cuts to the very core of Israelis’ perception of themselves and their state, they are likely to rally around their flag to defend it.

But HRW issued the report in part because Israeli politics only have gotten more committed to occupation in the last ten years. As for the claim that Israelis know their faults as well as anyone– that’s two Americans apologizing for Jewish Israelis over a long history that has caused incalculable suffering to Palestinians.

Omar Shakir, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, responded sharply to Miller and Kurtzer:

A 30-year peace process wont dismantle systematic repression. Palestinians deserve their basic rights today, irrespective of state of negotiations or the Israeli left. Time to move beyond stale thinking of yesterday, recognize reality for what it is & find #courage2fightapartheid

The good news is that as the Israel lobby’s consensus shatters, some liberal Zionists will go left. Peter Beinart has already done so. IfNotNow may well endorse BDS in months to come. The head of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, seems to have a similar trajectory to Beinart. Not long ago (Craig Murray reports), Roth had an understanding-of/adherence- to the Zionist narrative, driven in part by his “altruistic liberal Jewish” donor base. Roth has obviously evolved as his own organization has become more diverse, and as Israel sinks further into rightwing nationalism. The report that came out under his name will surely help others to evolve as well.

h/t Adam Horowitz, Scott Roth, James North, Michael Arria.

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