Apartheid States

 The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset. 

Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)

But Israel, alas, is not limited to its 1948 borders. There is the problem of the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government has effectively dropped any pretext at this point that the near sixty-year occupation of the former territory is "temporary." The settlements continue to expand. 

That means that millions of Palestinians living in the occupied territories are effectively subject to a government that controls nearly every aspect of their daily lives—but whose actions they are unable to directly influence through a vote or any democratic participation. 

That's apartheid. Unless anyone can convince us that it is imminently going to end, there is no other word for the situation. 

And again, even the Israeli government does not really claim it's going to end. Instead, the current right-wing leadership talks about extending control through settlements or even formal annexation over Biblical "Judea," which includes the Palestinian West Bank—and very much does not talk about granting political rights to the current Palestinian inhabitants of this land. 

 But even if the current situation does resemble apartheid, many supporters of Israel will protest that the state remains much more sympathetic than the apartheid regime in South Africa ever was. After all, Israel was founded to be a homeland for a persecuted people who had nowhere else to go. 

But then again—so was South Africa; at least, by the lights of its supporters. 

Independent South Africa was seen by its Boer founders, at least, as a haven for a people who had been hunted and persecuted throughout history and had always before been denied political rights and a state of their own. 

This was brought home to me in reading André Brink's A Dry White Season. This classic novel is obviously a direct criticism of the apartheid system, and managed to get itself banned in South Africa at the time of its publication. 

But the book also depicts with human sympathy the motives and worldview of its Boer protagonists. It shows a group of people who cannot rationally defend the status quo in their country—and know it; but who nonetheless feel that apartheid South Africa is more sinned against than sinning. 

Brink shows that the ideological rationalizations for the defenders of apartheid South Africa went something like this: the Boer people were the descendants of people who had been persecuted and expelled from Europe because of their religion (Huguenots, e.g.)

They had come to Africa in the first place because it was the only place they could go—they had been hunted and driven away from everywhere else. And then, once in Africa, they were promptly persecuted again—oppressed and expelled by the British, and forced to seek shelter on the "Great Trek." 

Then, after a prolonged struggle for recognition, linguistic and ethnic equality, and national self-determination against British colonial overlords, the Afrikaners finally achieved a state of their own, in the form of a united and independent (but, ahem, white supremacist) South Africa. 

Brink's protagonist—a good, upstanding Boer, albeit one with a strong enough conscience to get him into trouble with the authorities—at one point rehearses the official national ideology to himself the way he learned it in school: 

"Our entire history, children, can be interpreted as a persistent search for freedom, against the dictates of successive conquerors from Europe. Freedom expressed in terms of this new land, this continent [...] Outside this vast land we have nowhere to go." 

But Brink's protagonist slowly comes to doubt this ideology; or at least, to find it inadequate as an all-sufficing apologia for the reality of apartheid rule. He brings his doubts to his father-in-law in one scene—who remains a stalwart defender of the established order. 

The father-in-law excuses the apartheid government on the grounds that it is "a freely elected government." 

Much as many defenders of Israel today are quick to describe it as a democracy, at least within its 1948 borders (indeed, they always add—and not inaccurately—the only democracy in the region). 

To which I can only say—okay, great. But what about outside the 1948 borders?

"They get full citizenship" as a right-wing Israeli commentator said of Israel's Arab population last year in an interview on Ezra Klein's show. 

Okay, great, I say. Well done. But what about the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who do not have the rights of citizenship? 

Well, maybe they should have their own state? Except that Israel is still denying them that and occupying them militarily. Hmm...

As the father-in-law in Brink's novel says of the South African regime: "Don't you realize what the government is doing for the blacks? One of these days the whole bloody lot of them will be free and independent in their own countries. And then you have the nerve to talk about injustice!"

The argument is not unlike the one one often hears from defenders of the Israeli status quo: "We give the Arabs in our 1948 borders citizenship rights. Where else in the Arab world would they get a vote at all? Do you see any other democracies around? And what are they doing to help the Palestinians?"

And indeed, despotic Arab governments in the region seem to want nothing more than to wash their hands of any responsibility for Palestinian refugees; and Egyptian authorities have helped maintain a blockade on Gaza alongside Israel. Where are the international resolutions against them? 

But, the white nationalists of apartheid South Africa could likewise point to surrounding postcolonial governments in Africa and claim—with some legitimacy—that there, under those regimes, was not even a pretense of legality or democracy; where was the outrage against them? 

There, in South Africa too, then, one heard the argument that is so often on the lips of Israel's defenders today: the cry of a double standard. 

"Injustice!" says the father-in-law in the novel; "If you want to talk about injustice, then look at what our people have suffered. [...] You ought to be ashamed of yourself, man. Now that we have at long last come to power in our own land." 

This, word for word, is the argument used today by many defenders of Israel. The Jewish people finally have a state of their own, in their historic homeland, after millennia of persecution and exile. And this is the point people call for self-criticism? 

But Brink's protagonist asks his father-in-law how much this argument (irrefutable on the facts) is supposed to prove: What does his father-in-law mean, he asks; "Now we're free to do to others what they used to do to us?" he asks. 

And indeed, this is often the unanswered question looming over debates about Israeli policy. Does the history of persecution and genocide that led to the foundation of Israel mean that the state can inflict the same atrocities on another population, just because they had the misfortune to be in the way? 

Arthur Koestler (in his Zionist phase) wrote that he had to identify himself with the struggle to establish a Jewish state "as long as there was no haven for the persecuted and homeless" in the world—and who could disagree with such an aspiration?

But what, one has always wondered, was supposed to happen to the Arabs who were already living there? What was the plan for them? How was this supposed to work, even in theory? Did their presence give them any moral rights in the matter? 

The founders of Israel—like the founders of independent South Africa—saw themselves as the victors in a heroic struggle for national liberation and self-determination against a British colonial authority that had for too long denied them the rights of statehood and nationality. 

In both cases, one can admire the heroism and patriotism involved in this vision. But in both cases, one is left with the same unanswered doubt: that's all well and good, but what about the rights and aspirations of the other people living in the same territory? 

Walter Kaufmann was an outstanding intellectual, and in his 1969 lecture, "The Future of Jewish Identity," one finds an immensely thoughtful person trying to reason through two difficult and conflicting truths about the State of Israel:

On the one hand, many people do in fact hold Israel to an unfair double standard. They criticize her without criticizing her neighbors, even when the latter are guilty of even worse crimes. 

Many of these critics are in fact motivated by unsavory factors such as anti-semitism or Soviet propaganda. 

On the other hand, Kaufmann could not suppress his discomfort with developments in Israel, and knew that some of the nascent state's actions were frankly indefensible. 

"After the state of Israel was proclaimed, I could have wished for it to become a model to the nations in some ways in which it did not;" he writes; "for example, in its treatment of minorities. To say there were extenuating circumstances would be a gross understatement. Nonetheless, I wish that Israel were less nationalistic." 

"Let us not embody in the state of Israel those features of nationalism which were the bane of our existence when we lived in nation-states," he pleads; "Let us build an exemplary pluralistic society. [...] Israel [...] cannot be content to plead extenuating circumstances for its treatment of the Arabs in Israel and in the occupied territories." 

But then he also circles back again: "Of course, there are extenuating circumstances, and it is maddening that most of mankind continues to apply a double standard to Jews and Arabs[.]" 

So far, I basically agree with Kaufmann and think he has correctly identified the two hard truths of this debate, and weighed the balance between them judiciously. 

But then, alas, he ends his lecture with a claim I cannot follow: 

"Nobody has any right to ask the Jews to go on demanding more of themselves than other nations do—" he asserts; "nobody, except a Jew." 

Well, I would think that Palestinians too might have some right to an opinion in the matter—given that it is their lives that are affected most every day by the actions of the Israeli government. 

(Besides, they can hardly be blamed for the actions of other governments that fall even lower than the Israeli standard on human rights—particularly not the children and elderly and other civilians among them.)

And as soon as we have granted that much, we of course can't stop there. As Kaufmann would himself probably be the first to admit, if he weren't catching him in a deliberately provocative moment, humanity as a whole has a right to an opinion on any question of justice.

Besides, as sympathetic as we may find Kaufmann's efforts to weigh the tension between these two hard truths, we can well ask whether the good, upstanding Boers in Brink's novel were doing anything different. 

They too were faced with a status quo they couldn't really defend. Yet they fired back at the world: who are you to cast the first stone? You don't know the sorts of extenuating circumstances we face!

"People don't seem to realize we're right in the middle of a war already," as a member of South Africa's security forces puts it, in Brink's novel; "[...] if we were to lay off for one week this country would be right down the drain."

Israel too sees itself as forced to suspend legal norms and to rule by the fiat of indefinite occupation as a matter of military necessity. 

"All right, I take it from you, Captain. I'm not arguing either," as Brink's protagonist replies to this argument; "But what did Gordon have to do with it all? Would you still have had to fight this war of yours if your wheels hadn't rolled over people like him to start with?" 

So too—this is the question one must ask every Israel apologist today. 

I don't doubt the "extenuating circumstances" and the security risks—who could after October 7?—but what does a Palestinian child or other civilian have to do with it? Why should they suffer for it, merely because they were born in Gaza and the West Bank? 

Are indeed, would you still be fighting this war with the Palestinians if you hadn't killed so many innocents in the course of it—tens of thousands in Gaza alone by the last count, with another civilian killed nearly every day even after the supposed ceasefire went into effect? 

If your "wheels" hadn't rolled over people like that to start with, would you still be at war? 

That image of the "wheels" from Brink's novel, crushing the bodies of the bystanders who happened to be in the way, reminds me all too much of Isaac Rosenberg's haunting war poem, "Dead Man's Dump"—in which the soldiers on corpse-collection duty end up crushing beneath their wheels one who still had life...

Let that not be the only future Palestinians and Israelis have to look forward to! Gaza looks a great deal today like a "Dead Man's Dump" from the first world war. If no one changes course from the current trajectory, ever more of the Middle East will look the same. 

Israelis today often ask: but what will happen to us in a post-apartheid world? What happens if the Palestinians do get a fully independent state with its own military? Won't the first thing they do be to attack us? 

Even worse, what happens if we give the vote to everyone in the occupied territories? Won't they just vote an anti-Zionist party into power and enact a right of return, and we will be instantly outnumbered? 

And once outnumbered—what then? Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? Will we be exiled and persecuted yet again? 

The Boers asked themselves all the same questions during the apartheid period. As Brink's protagonist summarizes the national ideology he was taught as a boy: "My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control—and who are now threatened with extinction." 

People don't impose and defend an apartheid regime because they are evil. They do it because they fear the alternative. They do it because they think it is their only option. They do it because they think their survival is in jeopardy if they ever ease up. 

If Israelis think that their apartheid in the West Bank is different or more excusable, simply because they have sound historical reasons to fear that other groups wish to persecute and exterminate them—then all one can say is that the Boers in South Africa defended their apartheid system—the one that gave the problem its name—by the same logic and with the same arguments. 

Well—one can then ask; were the Boers right to fear the consequences of democracy? 

Well, here we are, thirty years later. The Boers have not been exterminated. But their fears for survival have not gone away either. 

Right-wing demagogues speak of a "white genocide" in South Africa; but this is obviously absurd. As media reports never tire of pointing out in response: violent crime in the country affects all groups. 

But that said, such a statement is hardly a ringing endorsement. The claim that all racial groups in South Africa are getting gunned down by out of control crime may absolve the county of deliberate "genocide"— but it does not exactly point to a happy status quo. 

André Brink himself is an illustration of the tragedy of modern South Africa. His own nephew was murdered in a home invasion in 2008, in one of many instances of the violent criminality that is currently unchecked in the country. 

The current South African government is undoubtedly a better approximation to justice and democracy than the apartheid regime. But at the same time, it is far from ideal. 

And in light of the current level of violence in the society, one cannot say that the Boers' fears for the future were utterly unfounded. 

Just as no one can sneer at Israelis' concerns about security risks—not in the wake of October 7. 

Israel's apartheid is indeed a great deal like South Africa's apartheid, then—both in the sense that the two systems are morally and humanly indefensible; and in the sense that the two arose out of and created dilemmas from which there is not an easy or simple escape. 

One does not accuse Israel of committing apartheid and of resembling pre-democracy South Africa, then, merely to condemn the country and write it off as beyond the reach of human sympathy. 

To the contrary, the comparison is relevant because it illustrates the nature of the impasse they have come to, and how human beings with recognizable motives might have reached it, even while persuading themselves along the way that they were making necessary and excusable choices...

Now today in Israel, logic and morality and justice and human rights all dictate a democratic outcome; yet, the voices of "realism," fear, and pessimism (not all of it ungrounded) caution against majoritarian rule as a recipe for catastrophe. 

It is humanly untenable and monstrous for millions of Palestinians to live under the thumb of indefinite occupation, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism in the West Bank. They must either be given a state of their own or the vote in the Israeli Knesset. There are no other options. 

At the same time, people have some solid reasons—in light of past events—to fear that a Palestinian state or voting majority will not work out well for anyone—least of all for Israeli Jews. 

At such times, to quote Gore Vidal, "the liberal" who pleads for justice and equality "looks altogether absurd, the maverick lemming"—much like the Boer protagonist of Brink's novel, who follows his conscience instead of the herd, even though it means being condemned and rejected as a "traitor to his people."

"Yet, each acts as he must," Vidal concludes his essay on "The Liberal Dilemma"; "[B]y acting as though man's condition can be improved, the liberal simply demonstrates his predictability,[...] and does what he must since there is nothing else for him to do and no world elsewhere." 

So too, we must act as if our condition can be improved—as if peace and justice and democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere are possible; not because we can foresee or promise the future; but because we know no other way to behave and we have no other world than this one.