Is Israel an Apartheid State?

Representative Rashida Tlaib’s recently caused a bit of a storm when she made the following assertion at an event celebrating Palestine:

I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel‘s apartheid government.

Hold on.

I have long considered Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to be brutal, dishonest, and ultimately self-defeating. However, to put things into regional context, I don’t see any of the nearby Arab states — several of which are immensely wealthy — stepping up to help the Palestinians. So there’s that.

Second point: Who elected Rashida Tlaib to decide who can claim to “hold progressive values?” This call to purity is the scourge of the political left. The insistence that one must agree with every nuance of our platform to be welcomed as part of our enlightened group is absurd yet ubiquitous among so-called progressives. No wonder simpletons motivated by nothing more than power and money keep winning the day and running the show. The self-fracturing, self-defeating geniuses of the progressive wing keep choosing ideological purity over practical progress, so the lizard-brained take control. How in the world does Tlaib think she’ll advance her cause by alienating and expelling any progressives who support Israel? I’m sorry, but that kind of thinking is so progressive it’s regressive.

But more interesting to me, ultimately, is how intellectual sloppiness is reflected in sloppy language, often resulting in confusion and unnecessary conflict. Tlaib (and many others) insist that Israel is an Apartheid State, but what does the word “apartheid” actually mean? Here’s Amnesty International’s summation:

The term “apartheid” was originally used to refer to a political system in South Africa which explicitly enforced racial segregation, and the domination and oppression of one racial group by another. It has since been adopted by the international community to condemn and criminalize such systems and practices wherever they occur in the world.

The crime against humanity of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute and customary international law is committed when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.

Apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.

Apartheid is a system of oppression of one racial group by another. That’s the essence of apartheid. But here’s a problem: most Israelis and Palestinians are racially indistinguishable. To the extent that “race” exists, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians are in the same one.

“Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham,” says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, an author of the new study by an international team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Israel. “And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years,” he says.

The study, published in the May 9 (2000) issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and these signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this region. Consequently, Jews and Arabs share a common ancestor and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world. (From a summary in Science Daily, here.)

No doubt, Israelis are oppressing Palestinians, Shia Muslims are oppressing Sunni Muslims in Iraq, the British have long oppressed Scots and Irishmen, Indians are always just a step away from war with Pakistan … but none of these conflicts are racial in nature, they are religious. To some readers, it may seem that I’m nitpicking and missing the point, but to conflate religious conflict with racism is to utterly misunderstand/misrepresent the problem, which makes it pretty much impossible to solve.