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.
Hi Chris - you might find this recent video, by Katie Halper, interesting. It seems that even Israeli politicians describe their own system as apartheid - I wonder if focusing on the definition might be missing the wood for the trees?
It's funny how much emphasis we put on specific words. 'Apartheid' is one, 'anti-semitism' is another. Surely apartheid is a form of racial discrimination, which in turn is a form of injustice and prejudice? And isn't anti-semitism too a form of injustice and prejudice? And prejudice just means to 'judge in advance', i.e. a form of injustice? So basically apartheid and anti-semitism are wrong because they are unjust.
It seems to me if humans focused on words that applied in the universal, we would be less divided. Injustice is bad whether applied to Palestinian, Israelis, or South Africans. Using words like apartheid and anti-semite work to divide people by making certain groups appear to be separate or different. The reality is the principles of justice and injustice, good and bad, are universal, and humanity would be better served seeing them that way.
Chris…Please don’t pull a Rogan or Russel Brand and cater to the right wing for the money. I have unsubscribed but I’m sure you’ll gain a few right wingers in my place
Chris speaking from the brain/heart about his thoughts on sensitive and complicated political matters is not akin to pandering to right wingers for money.
Your comment is probably not at all worth even responding to, but you should know Chris better than that. I don't really agree with the sentiments of Chris's post, but I know his heart is in the right place and has no interest in selling out.
It was a lazy obfuscation about the situation. These exact obfuscations are frequently used by right wing publications. I would also point out how different Israelis (Jewish) look from Palestinians (Arab) .. so Apartheid is by no means a liberal use of the term when using it to describe the conflict. Also, the American right wing’s new poster boy and girl, Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard also went after Rashida Tlaib on the Joe Rogan experience the same exact day this article was written 🧐🧐.
I think the reason that "apartheid" has become common phrasing regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine is because it has been brutal and prolonged enough to warrant such use.
Blacks were dehumanized for their race by Whites in South Africa. Palestinians are dehumanized for their ethnicity by Israeli's. And there is physical and institutional segregation enforced by the more powerful of the two (drive on different roads, live in different areas, go to different schools, have measurably different outcomes of health).
Use of the word apartheid brings with it a certain weight that I believe supporters hope will allow the rest of the world to actually start caring.
I take your point about the left excluding it's own and thereby weakening itself, but it seems to me that apartheid is, in essence, taking place right now in Palestine.
Chris, I applaud your courage in this climate of political purity. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex and rooted in historical context. Any oversimplification and caricature by labeling it "apartheid" demonstrates the ignorance of those who profess to know.
What is the actual problem with referring to the current situation in Palestine as apartheid?
I'm having trouble really understanding that commenters such as yourself and Chris are doing anything more than rallying against supposed left-wing "political purity".
With respect, there is nothing courageous about Chris posting his opinion on his own Substack.
I think it's a bit more than that, Eamon. I did debate whether it was worth posting, but for me, the gist of it is that words do matter -- especially when they're being used to define a lethal conflict. In this case, using a word that refers to racial oppression to define a situation that is in fact about religion seems both misleading and dangerous. Dangerous because misnaming a problem makes it harder (or impossible) to address it effectively. If you have rash, but your doctor calls it skin cancer, things aren't going to work out with the treatments. The problem isn't that Israel is led by a racist government. It goes deeper than that, I'd argue.
It's like calling a war "genocide" when it's just war. Yes, it gets people riled up and expresses passion, but "genocide" means something specific. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like using inflammatory words inaccurately makes it harder to call out really nasty shit because the words have lost meaning (e.g. What the Chinese are doing to the Uygurs seems to fit the definition of "apartheid.")
Well, if "words do matter", let's start with the word "left". It's another impressively elastic term that appears to mean whatever the user wants it to mean.
I consider myself a leftist, i.e. I believe in government intervention to redistribute wealth & to prompt society's members to respect each other & to use the Golden Rule.
This is in stark contrast to Democrat "progressives", who support the arch-capitalist, corporate-friendly Dem party by their cowardly failure to use their leverage in congress & live up to their own (vaguely stated) principles, if we can take that word, in their mouths, seriously. Their actions show them to care little, if anything, about the wealth gap. Instead, they advocate heavy-handed language-policing & the imposition on law of issues that precious few people actually give a damn about.
So it's fatiguing to see wokistas like AOC parading as "leftists". She wouldn't know true left principles if she tripped over them. The Squad has simply hijacked the word "left". If I went around saying I'm Jesus Christ incarnate vociferously enough, I might get committed. But the Squad call themselves leftists & nobody turns a hair.
So let's replace the word "race" with "tribe", then get on with the business of calling a spade a spade re Israel — they're stealing people's land & killing anybody who gets uppity about it.
I agree that what Peking is doing to the Uyghurs is more akin to apartheid than genocide. Unfortunately, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention has a definition vague enough to allow the word's application to all sorts of situations that aren't really genocidal, however nasty & even murderous they might be.
I get your point, but I'm not sure "tribe" represents much of an improvement over "race," in that "tribe" also has an elastic definition. We're getting close to the point where I don't even know how to talk about these issues. It feels like the relevant vocabulary has dissolved.
"We're getting close to the point where I don't even know how to talk about these issues. It feels like the relevant vocabulary has dissolved."
Precisely, we're using a whole slew of words that used to mean something fairly graspable (left, right, liberal, conservative, fascist, shill, etc.) to convey some usually deprecating but implication.
I also find it difficult to discuss these things without a lengthy digression to nail down every term used, which makes things kinda boring.
As for "tribe", I think we should try to normalize its use to mean nothing more specific than a group of people who feel they 'belong together', a shared membership of whatever group.
Anyone wishing to use it in a narrower sense can probably get there with an adjective or two (ethnic, hereditary, whatever) or just context.
"Race" is a word we should simply avoid (too toxic) & try to nudge it into oblivion. Of course, language has a mind of its own; nobody but nobody can boss it around — even the Nazis failed to impose their desires on the German language.
But we need to do Something to return to reasonable political discourse. Otherwise we'll end up like the Danes.
Point taken, and I'm glad it is more than that. I often feel that, although yes, certain leftists do over-correct in an attempt to be morally just in all instances without employing due critical thought, those who take issue with such often undermine all endeavours of the left as being self centered and "woke".
I agree completely that it is difficult, or not possible, to tackle a problem that cannot be defined. I would argue that the basis of discrimination against Palestinians is not simply religious, but instead presents as more of a settler-Indigenous framework. Palestinians are seen by many Israeli's as an inferior ethnicity, one undeserving of their original land. I don't see it as being altogether different to the Chinese-Uighur example. Uighurs are discriminated against by Han Chinese at intersections of ethnicity and religion, much like Palestinians. As you likely know, the Uighur homeland is home to a Turkic peoples with vastly different religious and cultural behaviours to China. More over, the discrimination is enforced systematically by the more powerful class and results in massively contrasting outcomes of health when compared to the ruling ethnicity. I see what is playing out in Western China (Eastern Turkestan) as closer to cultural genocide. The Chinese government is set to essentially erase Uighur culture from Xinjiang and have it be subsumed with their own. We are all aware of the horrors currently taking place to achieve such a goal. It's not a "one road for each ethnicity" kind of situation like in Palestine.
Regardless, I don't really know the answer. Call it whatever you want, I don't see any real reason why the change needs to come from anywhere else but inside of Israel. Jews are still being targeted by heinous acts of antiSemitism, to be sure. But ultimately the people of Israel need to compromise with their own ideology to make space for a people equally as deserving of access to their homeland.
I agree with each of your three points, especially that last one. There is a plethora of slopping thinking on this topic. I have visited both Israel and the West Bank, and so I know some of the complexities first hand.
Hmm. Race is a social construct (we are all variations within the human “race”) created by ideologues to define white Protestant people of NW European descent as somehow superior to others based partly on skin color, hair color, facial features, etc. It’s bullshit. Thus, Apartheid as traditionally defined is predicated on pure bullshit.
Religion--another social construct--is no more grounded in reality than race. Conflicts between religion or religiously affiliated peoples are disputes about certainties of the unknown and unknowable.
But oppression and dominance of others on the basis of some social construct or another can be named the same even if there are differences in the details. So applying the term Apartheid to a different form of dominance and oppression is simply renewing an old term and applying it to a different but still equivalent situation in the present. Language evolves, meaning evolves as our understanding evolves, and the use of Apartheid to describe the situation of Palestinians in Israel is really the use of a metaphor to compare like with like.
Nonetheless, I fully agree with you about the puritanical homogenization of progressive discourse these days. Thought police, anyone?
I take your points, but I think there is something fundamentally different about oppressing people because of race, class, gender, or religion. Also, I think the origin of race is a concept is more complex than your summation. For example, the Japanese consider themselves to be of a different, superior race than the Chinese or the Koreans. This is not something that was invented by white Europeans. Race is clearly a problematic concept, but if amnesty international and others are going to use the concept in their definition of apartheid, then it seems both confusing and misleading to conflate apartheid with religious persecution or persecution based upon other criteria.
Points well taken, and I’d add to my too-narrow definition of racism to include Arab racism against Subsaharan Africans, Han Chinese against Tibetans and Uighurs, and so on and so on. I suppose my main point is the use of a metaphor to draw parallels (albeit with differences) between South African apartheid and what’s going on in Israel. Which is truly sad because I’m sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland, given the crap that’s happened to Jews over the last 2000 years.
Excellent post. CR pillories "ideological purity" but then turns around & applies an excruciatingly technical definition of the word "race", a word having little meaning in the real world except whatever the user chooses it to mean (as in your point about Nazi race theory).
Yes, the struggle is about "land and home and belonging". It's tribe against tribe.
And the dominant Israelis lord it over the defeated Palestinians, stealing ever more of their land, & controlling All of it. Like apartheid South Africa, the Israelis use force to stay on top & keep the Palestinians down. The latter can't join the Israeli tribe; for all intents & purposes they're a different "race".
If you consider Israel proper & the occupied territories to be one entity (contrary to international law, but that's definitely how the Israelis view it), then it requires some pretty challenging logical contortions to rule out "apartheid", if only by analogy.
Hi Chris - you might find this recent video, by Katie Halper, interesting. It seems that even Israeli politicians describe their own system as apartheid - I wonder if focusing on the definition might be missing the wood for the trees?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3a7d4Qa8M6I
It's funny how much emphasis we put on specific words. 'Apartheid' is one, 'anti-semitism' is another. Surely apartheid is a form of racial discrimination, which in turn is a form of injustice and prejudice? And isn't anti-semitism too a form of injustice and prejudice? And prejudice just means to 'judge in advance', i.e. a form of injustice? So basically apartheid and anti-semitism are wrong because they are unjust.
It seems to me if humans focused on words that applied in the universal, we would be less divided. Injustice is bad whether applied to Palestinian, Israelis, or South Africans. Using words like apartheid and anti-semite work to divide people by making certain groups appear to be separate or different. The reality is the principles of justice and injustice, good and bad, are universal, and humanity would be better served seeing them that way.
Chris…Please don’t pull a Rogan or Russel Brand and cater to the right wing for the money. I have unsubscribed but I’m sure you’ll gain a few right wingers in my place
Gerard, don't be that guy.
Chris speaking from the brain/heart about his thoughts on sensitive and complicated political matters is not akin to pandering to right wingers for money.
Your comment is probably not at all worth even responding to, but you should know Chris better than that. I don't really agree with the sentiments of Chris's post, but I know his heart is in the right place and has no interest in selling out.
Without wanting to sound harsh, please, grow up.
It was a lazy obfuscation about the situation. These exact obfuscations are frequently used by right wing publications. I would also point out how different Israelis (Jewish) look from Palestinians (Arab) .. so Apartheid is by no means a liberal use of the term when using it to describe the conflict. Also, the American right wing’s new poster boy and girl, Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard also went after Rashida Tlaib on the Joe Rogan experience the same exact day this article was written 🧐🧐.
No idea what you're talking about.
I think the reason that "apartheid" has become common phrasing regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine is because it has been brutal and prolonged enough to warrant such use.
Blacks were dehumanized for their race by Whites in South Africa. Palestinians are dehumanized for their ethnicity by Israeli's. And there is physical and institutional segregation enforced by the more powerful of the two (drive on different roads, live in different areas, go to different schools, have measurably different outcomes of health).
Use of the word apartheid brings with it a certain weight that I believe supporters hope will allow the rest of the world to actually start caring.
I take your point about the left excluding it's own and thereby weakening itself, but it seems to me that apartheid is, in essence, taking place right now in Palestine.
Overall, a complex, sticky and awful situation I don't profess to hold any answers to but hope we will see peaceful resolution in our time.
Chris, I applaud your courage in this climate of political purity. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex and rooted in historical context. Any oversimplification and caricature by labeling it "apartheid" demonstrates the ignorance of those who profess to know.
Jerry, you didn't really make an argument.
What is the actual problem with referring to the current situation in Palestine as apartheid?
I'm having trouble really understanding that commenters such as yourself and Chris are doing anything more than rallying against supposed left-wing "political purity".
With respect, there is nothing courageous about Chris posting his opinion on his own Substack.
I think it's a bit more than that, Eamon. I did debate whether it was worth posting, but for me, the gist of it is that words do matter -- especially when they're being used to define a lethal conflict. In this case, using a word that refers to racial oppression to define a situation that is in fact about religion seems both misleading and dangerous. Dangerous because misnaming a problem makes it harder (or impossible) to address it effectively. If you have rash, but your doctor calls it skin cancer, things aren't going to work out with the treatments. The problem isn't that Israel is led by a racist government. It goes deeper than that, I'd argue.
It's like calling a war "genocide" when it's just war. Yes, it gets people riled up and expresses passion, but "genocide" means something specific. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like using inflammatory words inaccurately makes it harder to call out really nasty shit because the words have lost meaning (e.g. What the Chinese are doing to the Uygurs seems to fit the definition of "apartheid.")
Well, if "words do matter", let's start with the word "left". It's another impressively elastic term that appears to mean whatever the user wants it to mean.
I consider myself a leftist, i.e. I believe in government intervention to redistribute wealth & to prompt society's members to respect each other & to use the Golden Rule.
This is in stark contrast to Democrat "progressives", who support the arch-capitalist, corporate-friendly Dem party by their cowardly failure to use their leverage in congress & live up to their own (vaguely stated) principles, if we can take that word, in their mouths, seriously. Their actions show them to care little, if anything, about the wealth gap. Instead, they advocate heavy-handed language-policing & the imposition on law of issues that precious few people actually give a damn about.
So it's fatiguing to see wokistas like AOC parading as "leftists". She wouldn't know true left principles if she tripped over them. The Squad has simply hijacked the word "left". If I went around saying I'm Jesus Christ incarnate vociferously enough, I might get committed. But the Squad call themselves leftists & nobody turns a hair.
So let's replace the word "race" with "tribe", then get on with the business of calling a spade a spade re Israel — they're stealing people's land & killing anybody who gets uppity about it.
I agree that what Peking is doing to the Uyghurs is more akin to apartheid than genocide. Unfortunately, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention has a definition vague enough to allow the word's application to all sorts of situations that aren't really genocidal, however nasty & even murderous they might be.
I get your point, but I'm not sure "tribe" represents much of an improvement over "race," in that "tribe" also has an elastic definition. We're getting close to the point where I don't even know how to talk about these issues. It feels like the relevant vocabulary has dissolved.
"We're getting close to the point where I don't even know how to talk about these issues. It feels like the relevant vocabulary has dissolved."
Precisely, we're using a whole slew of words that used to mean something fairly graspable (left, right, liberal, conservative, fascist, shill, etc.) to convey some usually deprecating but implication.
I also find it difficult to discuss these things without a lengthy digression to nail down every term used, which makes things kinda boring.
As for "tribe", I think we should try to normalize its use to mean nothing more specific than a group of people who feel they 'belong together', a shared membership of whatever group.
Anyone wishing to use it in a narrower sense can probably get there with an adjective or two (ethnic, hereditary, whatever) or just context.
"Race" is a word we should simply avoid (too toxic) & try to nudge it into oblivion. Of course, language has a mind of its own; nobody but nobody can boss it around — even the Nazis failed to impose their desires on the German language.
But we need to do Something to return to reasonable political discourse. Otherwise we'll end up like the Danes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk&ab_channel=snurre
I've been toying with the idea of trying to write something about race/racism, triggered by this article.
https://race.undark.org/articles/race-is-a-biological-fiction-it-is-also-a-powerful-social-reality
I wonder what your take on it is. Can we abandon the idea of race, as you suggest, while still struggling against racism?
Point taken, and I'm glad it is more than that. I often feel that, although yes, certain leftists do over-correct in an attempt to be morally just in all instances without employing due critical thought, those who take issue with such often undermine all endeavours of the left as being self centered and "woke".
I agree completely that it is difficult, or not possible, to tackle a problem that cannot be defined. I would argue that the basis of discrimination against Palestinians is not simply religious, but instead presents as more of a settler-Indigenous framework. Palestinians are seen by many Israeli's as an inferior ethnicity, one undeserving of their original land. I don't see it as being altogether different to the Chinese-Uighur example. Uighurs are discriminated against by Han Chinese at intersections of ethnicity and religion, much like Palestinians. As you likely know, the Uighur homeland is home to a Turkic peoples with vastly different religious and cultural behaviours to China. More over, the discrimination is enforced systematically by the more powerful class and results in massively contrasting outcomes of health when compared to the ruling ethnicity. I see what is playing out in Western China (Eastern Turkestan) as closer to cultural genocide. The Chinese government is set to essentially erase Uighur culture from Xinjiang and have it be subsumed with their own. We are all aware of the horrors currently taking place to achieve such a goal. It's not a "one road for each ethnicity" kind of situation like in Palestine.
Regardless, I don't really know the answer. Call it whatever you want, I don't see any real reason why the change needs to come from anywhere else but inside of Israel. Jews are still being targeted by heinous acts of antiSemitism, to be sure. But ultimately the people of Israel need to compromise with their own ideology to make space for a people equally as deserving of access to their homeland.
It’s not very complex when you actually dig into the history.
I agree with each of your three points, especially that last one. There is a plethora of slopping thinking on this topic. I have visited both Israel and the West Bank, and so I know some of the complexities first hand.
Hmm. Race is a social construct (we are all variations within the human “race”) created by ideologues to define white Protestant people of NW European descent as somehow superior to others based partly on skin color, hair color, facial features, etc. It’s bullshit. Thus, Apartheid as traditionally defined is predicated on pure bullshit.
Religion--another social construct--is no more grounded in reality than race. Conflicts between religion or religiously affiliated peoples are disputes about certainties of the unknown and unknowable.
But oppression and dominance of others on the basis of some social construct or another can be named the same even if there are differences in the details. So applying the term Apartheid to a different form of dominance and oppression is simply renewing an old term and applying it to a different but still equivalent situation in the present. Language evolves, meaning evolves as our understanding evolves, and the use of Apartheid to describe the situation of Palestinians in Israel is really the use of a metaphor to compare like with like.
Nonetheless, I fully agree with you about the puritanical homogenization of progressive discourse these days. Thought police, anyone?
I take your points, but I think there is something fundamentally different about oppressing people because of race, class, gender, or religion. Also, I think the origin of race is a concept is more complex than your summation. For example, the Japanese consider themselves to be of a different, superior race than the Chinese or the Koreans. This is not something that was invented by white Europeans. Race is clearly a problematic concept, but if amnesty international and others are going to use the concept in their definition of apartheid, then it seems both confusing and misleading to conflate apartheid with religious persecution or persecution based upon other criteria.
Points well taken, and I’d add to my too-narrow definition of racism to include Arab racism against Subsaharan Africans, Han Chinese against Tibetans and Uighurs, and so on and so on. I suppose my main point is the use of a metaphor to draw parallels (albeit with differences) between South African apartheid and what’s going on in Israel. Which is truly sad because I’m sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland, given the crap that’s happened to Jews over the last 2000 years.
Excellent post. CR pillories "ideological purity" but then turns around & applies an excruciatingly technical definition of the word "race", a word having little meaning in the real world except whatever the user chooses it to mean (as in your point about Nazi race theory).
Yes, the struggle is about "land and home and belonging". It's tribe against tribe.
And the dominant Israelis lord it over the defeated Palestinians, stealing ever more of their land, & controlling All of it. Like apartheid South Africa, the Israelis use force to stay on top & keep the Palestinians down. The latter can't join the Israeli tribe; for all intents & purposes they're a different "race".
If you consider Israel proper & the occupied territories to be one entity (contrary to international law, but that's definitely how the Israelis view it), then it requires some pretty challenging logical contortions to rule out "apartheid", if only by analogy.