Robert Azzi| Columnist
Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right, I remember P. J. ORourke, who died this week at his home in Sharon, NH, writing after he traveled to the Levant and beyond.
Today, I get to explain why Im right.
Today, I'm inspired by a Seacoast reader who recently sent me two op-ed pieces from the Wall Street Journal, the first of which was accompanied by the following note:
Mr.Azzi, / If you could bring yourself to denounce Amnesty International, renounce BDS and recognize this new version of anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism, I would take you more seriously as a liberal voice!
What provoked my reader was the publication, last month, of anAmnesty Internationalreport, that joinedHuman Rights Watch(HRW),BTselem, andYesh Din- all highly regarded human rights organizations - in reporting the conditions under which Palestinians were living in Israel and the occupied territories, concluding "The Israeli government is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians and must be held accountable.
This isnt the world ganging up on Israel; this is the world calling upon Israel to live up to its own declared aspirational values.
Im often asked why I criticize Israel when other regimes are so much more cruel and unjust. I criticize Israel, I answer, because those other regimes - Syria, China, Iran, for example - do not (a) even pretend theyre democracies, and (b) they are not occupying and oppressing indigenous populations using American weapons and with American support.
Todays reality is that Israel is a democracy only for its Jews; for its Christian, Druze, and Muslim citizensdemocracy is promised but never fully realized, limited by unequal housing, education and employment opportunities.
In the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, Israel acts as a violent and internationally illegitimate occupying power that controls nearly all aspects of Palestinian life and opportunity.
Some pro-Israel critics argue Israel cant be an apartheid state because some Israeli Arabs have achieved some modicum of success.
Thats absurd: to assert that Israel is a democracy for all because it has an Arab supreme court justice and Arabs in the Knesset - or an Arab beauty queen - is akin to asserting that Americas free of systemic racism because it once elected a Black president.
The reality is, as then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered in 2019 following the passage of Israels new Nation State law that Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people and only it.
Thats reality for many Israelis - and its not new.
"The 'A-word' used to be taboo, but this has changed as the situation has changed," Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa said in 2013. "The situation that has developed in the West Bank over four and a half decades is a kind of apartheid. If you compare the suffering of black people in South Africa under 40 years of apartheid, and the suffering of the Palestinians under 46 years of occupation, I don't know who suffered more.
I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed, Bishop Tutu wrote in 2014, recognizing that house demolitions, segregation, land confiscation for illegal settlements, the limiting of Palestinians to Bantustan-like communities, discriminatory admissions policies, roads built for settlers not accessible to Palestinians, travel and family unification restrictions, and the ability of Israeli Jews being able to reclaim pre-1948 property abandoned during the war of independence while Palestinians are denied that right, are all manifestations of apartheid.
HWR, writing that …in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity.
Since Israels war for independence - referred to as the Nakba by Palestinians - when over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, over 500 Arab villages erased from maps, when atrocities including rapes, massacres, and torture were committed by both sides, the State of Israel has failed to confront the reality of what life has become for Palestinians living under their control: that although the population of the two peoples between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is nearly identical - 6.8 million residents each - one people is privileged over the other.
That, I believe, is apartheid.
Further, I am a supporter of the global nonviolent BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement against the State of Israel, just as I favored BDS against South Africa. Initially, I supported limited BDS - targeting just Israeli activity in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 but, as that had little effect, I have fully embraced total BDS.
It worked in South Africa and will, in time, work in Israel.
These are difficult, but necessary, conversations to have. I consider myself a progressive voice advocating for justice, human rights, and equality for all, whether in America or in the Middle East; whether in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories, in Ferguson or Hebron, in Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Jerusalem.
I believe that the Zionism that emerged in the late 19th century as a political nationalist movement that became a settler-colonialist instrument of domination is today anachronistic, oppressive, and counterproductive, i.e., Israel cannot be both Democratic and Jewish.
Instead, I believe that Zionism as religion, identity, language, and history should not only endure but be nourished not by conquest or domination of other peoples but by recognizing the humanity of all peoples.
Until the humanity of both peoples is recognized neither will find peace.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached attheother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
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