By Khaled Ali Beydoun
UCLA
Daily Bruin, July 8, 2002
I commend the University of California professors who have taken a moral stand against Israeli occupation demonstrated by their call for divestment. The sociopolitical reality and circumstance of Palestinian innocents in the West Bank, on numerous planes, mirrors the South African apartheid paradigm and, in some respects, even transcends it in degree of violence and suffocation.
To exemplify the parallel, examination of the 13 isolated West Bank cantons, which comprise 287 enclosed areas, is functionally equivalent to the apartheid design of South African Bantustans. Although the analogy is vehemently discredited as too tenuous or absurd by sympathizers of Israel, it has been echoed by the likes of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who have endured South African apartheid) as well as other intellectuals and leaders across the globe.
True, the occupation of the West Bank is not perfectly congruent with its South African precedent, but fundamentally cosmetic and political-specific differences do not exhaust the applicability of the comparison: Palestinians in the West Bank are enduring a reality where they are severed from their families in geographically neighboring, but politically inaccessible, villages and subsequently have no mobility or freedom, much like the indigenous Africans of South Africa.
Nevertheless, supporters of Israel will argue that its championing of democratic ideals ultimately precludes the applicability of the apartheid comparison. This challenge, which logically invites another theoretical challenge is: if relating South African apartheid to Israeli occupation is ill-fitting, consequently, the comparison between the Israeli brand of democracy with universal democratic precepts is exponentially bizarre.
Rabbi Norbert Weinberg compiles a list of moral/democratic transgressions that the Arab governments have violated, many of which I echo, but he also selectively overlooks Israel's own engagement in such practices. Israel is no novice to de facto or even institutionalized racism; examining its history and contemporary civil society reveals that not only Palestinians, but also ethnic Jews (Falasha and Safardic Jews), are third and second-class citizens, at best to Ashkinazi, or European Jews.
Such stratification along racial lines is derived from ethnocentric political and cultural roots, and is hardly democratic. Further, Israel's founding was facilitated by rag-tag terrorist organizations, including the Haganah and its more extremist offshoot, the Stern Gang, who were responsible for bombing the King David Hotel and intimidating Palestinian innocents out of their homes. Further, Israel's military practices of the 1980s, most notably the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, as well as the current oppression of Palestinian civilians is, in shape and consequence, government-executed terrorism.
Democracy does not function so militaristically. In order to superficially legitimize and market its democratic guise, Israel will boast that Arabs are allowed to vote and even serve in government, but that is only 20 percent of the entire Arab population, and the result is the handful of Palestinians serving in government wield no influence and are alas merely tokens.
However, raising these flawed counterarguments is finally irrelevant to what is actually taking place in the West Bank: a government design to systematically isolate, exhaust and ultimately displace the Palestinian people. It is not the South African apartheid, but monopolizing that concept to a single historical experience is intellectually stagnant, and refusing to accept the analogies is morally irresponsible for any person of conscience.
Archbishop Tutu observed, "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction."