Israeli
Apartheid:
A
Beginner’s
Guide
–
Book
Review
By Susan de Muth
(Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. Ben White, Pluto
Press, 144 pages.)
“Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide” by Ben White is a new,
updated and expanded edition of his hard-hitting study of how
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians resembles the nowextinct South African apartheid system.
White’s premise is simple: if Israel is, indeed, practicing a
form of apartheid, why doesn’t the international community
respond with the same abhorrence it exhibited for the
Pretorian prototype? Diplomatic pressure, sanctions and
boycotts ultimately saw that system collapse and the
establishment of one state for all South Africa’s citizens,
whatever their skin color.
White was prompted to revisit his subject six years on, not
only because “the situation on the ground is even worse” but
also in response to an awakening of Western sympathies in
regard to the plight of the Palestinians, despite the best
efforts of Israel’s vigorous propaganda machine.
Former American president Jimmy Carter was ahead of the pack
with his 2006 book “Peace Not Apartheid” which brought the
debate into the mainstream and challenged the moral integrity
of the Hebrew state. Israel’s 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead”
onslaught on Gaza which killed 1400 Palestinians, many of them
women and children, gave the general public more reason to be
concerned. Prominent Israelis, including former prime minister
Ehud Olmert, warned that Tel Aviv’s violent and racist actions
were putting the country at risk of becoming a pariah state.
White reminds readers that Israel’s association with apartheid
South Africa was longstanding. Both emerged in 1948, and the
South African Jewish community heavily funded the Hebrew state
in its infancy. In 1961, then South African prime minister and
architect of apartheid, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, observed
that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state”. The
two states maintained a close political and military
relationship, with Israel enabling South Africa to become a
nuclear power following a secret 1975 military co-operation
agreement signed by Shimon Peres and P.W. Botha.
White’s book achieves the aims it sets out in the preface — to
“highlight the key issues” and be “readable” — but does the
author convince that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is
indeed akin to apartheid?
White begins with the legal framework. Apartheid was first
defined — in UN General Assembly Resolution 3068 (1973) — as a
crime, producing “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of
establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of
persons over any other racial group
systematically oppressing them”.
of
persons
and
This definition is now enshrined in international law, and
White’s book is structured around the three main groups of the
“inhuman acts” it cites.
The first group concerns “measures designed to divide the
population along racial lines by the creation of separate
reserves and ghettos … [and] the expropriation of land and
property”. Clearly, Israel’s ongoing construction of a 400mile (644-kilometre) “separation” wall does what it says on
the tin, and has been grabbing some extra Palestinian land
too.
Israel’s relentless building of colonies in the Occupied
Territories is intended to expropriate Palestinian land and
also fragment it. Special roads for the exclusive use of more
than half a million Jewish colonisers achieve a similar
purpose.
The next group of “inhuman acts” cites “measures calculated to
prevent a racial group from participation in the political,
social, economic and cultural life of the country… [including]
the right to leave and return to their country, the right to a
nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”
Again, Israel’s oppressive measures tick all the boxes and
White is thorough in listing his evidence. There is no space
here to detail his persuasive picture of “ethnic cleansing” in
an Israel which defines itself as a “Jewish” state, which
perceives the birth of Arab children as a “demographic
threat”, which impedes freedom of movement with checkpoints,
gates and barriers, and seeks to impose the maximum cruelty,
humiliation and hardship on the beleaguered Palestinians with
grinding, daily, regularity.
The final group concerns impeding “the right to life and
liberty”. White shows that nearly a million Palestinians have
been imprisoned by Israel — among them, every year, up to 700
children — and that torture is commonplace.
In a period of three years, 67 Palestinian mothers were forced
to give birth at Israeli checkpoints when they were not
allowed through to get to hospital; 38 newborn babies died as
a result. White quotes an Israeli activist who describes the
situation in Gaza as “the imprisonment of an entire people”.
White intersperses his text with shocking first-person
Palestinian testimonies — that of an elderly lady, for
example, who not only suffered the trauma and indignity of
Israeli bulldozers razing her home, but was presented with the
bill afterwards.
White’s thesis is well researched, well argued and copiously
referenced (there are some 30 pages of notes). Inevitable
criticisms that the book fails to represent the Israeli
viewpoint are to some extent offset by a “Frequently Asked
Questions” section. Here, White responds to the charge that it
is “anti-Semitic” to criticize Israel, and offers an excellent
philosophical refutation (courtesy of Sharif Elmusa) of the
claim that “Jews are entitled to a state of their own just as
the French have France”: “If Israel is the state of all the
Jews, all Jewish people are by definition citizens of Israel;
and all citizens of Israel are … Jews. The third part of the
proposition is clearly empirically wrong; thus the assertion
that Israel is as Jewish as France is French cannot be
sustained.”
White concludes that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians
is not only comparable to apartheid South Africa, but worse.
Where Israel seeks to destroy the Palestinians’ social,
political and economic infrastructure, the Pretoria regime
“promoted a pretense of equal treatment, and built houses,
schools, universities and businesses … it sought to advance
the material welfare of black people while denying political
rights”.
In the final section of the book, White considers what can be
done and urges the international community to build on the
present momentum the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)
movement has gained.
Surely, there can be no chance for lasting peace until the
various elements of Israel’s apartheid regime are dismantled,
and a solution for the benefit of both Palestinian Arabs and
Jews is genuinely sought.
– Susan de Muth is a London-based journalist who focuses on
the Middle East, contributing regularly to specialist
publications. (This review was originally published in Gulf
News, and is reprinted in PalestineChronicle.com with
permission from the author.)