As college campuses across the country recognized Israeli Apartheid week this week, they sparked debates in the media on whether the term is used fairly to describe the situation in Israel. In a recent Washington Post article, Roger Cohen argues that Jimmy Carter label of Israel as an apartheid system was an exaggeration, especially given that the situation in the West Bank is not reflective of how the rest of the Israeli state functions.
Thankfully, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald had a fantastic comeback, in which he sites one of Cohen’s glaring omissions: that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have both attributed the term apartheid to Israel.
But does the racial segregation that shaped South Africa’s political system effectively explain how Palestinians and Israelis are living?
Not exactly.
As a system, apartheid does reflect what is taking place in Israel now: the forced segregation of Israelis and Palestinians, and systematic practices that separate a group of people and limit their civil and political rights.
What Greenwald and others overlook, though, is that the term “apartheid” has inherited a weighty historical context. Many, including Nelson Mandela, liken the Palestinians’ plight in Israel to apartheid in the South African context, claiming it is similar to – if not worse than – the systematic racial segregation in South Africa.
But the racial dynamics between the oppressors and victims that were real in South Africa are imagined in the context of Israel. Israelis do not consist of one racial group, and the majority of the Israelis – those who did not migrate to the state – have inherited the same racial features as Palestinians.
According to the 2009 Israeli Census, the country’s Jewish population by continent of origin is as follows:
Israel: 37.5%
Asia: 12.2%
Africa: 15.5%
Europe-America: 34.8%
Although the number of Europe-Americans Jews migrating to Israel is consistently increasing, they still make up a minority of all the Jews living in Israel – a white minority. And yet, they have come to symbolize the identity of the Israeli population in the minds of most Americans, and sometimes even shape how locals perceive the conflict.
In March 2009, Swiss artist Oliver Suter published an advertisement in Haaretz newspaper that called for lookalikes to the 8 people featured in the advertisement. The eight were Palestinians. Among the photos that Suter received, he matched up an Israeli girl to a Palestinian boy, surprising both families by their impressive similarity and prompting the girl’s father to say: “[David] Ben-Gurion was right when he said ‘The Palestinians are not our cousins, they’re our brothers. Turns out, they could be twins.’”
Incredibly, amid the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis, the racism that occurs among Israelis is often neglected in U.S. media. According to the Israeli Census, Mizrahi Jews (those of Arab origins) and Jews from Africa often fall behind Ashkanazi Jews in education and employment. This is in addition to the racist backlash against Ethiopian and Asian Jews [here I wish I could provide data or first-hand accounts, but I am deferring to stories of friends who have visited Israel].
But racism is not a taboo topic in Israel. Haaretz, among other publications, and Israelis have discussed the growing racial tensions within the country. However, when it comes to the U.S., Americans have imagined a different Israel altogether, one in which the Israelis do not look or act like the other – the Palestinians.
The term “apartheid” perpetuates this imagined identity, and I myself doubt if we can use such a loaded term without framing it according to the South African context from which it originated. Yet, the debate about the term poses a rather interesting question about not what Israel is, but how we perceive this conflict, and who Israel belongs to. Who really owns Israel?
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