Israel and apartheid?

Editorial

Some credit is due to organizers of a conference last weekend at Simon Fraser University. The conference brought together some top academics to discuss what lessons the parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could learn from the experience of apartheid-era South Africa. (See Oct. 22 cover story, "Apartheid comparison fails.")

The conference had the potential to be divisive and destructive. As events at Concordia University in Montreal have demonstrated, the ability to address some of the issues around the conflict in the Middle East are incapable of being discussed civilly in some environments. Remarkably, that did not happen here, despite the incendiary topic.

Most of the speakers – including those whose sensibilities tended to be sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative – acknowledged as folly the idea that we can apply too many direct comparisons between the divergent conflicts between blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa and Israelis and Palestinians today.
Academics, God bless them, have a capacity for comparing and contrasting anything and everything. So, of course, there were parallels and lessons to be found in the South African context for the Middle East conflict. But the mature conclusion of most participants was that the variations in the cases precluded any significant direct comparisons.

Generally speaking, the event was comprehensive, intriguing and refreshing for its intellectual level and lack of propaganda.

But the outstanding issue that remained largely unaddressed by the conference was any deep consideration of the role that the apartheid libel has played in the worldwide battle for global sympathy. Apartheid has become the guiding metaphor for Israel's critics to shorthand the alleged inhumanity, brutality and injustice of the current conflict.

Though participants in the SFU conference effectively discounted the intellectual credibility of the libel and outlined the inappropriateness of applying the direct apartheid metaphor to the Middle East conflict, they did not, in any substantial way, address the role it plays in the conflict, especially in the perceptions of outside observers to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

The apartheid slander has been a defining force in the anti-Israel movement since, at the latest, the Durban conference of 2001. In a world where busy people make judgments on world affairs based on sound bites from last night's newscast, the apartheid libel has been one of the most effective organizing tools. By shorthanding a complex conflict with difficult historical, theological and contemporary intricacies into something as black-and-white as "apartheid" has allowed the anti-Israel movement to set this debate on a massively distorted playing field.

As the academics at last weekend's conference pointed out repeatedly over two days of provocative and dramatic lectures and workshops, the parallels are tenuous at best and have the potential to significantly distort the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by imposing on them a simplistic interpretation that cannot possibly fit.

Apartheid is a word that evokes powerful revulsion in good people. It is so powerful that it evokes an intellectual override stroke in our minds. If something is in any way akin to apartheid, we must oppose it wholeheartedly, regardless of any potential contradictions the facts might suggest. For this reason, the apartheid comparison has been massively successful in drawing to the anti-Israel movement a class of activists who are able to discount any legitimacy to Israeli actions, while overlooking the profound ideological differences they might have with the Palestinian narrative and ignoring far worse human rights abuses than Israel's all over the world. By invoking the imagery of apartheid, anti-Israel activists have been able to cement a false dichotomy of Israeli oppression and beatific Palestinian suffering mirroring the black-white relationship under apartheid.

Though top intellectuals debunked this position as untenable last weekend, the apartheid libel will continue to underpin the movement that denies any legitimacy to Israel. The apartheid metaphor is simply too successful and too valuable to abandon simply because it is intellectually false. The success that the simplistic apartheid accusation has had in drawing flocks of ill-informed, virulent and simple-minded fanatics to the anti-Israel cause has redefined the nature of the debate in Canada and elsewhere. We'd like to see a conference about that.

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