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October 22, 2004
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.
^TOP
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