For one thing, the Palestinians have engaged in so much terroristic activity and bad faith on their part that the Apartheid- trending activities of Israel have to be seen in that context.
It's not a pretty picture.
I remember hearing Henry Kissinger speak at the Pierre Hotel in New York some 30 years ago about Israel and the Mideast, and his outlook was very gloomy. Basically, he said that what he had seen from human history was that situations like the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over territorial rights were incredibly difficult to resolve and that in most cases it went from one crisis to another.
At that time, the Troubles in Northern Ireland were still in full swing, and no meaningful progress had ever been made towards a Peace Process. Both sides were intransigent, as Bill Clinton later remarked " like two drunks who insist on going back to a bar to fight no matter how many times they are separated and thrown out."
The situation in Israel also means disturbing the Power that Must Not be Named, which is the Infamous Israel Lobby in the United States. People who run afoul of these fascistic types with their constant shrieks of "anti-Semitism!!" and references to the Holocaust come up whenever someone in ANY WAY questions what the Israelis are doing.
The following is the most rational article I have found on the situation in some time.
World
Why John Kerry’s right on Israel and apartheid: Burman
The harsh reaction to John Kerry’s ‘apartheid’ warning prompted the U.S. secretary of state to apologize. But he shouldn’t have.
MOHAMMED ABED
/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A Palestinian child plays under a tarp at the harbour in Gaza City
on April 28, 2014. Is a two-state solution necessary for Israel to
remain a Jewish state?
Of course, John Kerry
was right, and it was important that he said it. On its present course,
the State of Israel runs considerable risk that it will one day become
an “apartheid state.” And we know from the lessons of history how
perilous that would be for the country. Anyone supportive of Israel who
thinks otherwise is delusional, dishonest or wilfully blind.
Kerry’s apology
on Monday for his controversial and off-the-record remarks was
perfunctory and predictable: “If could rewind the tape, I would have
chosen a different word.” But it didn’t take away from the original
truth.
Let’s remember what
the U.S. secretary of state actually said. Speaking at a closed-door
meeting of world leaders, Kerry said Israel would soon need to accept a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or face a worse
alternative: “A unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state
with second-class citizens — or it ends up being a state that destroys
the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”
Kerry didn’t say that
Israel is an “apartheid state,” or wishes to become one. That would be
untrue. But what he did say was remarkably similar to what Israeli
leaders themselves have said in the past.
In 2007, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned
that “if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we
face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights . . . the
State of Israel is finished.” In 2010, former prime minister Ehud Barak
said: “The simple truth is, if there is one state . . . if this bloc of
millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Last year, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni warned that, without a two-state solution, Israel could turn into an “apartheid state.”
But these leaders
don’t rule Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does, and his views
and actions have been strikingly different.
The debate triggered
this past week by Kerry’s use of the word “apartheid” largely missed the
mark. Of course, it is wrong to exaggerate the similarities between the
two cases. But there are important strategic parallels.
It is obvious that the
driving assumption of the Netanyahu government has been that the world
will eventually tire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that
Israel’s importance — at least to a compliant West — as a pivotal
strategic partner in the region will let it keep expanding its “facts on
the ground.” Hence, the unrelenting construction of illegal Israeli
settlements.
That part does remind
me of South Africa. When I started visiting that country in the
mid-1980s with the CBC, at the height of apartheid and during its “state
of emergency,” I remember that South Africa too felt impervious to
international interference.
After all, with the
Cold War also at its height, South Africa was seen by the West as
Africa’s bulwark against the spread of communism. Nelson Mandela
was invisible and in jail. And the leaders of Britain and the United
States in particular — Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — were
completely indifferent to the scourge of apartheid, and to whether
Mandela died in jail.
But then something
changed. As the popular resistance to apartheid increased within South
Africa, popular international resistance against South Africa began to
mobilize. Appalled at the growing violence of the South African regime, a
coalition of unions, churches, civic groups and individual companies —
many of them Canadian — pressured governments to isolate South Africa
and ultimately bring down the regime.
In February 1990, just
after Nelson Mandela was released from a South African prison, I was
part of the CBC team with Barbara Frum as he gave one of his first
interviews. Before it began, he kept quizzing us on where we had been.
I told him that I had
just come back from what I described as “a conflict even more
intractable” than South Africa. In Israel and the occupied territories, I
was covering the first Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising against
Israeli rule.
Mandela gently
replied: “They will learn, just as we are learning here in South Africa,
that all conflicts must come to an end. The only question is ‘how.’”
That was 24 years ago.
As John Kerry has tried to suggest, that question of “how” is becoming
more and more urgent in the Middle East.
Tony Burman, former head of Al-Jazeera English and CBC News, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. @TonyBurman tony.burman@gmail.com
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