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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.

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?

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