For Israel, an epithet undeserved
Toward the end of last year, Jimmy Carter apologized for some of his very harsh statements about Israel. In an "open letter to the Jewish community" he airily mentioned criticisms that "stigmatize Israel" but omitted his contribution: the implication that Israel is, like the South Africa of old, an "apartheid" state.
Carter used the term in his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." It could be argued that he meant the label to apply only to the West Bank, which is hardly an apartheid state anyway, but still the use of the term was deliberatively provocative. Carter was waving the bloody shirt of racism and he knew it.
What can be said about others who apply the term to Israel in general? No apology has come from them. Use of the word has become common. Google "Israel and apartheid." The message is clear: Israel is a state where political and civil rights are withheld on the basis of race and race alone.
This is not the case.
Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military, although most are exempt from draft.
The West Bank, more or less under military rule, is a different matter. But it is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan - including those proposed by Israeli governments - almost all of it will revert to the Palestinian Authority and become the heartland of a Palestinian state.
Yet Israel's critics continue to hurl the apartheid epithet. Interestingly, they do not use it for Saudi Arabia, which maintains as perfect a system of gender apartheid as can be imagined or elsewhere in the Arab world, where Palestinians sometimes have fewer rights than they do in Israel.
A recent op-ed article on Israel in the Financial Times employs the word apartheid. The author is Henry Siegman, a harsh critic of Israeli policies and a former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, so anti-Semitism is not the issue. But anti-Semitism is not so easily dismissed with others.
"Israeli Apartheid Week" recently hit campuses across the world. It is clear that what furiously animates many protesters are not legitimate grievances but imaginary ones. Israel is not above criticism and the Palestinians have their case, but when that case is constructed out of lies it not only represents a wholly unoriginal cover of some old anti-Semitic ditties but also denigrates the Palestinian cause.
It does not need lies.
Years of this sort of stuff have made Israel tone-deaf to legitimate criticism. That's why Israel refused to cooperate with the South African jurist Richard Goldstone when, on behalf of the United Nations, he looked into alleged war crimes. The U.N. had once equated Zionism with racism. After that, it was hard to care what the U.N. thought.
To Carter's credit, he must have understood a hunk of his audience had stopped listening. He was right to apologize, wrong not to have been more specific and a bit late in appreciating the damage he's done.
Israel has its faults, but it is not motivated by racism. That's more than can be said for many of its critics.
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