© The InterceptPalestinian laborers wait to cross an Israeli checkpoint as they return to their homes after a day’s work in the Jewish state in 2010 near the village of Ni’ilin in the West Bank.
IN HIS MEMOIR, the Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman described how he returned home from the Six Day War in June 1967 to hear the country's
founding father and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, speak on the radio.
"Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible," recalled Goodman.
"If it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state." Goodman was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. "That phrase, 'Israel will become an apartheid state,' resonated with me," Goodman wrote. "In a flash I understood what he was saying."
In a flash. Yet fifty years later, despite an entrenched and ongoing occupation,
Israel's defenders angrily reject any invocation of the A-word. Leading U.S. politicians who have dared utter it in relation to Israel, such as John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, have been forced to
apologize and
backtrack. Last week, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
(UNESCWA) became the first U.N. agency to publish an official report documenting how
"Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole," and this provoked — as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has
noted — a huge furor which led to the U.N. secretariat
removing the report from its website and the Jordanian head of the UNESCWA, Rima Khalef, quitting in protest.
Good riddance, say supporters of the Jewish state. To mention the grotesque crime of apartheid in the same sentence as the democratic state of Israel, they claim, is
"slander", a "smear", a "despicable" and "blatant lie", a shameful act of "Israel-bashing" and a "new form of anti-Semitism."
Comment: See also: