'A' is for Apartheid in the Modern Alphabet of Misery
The controversy over Jimmy Carter's book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,"
was to be expected. And the much-publicized resignation of Kenneth Stein from the Carter Center is no surprise. Carter has been roundly criticised for daring to compare Israel's policies of pacification in Palestine to South Africa's policies of containment against blacks.
Frankly, I am sick of subjugation by semantics. Israel and its apologists have no right to assert authority to appoint who can and who cannot use the most resonant and relevant words and analogies, drawn from recent history, to frame their occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. Words and phrases like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid" are part of a vocabulary that has evolved to describe events taking place in this country--now reduced in size and status considerably below that of a satellite state to a quiltwork of bantustans (blacklands) and Indian reservations.
The Palestinian crisis is denied comparison or access to any antecdent or likeness that would suggest systematic verifiable extermination of a people, race or culture. In short, Israel and its apologists are practicing dehumanization and deprivation by censoring and castigating critics who seek to draw legitimate parallels to atrocities and horrors committed daily against Palestinians. As a poet, I cannot permit the final ostracism of this country and its people from my time's recognized syntax of suffering. This is one form of isolation I can prevent.
I would never deny Jews the right and need to frame their history in the magnitude of suffering invoked by the word "Holocaust." Jewish history takes a measure of inhumanity that sets a new scale for barbarism. As a Jew who has studied and written about the Holocaust, that catastrophe is part of my identity. I still remember the small nervous breakdown it caused when I read letters from Nazi soldiers stationed in the Ukraine to parents and friends about throwing Jewish babies against trees or up in the air for bayonetting as part of drunken sport.
But those particulars now keep company with fresh descriptions of Palestinians shot by Israeli snipers or driven from homes that are to be razed by American-made bulldozers. I keep a fact file of assassinations using planes and missiles my tax dollars have sent gratis to Israel. And I feel the sore, impacted guilt that Germans of conscience must have felt allowing the Holocaust to unfold.
In my lifetime, I have watched as my people have become so obsessed with their past and prevention of its recurrence that they have turned it into an exclusive franchise for protection. The Holocaust has become a kind of demonic luxury brand for hideous, large-scale suffering. So when foreign dignitaries visit Poland or Germany, they are expected, as a gesture of cultural courtesy, to visit Holocaust shrines like Dachau or Aschwitz. Such visits can no longer be spontaneously or privately compelled. They are scripted as part of ritualized expectations which must be met. Obeisance to Jewish history is now part of diplomatic protocol in Eastern Europe.
As much as I hate to say this, such behavior is part of an insidious branding of Jewish history. Yes, build Holocaust museums, but allow chronicling and curatorship of genocide to include the Armenian holocaust of 1914 and Rwanda's in our time as more than precursors and addendums. Let there be, if you will, a brotherhood of suffering that becomes an ash heap from which a true phoenix of non-violence arises and under whose full-sky wing span of light (rather than dark) we can stand--unafraid and embracing.
As things are now, historians, commentators and observers must apply for authorization to compare events in Palestine to their conspicuous Jewish antecedents and parallels. Of course, this permission is never granted. So while Darfur is allowed coddling in words such as "genocide," even "holocaust," Palestine, which is strangled by political quarantine that begs reference to the Warsaw Gehtto and the Berlin Wall, is, of course, denied affiliation with its brother-events and conditions. At the risk of sounding like a crass marketer, Palestine is a sort of un-cola of oppression, while Darfur is allowed to be its Diet Coke.
For Israel's own good, we must not allow it to control discourse and analysis in order to de-link the tragedy of Palestine with history, or to deprive this calamity of a recognizable resonance in the annals of contemporary mass cruelty. Israel is guilty of documentable "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid." These words are permissible markers for the Palestinian plight.
Israel may take away every Palestinian right, but it cannot take take away the right to place their history in the justified contexts of racism and persecution it invokes. And I, for one, will freely and legitimately use the universal syntax of suffering that has evolved since the Hitler, Stalin and Mao regimes to describe and condemn Israel's policies and actions toward Palestine. History requires me to do so. To make Palestine a Brand X for suffering is to condone the genocide that is taking place there.
Here's an article, published in Electronic Intifada, that discusses apartheid in South Africa and Israel.
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid. As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me.
On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security. The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free move ment of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role. The Palestinian territories - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.
Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement.
But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts - the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley - and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization.
At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas - north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa. Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks re semble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the U nited States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West.
Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid. In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans - rightly - complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.
John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This article comes courtesy of the Institute for Middle East Understanding and was published first in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
was to be expected. And the much-publicized resignation of Kenneth Stein from the Carter Center is no surprise. Carter has been roundly criticised for daring to compare Israel's policies of pacification in Palestine to South Africa's policies of containment against blacks.
Frankly, I am sick of subjugation by semantics. Israel and its apologists have no right to assert authority to appoint who can and who cannot use the most resonant and relevant words and analogies, drawn from recent history, to frame their occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. Words and phrases like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid" are part of a vocabulary that has evolved to describe events taking place in this country--now reduced in size and status considerably below that of a satellite state to a quiltwork of bantustans (blacklands) and Indian reservations.
The Palestinian crisis is denied comparison or access to any antecdent or likeness that would suggest systematic verifiable extermination of a people, race or culture. In short, Israel and its apologists are practicing dehumanization and deprivation by censoring and castigating critics who seek to draw legitimate parallels to atrocities and horrors committed daily against Palestinians. As a poet, I cannot permit the final ostracism of this country and its people from my time's recognized syntax of suffering. This is one form of isolation I can prevent.
I would never deny Jews the right and need to frame their history in the magnitude of suffering invoked by the word "Holocaust." Jewish history takes a measure of inhumanity that sets a new scale for barbarism. As a Jew who has studied and written about the Holocaust, that catastrophe is part of my identity. I still remember the small nervous breakdown it caused when I read letters from Nazi soldiers stationed in the Ukraine to parents and friends about throwing Jewish babies against trees or up in the air for bayonetting as part of drunken sport.
But those particulars now keep company with fresh descriptions of Palestinians shot by Israeli snipers or driven from homes that are to be razed by American-made bulldozers. I keep a fact file of assassinations using planes and missiles my tax dollars have sent gratis to Israel. And I feel the sore, impacted guilt that Germans of conscience must have felt allowing the Holocaust to unfold.
In my lifetime, I have watched as my people have become so obsessed with their past and prevention of its recurrence that they have turned it into an exclusive franchise for protection. The Holocaust has become a kind of demonic luxury brand for hideous, large-scale suffering. So when foreign dignitaries visit Poland or Germany, they are expected, as a gesture of cultural courtesy, to visit Holocaust shrines like Dachau or Aschwitz. Such visits can no longer be spontaneously or privately compelled. They are scripted as part of ritualized expectations which must be met. Obeisance to Jewish history is now part of diplomatic protocol in Eastern Europe.
As much as I hate to say this, such behavior is part of an insidious branding of Jewish history. Yes, build Holocaust museums, but allow chronicling and curatorship of genocide to include the Armenian holocaust of 1914 and Rwanda's in our time as more than precursors and addendums. Let there be, if you will, a brotherhood of suffering that becomes an ash heap from which a true phoenix of non-violence arises and under whose full-sky wing span of light (rather than dark) we can stand--unafraid and embracing.
As things are now, historians, commentators and observers must apply for authorization to compare events in Palestine to their conspicuous Jewish antecedents and parallels. Of course, this permission is never granted. So while Darfur is allowed coddling in words such as "genocide," even "holocaust," Palestine, which is strangled by political quarantine that begs reference to the Warsaw Gehtto and the Berlin Wall, is, of course, denied affiliation with its brother-events and conditions. At the risk of sounding like a crass marketer, Palestine is a sort of un-cola of oppression, while Darfur is allowed to be its Diet Coke.
For Israel's own good, we must not allow it to control discourse and analysis in order to de-link the tragedy of Palestine with history, or to deprive this calamity of a recognizable resonance in the annals of contemporary mass cruelty. Israel is guilty of documentable "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid." These words are permissible markers for the Palestinian plight.
Israel may take away every Palestinian right, but it cannot take take away the right to place their history in the justified contexts of racism and persecution it invokes. And I, for one, will freely and legitimately use the universal syntax of suffering that has evolved since the Hitler, Stalin and Mao regimes to describe and condemn Israel's policies and actions toward Palestine. History requires me to do so. To make Palestine a Brand X for suffering is to condone the genocide that is taking place there.
Here's an article, published in Electronic Intifada, that discusses apartheid in South Africa and Israel.
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid. As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me.
On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security. The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free move ment of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role. The Palestinian territories - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.
Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement.
But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts - the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley - and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization.
At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas - north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa. Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks re semble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the U nited States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West.
Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid. In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans - rightly - complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.
John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This article comes courtesy of the Institute for Middle East Understanding and was published first in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
posted by David Federman @ 5:19 AM
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