[Salon] Whoopi Goldberg suspended from The View after saying Holocaust 'isn't about race

FM: John Whitbeck

It is ironic that the same day on which Amnesty International released its 280-page report on Israeli apartheid should also see the furore, professional suspension and compulsory apologies arising out of Black actress and talkshow host Whoopi Goldberg's saying on American TV: "Let's be truthful, the Holocaust isn't about race, it's not. It's about man's inhumanity to man, that's what it's about. These are two groups of white people." (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/feb/02/whoopi-goldberg-suspended-from-the-view-after-saying-holocaust-isnt-about-race).

In my message yesterday regarding the Amnesty International report (retransmitted below), I wrote that there is no non-psychedelic way in which the definitions of the crime of "apartheid" in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court can be interpreted so as not to apply to the practices of the Israeli government.

In fact, as the Whoopi hullaballoo has recalled for me, there is one -- and only one -- arguable way that these definitions can be interpreted so as not to apply to the practices of the Israeli government. It is a matter of form rather than substance, but legal matters frequently turn on form rather than substance and whether or not the Israeli goverment's practices constitute the crime against humanity of apartheid is a legal, not a political or public relations, matter.

Furthermore, Israeli governments through the decades have, necessarily, had considerable experience in emphasizing legal form over substance, most notably by arguing that UN Security Council Resolution 242 does not require Israel to withdraw from any of the Palestinian territories which it conquered in 1967 because (ignoring the resolution's recital "Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war") the requirement of the "Withdrawal of Israel [sic] armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" does not inlude the definite article "the" before the word "territories" and Israel has withdrawn its armed forces from some other territories occupied in 1967.

The Apartheid Convention defines apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purposes of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." The Rome Statute defines apartheid as "an institutionalised regime of systemic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group."

Neither the Convention nor the Statute refers to appalling treatment by "one group of persons" of "another group of persons" or to appalling treatment by "one racial or religious group of persons" of "another racial or religious group of persons". They both refer only to racial groups as both victimizers and victims.

To the extent that the concept of race has any concrete meaning, virtually everyone would agree that it must have a genetic basis. One can change many things by personal choice but, Michael Jackson notwithstanding, not one's race. However, anyone can become a Jew by religious conversion, and anyone can cease to be a Jew by adhering to a different religion.

The Israeli government could therefore make the non-ridiculous legal argument, in accordance with Whoopi Goldberg's appreciation and notwithstanding Hitler's misappreciation, that the Israeli government cannot be guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid, no matter how appallingly it treats the Indigenous Palestinian people, because the Jewish people do not constitute -- and have never constituted -- a racial group.

Of course, making this argument would seriously complicate the exceptionalist, all-people-are-not-created-equal belief, widely appreciated even among secular/rational Jews, that the Jews are and will forever be God's Chosen People. If the Israeli government were to admit formally that, with even religious belief having become optional, Jews have effectively become a mere cultural or social group, their god might withdraw his special concern and favor.

I therefore feel confident that my pointing out Israel's sole legal defense to the charge of being guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid will not lead to its being adopted and pursued by the apartheid regime.