SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL: SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Increasingly,
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is being compared to South Africa’s
treatment of its black population in the years of apartheid. In fact,
such groups as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have used the term
“apartheid” to characterize Israel’s treatment of its indigenous
Palestinian population.
In
the West Bank, which Israel has occupied in violation of international
law for more than 50 years, Palestinians have almost no legal rights and
no opportunity to vote for the government under which they are
compelled to live. They live side by side with Israeli settlers, who
have full legal rights—-and the right to vote. Members of the current
Israeli government speak of expanding Jewish settlements and of annexing
the entire area and removing its Palestinian population. President
Biden continues to speak of a “two-state solution,” which members of the
Netanyahu government say will never be permitted.
During
the years of apartheid, I was a frequent visitor to South Africa. I
wrote a column from Washington that appeared in the widely read
Afrikaans language newspapers Die Burger in Cape Town and Beeld in
Johannesburg as well as the English-language news magazine To The
Point. I got to know many South Africans, both Afrikaans and English
speaking. As racial tensions in the country grew, the basic response of
those with whom I became friends was, “We know apartheid is wrong. We
are Western Christian people who believe in freedom. This contradicts
our values. If we do not abandon apartheid, our children will leave.
They will go to America, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The question
we have is, how can we abandon apartheid without becoming like the
one-party dictatorships which surround us in Africa?” Then, they took a
chance to do the right thing.
White
South Africans, recognizing that their treatment of black South
Africans violated their basic values, abandoned apartheid. In 1989
Frederik Willem de Klerk became president. He freed Nelson Mandela
from 27 years imprisonment and transformed South Africa into a
constitutional democracy. In 1993, de Klerk along with Nelson Mandela
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for dismantling apartheid.
I
keep hoping that a leader like President de Klerk will emerge in Israel
and bring the mistreatment of Palestinians to an end. Many Israelis
recognize that an injustice has been done. Consider the words of Prof.
David Shulman of the Hebrew University: “No matter how we look at it,
unless our minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious
right, the occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the
permanent disenfranchisement of a huge population…In the end, it is the
ongoing moral failure of the country as a whole that is most
consequential, most dangerous, most unacceptable. This failure
weighs…heavily on our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of
the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all
that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate,
expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have
reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.”
More
and more Jewish Americans are speaking out against Israel’s war in
Gaza. While everyone was outraged at the Hamas terrorist attack on
Oct. 7, the Israeli response, and the killing of at least 35,000
Palestinians so far, including large numbers of women and children, has
outraged many as well. Aryeh Neier, whose Jewish family left Nazi
Germany to escape the Holocaust, is one. A founder of Human Rights
Watch and a long time leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, he
says that he has reluctantly concluded that the Israeli government is
engaged in genocide. He said he cannot understand why the Israeli
government does not arrest extremist settlers who destroy trucks
bringing food and medicine to the starving people of Gaza. Permitting
such behavior, in his view, can be considered the kind of behavior
meriting the designation as “genocide.”
The
Jewish newspaper The Forward (May 6, 2024) featured a story about
Vermont Jewish activist Jules Rabin who demonstrated on the streets of
Montpelier, Vermont on his 100th birthday. A World War 11 veteran, a
graduate of Harvard and a former Goddard College professor, he called
the tragedy of Gaza “a piecemeal Holocaust.” He appeared on a Vermont
podcast and told host David Goodman that Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians resembles what the Germans did to Jews “in the Warsaw
ghetto and everywhere else in history.”
In
Rabin’s view, the Holocaust is one of the horrors in history. But, he
points out, the Palestinians had nothing to do with it. Yet their
country was turned over to European Jews to make up for the destruction
of Jews by Nazi Germany. He asks, “How could the Nazi genocide of Jews
from 1933-1945 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians
today?” If the world wanted to provide restitution to the Jews after
World War 11, Rabin declares, it should have given them Prussia or
Bavaria. That might have involved a bit of justice. But, instead, the
Palestinians were displaced from their country.
None
of what is happening today could take place without massive U.S.
military aid to Israel. President Biden says he supports a two-state
solution and the creation of a Palestinian state. But Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu says there will never be a Palestinian state while he
is in office. Members of his cabinet speak of filling the West Bank
with Jewish settlements, annexing the territory and expelling its
indigenous population. Sadly, the U.S. seems to be on the wrong side of
history.
Respected
Jewish voices were concerned about where Zionism would lead from its
very beginning in the 19th century. Albert Einstein, alluding to Nazism
in a 1938 talk, warned an audience of Zionist activists against the
temptation to create a state imbued “with a narrow nationalism within
our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even
without a Jewish state.”
In
his book “What Is Modern Israel?,” Professor Yakov Rabkin of the
University of Montreal, an Orthodox Jew, shows that Zionism was
conceived as a clear break with Judaism and the Jewish religious
tradition. In his view, it must be seen in the context of of European
ethnic nationalism, colonial expansion and geopolitical interests rather
than as an incarnation of Biblical prophecies or a culmination of
Jewish history. The religious idea of a Jewish return to Palestine had
nothing to do with the political enterprise of Zionism.
“Jewish
tradition,” writes Rabkin, “holds that the idea of return must be part
of a messianic project rather than the human initiative of migration to
the Holy Land…There was little room for Jewish tradition in the Zionist
scheme…It is not the physical geography of the Biblical land of Israel
which is essential for Jews but the obligation to follow the
commandments of the Torah.”
Where
all of this will end, none of us can know. What we do know is that the
Palestinians are the final victims of the Holocaust, an extraordinary
crime committed by others. Our own country is playing a negative role
by providing aid and the most advanced arms to an Israeli government
determined to terrorize Palestinians out of the country and committed to
treating those who remain as second-class citizens, what has been
widely described as apartheid.
I
remember apartheid in South Africa and the brave men and women who
abandoned it. Let us hope that similar men and women will arise in
Israel.
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Allan
C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism (
www.acjna.org)