A political debate tactic is to pretend a disliked policy or cause is not what it seems to be but is really something else. President Donald Trump’s deportations of illegal immigrants are, for example, alleged to be about suppressing minority turnout in the next congressional election rather than about expelling people who shouldn’t be here.
This technique is useful when the thing itself is hard to dispute. It’s difficult to say people with no right to be in America shouldn’t be made to leave. So argue that their expulsion is an antidemocratic trick to make left-of-center voters too afraid to turn up at polling places to cast their ballots.
Today, on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews by Hamas, it’s worth looking at similar misdirection by Israel’s enemies to depict Israel as something other than what it is, and its enemies likewise in the guise of people they are not.
A long-standing allegation is that Israel is an “apartheid” state. This became fashionable in the 1980s and 1990s when ending white minority rule in South Africa was the highest-priority international cause, when boycotts and other forms of ostracism were coming to their climax.
Denigrating Israel as an apartheid state accuses it of being racist, like South Africa, and thus damnable. But it’s utterly false, and absurdly transparently so. More than 1 in 5 Israelis is Arab — many of them fight in the Israel Defense Forces — and they have precisely the same rights as any Jew. Israeli Arabs are protected by the same laws as their Jewish neighbors. They vote, live where they want, and sit in parliament.
They are not segregated, not forced into isolated townships or Bantustans. The rejoinder that Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinian Bantustans begs the question. It requires you to agree from the outset that all of Israel is properly Palestinian, but that is the subject of debate, not the premise from which discussion must start. So no, Israel is not like South Africa, not apartheid.
Ah, say critics repeating another popular falsehood, Israel is a “settler colonial” state. Israeli Jews are European invaders who replaced the indigenous people. This lie is nurtured by postcolonialism, or postcolonial theory, which has been around for more than 50 years in the well-manured soil of Western academia, but blossomed only in this century after “apartheid” lost its potency as an accusation.
“Settler colonialism” is handy because it sounds vaguely learned. It is used to denigrate many successful modern peoples, white Americans as much as Jewish Israelis, by implying that they have no right to the lands they inhabit, that, indeed, they stole them from their proper and more ancient owners.
But this turns the history of the Holy Land on its head. The Jews have lived in Israel for three or four thousand years, and archaeology confirms the existence of King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem 1,500 years before colonial Arab invaders, the forebears of today’s Palestinians, arrived in the seventh century AD.
There has long been a global Jewish diaspora, but Jews have lived in Israel continuously since Old Testament days and cannot be compared to colonists such as the Portuguese arriving in India in the 15th century, or the British getting there a century later. The charge that they have stolen what was Arab land when Israel was founded in 1948 is a lie. There were Arab inhabitants, just as there were Jews, but both were subjects of the British Mandate and, before that, of the Ottoman Empire.
Nor did the Jews expel the Arabs. Rather, at independence, they asked them to stay. It was neighboring Muslim nations that instructed the Arabs to leave. They complied because Arab nations were about to invade Israel and were expected to drive the Jews into the sea. So the Jews are not invaders and colonizers, but the Arabs were.
Israel is committing “genocide,” say Greta Thunberg, Amnesty International, the South African government, and many millions of other ignorant or mendacious left-wing persons and institutions. Thus Israel needs to be regarded not as it is but compared to mass murderers — Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge slaughtering the middle classes in the killing fields of Cambodia, or Stalin using starvation to liquidate the Kulaks.
This does not square with Israel delivering food to Gaza, not starving it, and taking extraordinary care successfully to reduce the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in the war to levels not managed or even attempted by other military forces in any other recorded urban war.
There are now about 5.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, compared to about 1.3 million at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. It has been pointed out that a fourfold population increase is evidence of the most inefficient genocide ever recorded.
So the Jews of Israel are not engaging in genocide, not colonizing, not imposing apartheid. They live in the land of their ancestors, or a portion of it (for the West Bank is at the heart of their ancient territory). They did not oust the proper owners of that land, and they are not trying to eliminate them.
HAMAS MUST ACCEPT TRUMP’S PEACE DEAL OR ACCEPT CONSEQUENCES
Likewise, the forces murdering them whenever they get the chance, as they did appallingly two years ago today, are not freedom fighters battling to overthrow oppressive, racist occupiers. They are genocidal religious fanatics.
The facts are the facts. The Jews of Israel and their enemies are what they are. They are not something else, no matter how desperately and insistently political propagandists try to depict them in colors borrowed from other causes.
