Jimmy
Carter's Apartheid
Charge Rings True
By Saree Makdisi
22 December, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle
Former
President Jimmy Carter has come under sustained attack for having dared
to use the term "apartheid" to describe Israel's policies
in the West Bank. However, not one of Carter's critics has offered a
convincing argument to justify the vehemence of the outcry, much less
to refute his central claim that Israel bestows rights on Jewish residents
settling illegally on Palestinian land, while denying the same rights
to the indigenous Palestinians. Little wonder, for they are attempting
to defy reality itself.
Israel maintains two separate
road networks in the West Bank: one for the exclusive use of Jewish
settlers, and one for Palestinian natives. Is that not apartheid?
Palestinians are not allowed
to drive their own cars in much of the West Bank; their public transportation
is frequently interrupted or blocked altogether by a grid of Israeli
army checkpoints -- but Jewish settlers come and go freely in their
own cars, without even pausing at the roadblocks that hold up the natives.
Is that not apartheid?
A system of closures and
curfews has strangled the Palestinian economy in the West Bank -- but
none of its provisions apply to the Jewish settlements there. Is that
not apartheid?
Whole sectors of the West
Bank, classified as "closed military areas" by the Israeli
army, are off limits to Palestinians, including Palestinians who own
land there -- but foreigners to whom Israel's Law of Return applies
(that is, anyone Jewish, from anywhere in the world) can access them
without hindrance. Is that not apartheid?
Persons of Palestinian origin
are routinely barred from entering or residing in the West Bank -- but
Israeli and non-Israeli Jews can come and go, and even live on, occupied
Palestinian territory. Is that not apartheid?
Israel maintains two sets
of rules and regulations in the West Bank: one for Jews, one for non-Jews.
The only thing wrong with using the word "apartheid" to describe
such a repugnant system is that the South African version of institutionalized
discrimination was never as elaborate as its Israeli counterpart --
nor did it have such a vocal chorus of defenders among otherwise liberal
Americans.
The glaring error in Carter's
book, however, is his insistence that the term "apartheid"
does not apply to Israel itself, where, he says, Jewish and non-Jewish
citizens are given the same treatment under the law. That is simply
not true.
Israeli law affords differences
in privileges for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of the state -- in
matters of access to land, family unification and acquisition of citizenship.
Israel's amended nationality law, for example, prevents Palestinian
citizens of Israel who are married to Palestinians from the occupied
territories from living together in Israel. A similar law, passed at
the peak of apartheid in South Africa, was overturned by that country's
supreme court as a violation of the right to a family. Israel's high
court upheld its law just this year.
Israel loudly proclaims itself
to be the state of the Jewish people, rather than the state of its actual
citizens (one-fifth of whom are Palestinian Arabs). In fact, in registering
citizens, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior assigns them a whole
range of nationalities other than "Israeli." In the official
registry, the nationality line for a Jewish citizen of Israel reads
"Jew." For a Palestinian citizen, the same line reads "Arab."
When this glaring inequity was protested all the way to Israel's high
court, the justices upheld it: "There is no Israeli nation separate
from the Jewish people." Obviously this leaves non-Jewish citizens
of Israel in, at best, a somewhat ambiguous situation. Little wonder,
then, that a solid majority of Israeli Jews regard their Arab fellow-citizens
as what they call "a demographic threat," which many -- including
the deputy prime minister -- would like to see eliminated altogether.
What is all this, if not racism?
Many of the very individuals
and institutions that are so vociferously denouncing President Jimmy
Carter would not for one moment tolerate such glaring injustice in the
United States. Why do they condone the naked racism that Israel practices?
Why do they heap criticism on our former president for speaking his
conscience about such a truly unconscionable system of ethnic segregation?
Perhaps it is because they
themselves are all too aware that they are defending the indefensible;
because they are all too aware that the emperor they keep trying to
cover up really has no clothes. There is a limit to how long such a
cover up can go on. And the main lesson of Carter's book is that we
have finally reached that limit.
Saree Makdisi is a professor
of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator
on Middle East issues.
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