Olmert’s Apartheid Reference
Ehud Olmert’s much-discussed comment after the Annapolis conference was reported this way in The Guardian:
Israel’s prime minister issued a rare warning yesterday that his nation risked being compared to apartheid-era South Africa if it failed to agree an independent state for the Palestinians. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Ehud Olmert said Israel was “finished” if it forced the Palestinians into a struggle for equal rights.
If the two-state solution collapsed, he said, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. Israel’s supporters abroad would quickly turn against such a state, he said.
Whether the terminology of apartheid is applicable to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories as well as inside Israel has become an increasingly intense issue. I noted here last month the Boston Sabeel Conference on that very theme. What strikes as potentially useful about Olmert’s comment is that it will now be harder for Israel’s Jewish-community supporters to attack anyone who uses the term as an anti-Semite. Ehud Olmert is no Jimmy Carter.
Olmert went on to say this about the role of those Jewish supporters:
“The Jewish organisations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents,” he said.
Maybe so. Israel institutionalization of apartheid-like policies would make many American Jews uncomfortable, and for some might have an Emperor-has-no-clothes effect. Others, though, would no doubt buy into the expected new line: Israel’s Jewish character and its role as haven for persecuted Jews worldwide are more important than democracy and equality. That’s already the line of people like Benny Morris, and the more Jews feel put-upon, the more likely many of them will turn toward hard-nosed tribalism.
A few nights ago I went to a report-back session from a Workmen’s Circle delegation to Israel and the West Bank last summer. I know a few of the people who went, and was curious to hear more about their experiences. Here in Brookline, many WC members are in either Brit Tzedek, which advocates a two-state solution partially on the grounds that this is what’s best for Israel, or Jewish Voice for Peace, which is open to a one-state solution or any other solution that yields justice (I belong to JVP). The tone of much of the discussion was two-state focused, with some people pushing the Geneva Accord.
A few years ago I still thought a two-state solution with a viable Palestinian state was possible, even if unlikely. Since then, partly as a result of my two visits to the region where I could see for myself the impact of four decades of Israel’s “facts on the ground,” and as the Separation Wall added a new level of concreteness to institutionalizing those facts, it’s become clear to me that a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible. Israel’s effort over four decades to make that impossible has succeeded.
So Olmert’s warning seems to me to be a couple of decades too late.
Technorati Tags: apartheid, Israel, Olmert, Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Workmen’s Circle
