I have a confession.
For a long time, I think I just sort of accepted that Israel would always be demonized and singled out, no matter what it did. That the UN would always censure and condemn Israel above all other states. That a fringe minority on the left and right would always hate the Jewish state simply for existing.
But lately that unpleasant status quo has tipped into something even worse. Inflated criticism of Israel has become literally, physically dangerous. Mobs that spent more than a year screaming about genocide and spray-painting Hamas is coming are now hunting Jews on the streets, while pundits like Mehdi Hasan justify their behavior as somehow righteous.
And that boils my blood.
And it scares me, too.
So I want to tell the truth about Israel, no matter how harsh or unpleasant it can be. And, at the same time, I want to protect the Jewish people from the blood libels and collective punishment that have – yet again – terrorized innocent people.
Those two goals might sound contradictory. They’re not.
Protecting the Jewish people doesn’t mean obscuring the truth or denying harsh realities about the Jewish state.
It means telling the truth. Combating propaganda with facts. Telling multiple stories, not sloganeering. Because the Jewish state is neither perfect nor uniquely evil. It’s flawed, it’s complicated, it sometimes falls short of its ideals… just like every other country on the planet.
And that’s the focus of this episode on apartheid. Not baseless criticism, but principled exploration. Not hollow slogans, but multiple perspectives.
So yalla. Let’s do this.
Spring is a special time in Israel. There’s the re-emergence of the sun, of course. Those first green shoots sprouting from the earth, a reminder that life continues. There’s the national celebrations of freedom: first Passover, then Independence Day.
But the spring of 2022 was anything but celebratory.
In just six weeks, Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank murdered 19 Israelis. The West Bank town of Ya’abad celebrated the Bnei Brak shooting that killed five Israelis, lionizing the attacker as a “martyr.”
By the end of 2022 the Israeli death toll stood at 27 civilians, three soldiers, and one police officer. In the West Bank, the numbers were even grimmer: between 151 and 167 Palestinians, depending on who you ask, including a journalist and a teenage girl. Israeli security forces said that most of those casualties were members of terrorist groups or involved in attacks. But “most” is cold comfort when it’s your loved one that’s gone.
It was a terrible year, and Israelis were furious. What exactly was the point of the security barrier, if terrorists could slip through and hack Israeli fathers to death in front of their children on Independence Day?
But Israelis already knew the answer. The barrier had never been quite as impenetrable as people liked to believe. The myth of an unscalable wall serves everyone, reassuring Israelis that they’re safe while reinforcing the Palestinian narrative of unremitting oppression. But nothing is ever that simple.
Two things can be true at once. They can. To paraphrase an anonymous Israeli soldier who fought in the Six Day War: There’s no tragedy quite like two competing narratives that are both completely true. If there’s one thing you take from this episode or from this podcast in general, it should be this: multiple stories can be true at the same time. And every story contains shades of gray.
For years, the Palestinians who snuck into Israel faced significant risks. But they continued to do it. An LA Times article from 2017 describes how, quote: “Some scale sections of the 26-foot-high wall with ladders; others find drainage ditches underneath the concrete slabs to crawl across. The most common route into Israel runs through unfinished or damaged stretches of the barrier in the southern West Bank and near the city of Bethlehem farther to the north.” And that’s before you factor in the Israeli border police.
But by 2019, the border police seemed to be… elsewhere. An estimated 50,000 Palestinians were crossing into Israel from the West Bank illegally every day, in addition to the 70,000 workers with state-issued permits. In fact, in 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Palestinians from the West Bank flooded Israeli beaches, sometimes with the full cooperation of Israeli authorities. The Times of Israel reported, quote:
“Aref Shaaban from Jenin, who has organized transportation to Jaffa and Herzliya, said that, in many cases, the troops even helped the Palestinians cross into Israel. “The soldiers saw they were families with beach balls and food bags, not grenades,” he said. Another Palestinian visitor told Haaretz that military jeeps turned on their headlights in the evening to help direct the families back to the hole in the fence on their way back. Many were quoted saying that at no point did they feel threatened — not at the crossing point, nor in the Israeli cities.”
What in the world is going on here? And what does this have to do with our question of whether or not Israel in some way is an apartheid state? After all, that’s the question we’re trying to explore and answer.
Last week, I told you all about the history of apartheid in South Africa. We looked at the Israeli laws that govern its citizens’ lives – including the millions of Israelis who aren’t Jewish. We looked at the history of the West Bank, through the eyes of the Palestinians who live there.
Quick recap: the Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three areas, all of which are administered slightly differently.
Area A, where 60% of West Bank Palestinians live, is governed exclusively by the Palestinian Authority, also known as the PA. (And, it must be said, most Palestinians despise the PA.) There are no Jews in Area A. In fact, it’s illegal for Israelis to be there.
Area B, where 30% of West Bank Palestinians live, is also governed by the PA, though Israel takes responsibility for security matters. There are no Israelis in Area B, though they can enter legally, technically.
And Area C, home to 10% of West Bank Palestinians, where Israel is completely in charge. Area C is home to roughly 400,000 Jewish Israelis and 300,000 Palestinians, who – unlike the Jews – are subject to Israeli military law rather than civil law.
Much, though not all, of the West Bank is encircled by a high-tech fence meant to keep terrorists from infiltrating Israel. But around urban areas, like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, that fence gives way to concrete walls roughly 30 feet high – an ugly seam stretching across the landscape.
Last week, I told you that the wall reduced terror attacks by over 80% – even as it made Palestinians’ lives significantly harder. But I just started this episode by telling you that actually, at times, the Israeli defense establishment simply ignored many Palestinians sneaking illegally into Israel.
Palestinians, and some of their Western supporters, claim this as further proof that the fence was never about security. To them, it was always a racist landgrab meant to separate Israelis from Palestinians and Palestinians from their land.
But Israelis point out that as soon as the defense establishment relaxed its policy around the fence, terror resumed. Sure, not every single one of those 50,000 Palestinians who crossed into Israel each day were terrorists. Most were laborers, crossing into Israel to work.
But it only takes one or two people to shoot up a crowded street. It only takes one or two people to kill parents in front of their children. And many, many more than “one or two people” slipped over the border to terrorize Israelis.
In 2022 alone, Israeli security forces responded to over 2,500 terror attacks, in which at least one assailant tried to harm Israeli citizens, whether through shooting, stabbing, car ramming, projectiles, explosives, or other creative methods. And so it’s perhaps unsurprising that Israel allocated 300 million shekel, or 93 million dollars, to reinforce the barrier in mid-2022.
It worked. Somewhat.
Until October 7th of 2023, Israeli security forces counted 1,528 terror attack attempts – 1,173 of which took place in the West Bank, rather than Israel proper. For Israelis, this was further proof that the wall not only works – but that it needed to be expanded, protecting all the Jews of Area C.
Now, let me say this. The wall, or what we want to think of as the myth of the impenetrable wall is convenient, but it’s not helpful. One-dimensional narratives never are.
Sure, some Israeli soldiers purposely humiliate Palestinians at the checkpoints. But some also can, and do, help them across the holes in the fence so their kids can go to the beach.
And some Palestinians can, and do, cross the border with intent to kill… but many more stream into Israel so they can put food on their table back home in the West Bank.
We’re talking about people here. And people are messier and more complex than any headline or Tweet can accurately capture.
And to me, there are few places that exemplify this messiness and complexity like East Jerusalem.
So that’s where we’re going to pick up today, as we investigate this claim of apartheid. We’ll finish with some closing thoughts about the nature of the accusation – and about why it does more harm than good.
But first, a very brief history of Jerusalem – my favorite city in the entire world.
Today, we talk about East and West Jerusalem. But that’s a fairly modern designation. For most of its history, what we now know as West Jerusalem was farmland. When people talked about Jerusalem, they generally meant the walled city with the Temple Mount at its heart. And though Jerusalem is among the most important cities in the world, if not the most important, for much of its history it was a dusty backwater, a forgotten province of powerful empires.
But the age of empires was coming to an end.
Jews had always lived in Jerusalem, but by the late 19th century, Jewish immigrants were flocking there in droves. When the Jewish Quarter of the Old City grew too crowded to support them all, they bought up land west of the city’s walls, building up the area now known as “the New City” or “West Jerusalem.” It wasn’t an exclusively Jewish city. Arabs – both Muslim and Christian – began building there too.
By 1948, 100,000 Jews and 60,000 Arabs called Jerusalem home. Even before Israel declared independence that May, the city was a battlefield. The UN’s Partition Plan for Palestine proposed (wow, say that ten times fast) that Jerusalem become an international zone. But after the Arabs rejected the plan, the fight for Jerusalem began in earnest.
Here’s how I described it in our series on the 1948 war:
“If you’ve ever been to Jerusalem, you probably remember the journey there. Roads cut into the hillside, winding higher and higher. Ears popping slightly with the altitude. Random trucks on the side of the road. The sparse and timeless beauty of low trees and rocky cliffs and scrubby grass. It doesn’t matter how many times I make that trip. It always makes me catch my breath.
But the Haganah men driving poorly-armored trucks towards Jerusalem in 1947 and 1948 didn’t have time to reflect on the scenery. They were too busy scanning the road for an ambush. See, you might not think of supply runs as being particularly dangerous. You’d be wrong.
Because the Yishuv – and the Haganah – may have enjoyed social cohesion, and conviction, and money, and – soon – weapons. But many of its communities were geographically isolated, boxed in on all sides by Arab villages. And without heavy weaponry – like tanks – the convoys that supplied these isolated communities were at serious risk of attack.
Now, “convoy” might sound like a fancy military word. But in this case, we’re talking about a couple of cars or trucks jerry-rigged with some steel plating, full of food and medical supplies. And it doesn’t matter how good a shot the men or women inside may have been. They were outnumbered, and alone. The roads were surrounded by Arab villages. And they simply didn’t have the manpower – or firepower – to hold off a coordinated attack by armed gangs. Travel into Jerusalem became a game of Russian roulette.
OK, maybe you’re asking. Why not just forget about supplying these isolated communities and focus on a more defensible position? Well, because there were 100,000 Jews living in Jerusalem. And without supplies, they’d starve. And so the roads became a battlefield. Of the 136 supply trucks sent to Jerusalem in March of 1948, only forty one made it. Forty one. Out of a hundred and thirty six”.
So when the Arab countries invaded in May of 1948, the Jews of Jerusalem were in a precarious position.
They survived the war. But their city had been cleaved in two. Israel held the west side, with its so-called “New City.” Jordan now held the east – which meant the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the City of David, and the Mount of Olives, not to mention Christian holy sites like the Church of the Sepulcher.
Israelis and Jordanians alike purged their territory of the “enemy.” The Palestinians of East Jerusalem became Jordanian citizens. Many resettled in the Jewish Quarter, which had been emptied of its 2,000 or so inhabitants. For the next 19 years, no Jews were allowed in East Jerusalem.
Notice that I didn’t say Israelis. I said JEWS. Jordanian authorities demanded a baptism certificate, which I didn’t know was a thing, before they’d let a tourist near the Western Wall. And that was the status quo until June 7th, 1967, when the 55th Paratroop Brigade, under the command of Motte Gur, wound its way through the Old City.
Here’s how I described it in our series on the Six Day War:
“By 10AM, Gur and his men were standing on the Temple Mount. And amid the laughter and singing and yelling and hugging – and the occasional Jordanian bullet – Gur sent out a message.. No Jew who was alive that day will ever forget those three iconic, emotional words. [insert audio] Har Habayit Beyadeinu. The Temple Mount is in our hands. For the first time since the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, the Temple Mount was once again under Jewish control.”
And they all lived happily ever after.
Just kidding. The 44,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem in 1967 were Jordanian citizens. But East Jerusalem was not the West Bank. Israeli leadership was clear on one point: No part of the holy city would ever be a territorial bargaining chip in any negotiations. It would take 13 years for the Knesse, Israel’s parliament, to officially annex the territory, but from the start, Israel made it clear: Jerusalem, all of Jerusalem, was unquestionably and permanently Israeli territory. It was Jewish territory.
Which meant the 44,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem faced a choice. They could uproot themselves and hope for the best. Or they could take Israel’s offer of citizenship and become Israelis, joining the so-called “1948 Arabs” who had chosen to become Israeli citizens at the end of the war in 1948.
Let me say that again, because I want to be very clear here.
In 1967, Israel offered the 44,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem a chance to apply for citizenship. Anyone who took that chance was guaranteed, by law, the same rights as any other Israeli citizen.
They refused. Twice. Because Israel repeated the offer in 1980, after officially annexing East Jerusalem. Once again, the vast majority said no – meaning that Israeli territory was home to tens of thousands of Palestinians who had not only refused citizenship but were citizens of an enemy country.
Are you surprised to hear that Israel offered citizenship to these Palestinians? Are you surprised to learn that most of them refused?
Why? Why would they purposely make their own lives more difficult by refusing citizenship?
Well, as I said in our episode on the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, quote:
“Imagine that for decades, you’ve been living under the control of someone you consider your enemy. Your relatives in the West Bank and Gaza are suffering. Your Arab friends or family members within Israel technically have the same rights as Jewish Israelis, but report discrimination, high rates of crime, and structural inequity. And if you feel, in your heart, that the country that controls your home is an occupier, an illegal entity that must be resisted with all your might, why would you agree to become a citizen? Why would you swear an oath of allegiance to a country that you personally believe should not exist?
To be clear, I don’t want to speak for every Palestinian in East Jerusalem. No community is a monolith. But broadly, that’s the gist of the sentiment. It’s easy for me to say that I disagree – and hey, by the way, I disagree. It’s a little harder, but I think more important, for me to truly sympathize. Because most Palestinians in East Jerusalem aren’t evil monsters who refuse citizenship because they hate all Israelis and want them to die. They’re the descendants of people who have fled or been expelled, who have lost their homes, and who have never, ever known what it’s like to govern themselves”.
Not to mention that so many have relatives in the West Bank and Gaza. Relatives who for years denounced the betrayal of “normalizing.” Who claim that accepting citizenship means accepting Israel, and Israeli-ness. And once you accept Israel, you give up on the dream of an Arab Palestine from the river to the sea. People don’t like to give up on their dreams. Especially when they’ve inherited them from parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and political leaders who keep insisting that one day, the Jews will disappear.
Many Palestinians understand this as a lie that’s cost them dearly. You’ll meet some later in this episode.
But many Palestinians don’t. And by the way, that’s not a criticism unique to Palestinians. Some Jews also believe that if they can just harass and intimidate Palestinians enough, they’ll somehow disappear. They’ll go to Jordan, maybe. Or Lebanon. Or any other Arab country.
Newsflash: no one’s going anywhere.
Especially not Jordan. Because in 1988, the Jordanians officially renounced all claims to the West Bank, basically saying, it’s your problem now, Israel. They stripped the area’s Palestinians of Jordanian citizenship, leaving them technically stateless. Five years later, as Rabin and Arafat inked the Oslo agreements, Jordan repeated the trick, this time stripping most of East Jerusalem’s Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship.
All of which means that today, most of East Jerusalem’s 350,000 Palestinians are technically stateless. (Yes, I said 350,000 – a fivefold increase in 60 years!)
Think about it.
They’re not part of the Palestinian Authority, because according to the PA’s citizenship laws, PA citizens must either be born or live in a region under PA control. And the PA does not control East Jerusalem. So unless they were born in the West Bank, East Jerusalem’s Arabs are not citizens of the Palestinian Authority.
Most are not Jordanians, because Jordan mostly stripped them of their citizenship. And most are not Israelis, since very few have shown interest in becoming citizens.
So East Jerusalem’s Palestinians hold a strange and special status. They’re considered “residents,” which means they’re subject to Israeli law and required to pay Israeli taxes. This entitles them to full use of Israeli services and infrastructure – like transportation, healthcare, unemployment benefits, and so on. They can go wherever they want inside Israel and work for Israeli companies and interact as much as they please with Jewish Israelis. They can run and vote in municipal and local elections.
But that’s where the benefits end.
They can’t vote in national elections. They can’t serve as mayor, or sit on the executive board of Jerusalem’s Development Authority, which makes important decisions about urban planning. They can’t hold Israeli passports – meaning they can’t travel out of the country very easily unless they have another passport.
And though they are entitled to social services, they don’t always get them. Like their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank, they face disparities in accessing education, healthcare, and basic infrastructure like sewage and road maintenance. They also face near-impossible challenges in securing building permits. Anyone who bypasses these restrictions risks having their homes demolished.
Most difficult of all: their residency status is entirely conditional. And it can be revoked pretty on a whim at times. Between 1967 and 2022, roughly 14,000 East Jerusalemites have had their residency revoked – mostly because they spent 7 or more years outside the city, or obtained citizenship elsewhere.
Remember my friend Lana from last episode? She moved to East Jerusalem from Louisiana as an eight year old. Her dad and brother are Israeli citizens. But her mom, who is from Ramallah, is not. Which means that every year, she has to reapply for a permit to continue living with her family in East Jerusalem. And it sounds exhausting.
She has to get her permit renewed every single year. She has to go to the Ministry of Interior to get her permit renewed. And it’s just such an exhausting and disgusting and just awful process of just having to wait in this line under the heat or whenever it is and just having to wait to see if they’re gonna approve it or not and literally I’ve been living here for what 17 years now? A month ago she finally got a temporary blue ID… She has a temporary blue ID for two years and then she can get a permanent Israeli residency, not citizenship.
Now, any country is at perfect liberty to set rules about who is allowed residency or citizenship. That’s the nature of countries. That’s the point of borders.
The United States offers “birthright citizenship” – meaning that if you were born on U.S. soil (or a US military base abroad), you’re automatically a US citizen, even if your parents aren’t. So maybe that’s why some Americans see Israeli citizenship laws as unjust. But Israeli law, whose form of “birthright citizenship” requires at least one parent to be a citizen, is actually the norm around the world, not the exception.
And yet, it’s impossible for me not to sympathize with my friend Samer Sinijwali, a peace activist and senior political leader of Fatah, who was born in East Jerusalem.
“I am now a resident of Jerusalem, the united and eternal capital of Israel. I was born in the city. My father, my grandfather, I was born under Israel in 1972. After the annexation of Jerusalem, I don’t have rights in my own in the state of Israel. Not only me, 40% of the inhabitants of this city are not citizens. We don’t have rights. I am not a citizen of any state. This is terrible. I technically don’t have a passport”.
Samer lives in a no-man’s-land as a political leader without a state. It doesn’t sound pleasant. And maybe that’s why, in recent years, citizenship applications from East Jerusalem have soared. In fact, a 2022 poll revealed that if they had their druthers – which by the way is an expression people should use more often – 48% of East Jerusalem Palestinians would prefer Israeli citizenship, 43% prefer Palestinian citizenship, and 9% want Jordanian citizenship.
Samer is ineligible for citizenship because he spent five years in an Israeli prison for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers during the First Intifada.
But in recent years, East Jerusalem’s Palestinians have applied for citizenship in record numbers.
Granted, “record numbers” isn’t that high. We’re talking roughly 15,000 since 2003. But the taboo of accepting Israeli citizenship seems to be gone – or at least, significantly eroded.
Riman Barakat is the co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information. In 2012, she explained, quote:
“It’s only logical that people hoping to improve the quality of life for their children view Israeli citizenship as one way to escape the insecurity. With citizenship status, they are allowed to live anywhere in Israel, rather than suffer the threat of forced displacement in East Jerusalem, and relocation. Instead of having to apply for visas every time they travel abroad, they can just hop on a plane, without having to explain to border officials why they don’t have passports, and that they are stateless.”
Adi Lustigman, whose firm represents Palestinians seeking Israeli citizenship, told Ha’aretz in 2022 that, quote: “Some people say that we’re simply trying to enjoy equal rights, or wish to go overseas with a passport. Some people say they want to vote. Many say they don’t want their children to suffer from the difficulties they went through. They want to know they’re giving their children a better future.”
But only 38% of applications are approved. And sometimes, the process can take years. Applications are usually denied for three reasons:
1: The applicants can’t prove that they live or pay taxes in East Jerusalem.
2: The applicants don’t speak enough Hebrew.
3: Security reasons.
And listen. I’m all for security. There have been cases of Palestinians from East Jerusalem committing terror attacks – most notably during the so-called stabbing intifada of 2015, during which hundreds of Palestinians, many from East Jerusalem, targeted Israelis and tourists with knives. By the end of 2015, Israel was averaging three attacks per day, many in Jerusalem.
Like I said at the top of this episode: it only takes one or two people to destroy things for everyone. When a grocery chain has to pull its knives, scissors, and pizza cutters from the aisles after a stabbing attack in a supermarket, something is wrong. When a rabbi is hacked to death with a cleaver in broad daylight on a Jerusalem street, something is wrong.
So I understand why the Israeli government denies citizenship applications for quote unquote “security reasons” – even as I lament the fact that the wide-ranging definition of “security” encompasses my friend Samer, who went from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers to becoming a peace activist. Sometimes, the individual is sacrificed for the collective. I get why that happens. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy for that individual. That doesn’t mean I can’t look at them and say, this is horrible for you, and you deserve better.
Like I said, the situation is messy. There are no easy answers, and few obvious solutions.
So what should we make of all this? Do we swallow the diagnosis of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of whom condemn Israel as an apartheid state?
Do we accept the opinion of former member of Knesset Issawi Frej, who says:
“Israel is not apartheid state. We have a lot of problems. I know that. We have racism. We must try to find solutions for all these problems. We know that… Apartheid is between citizens and the state. The Palestinian Authority, it’s not – they are not citizens of Israel. There is other place.”
The Arab Muslim minister he’s referring to at the top is, of course, himself.
So who do we listen to? What do we believe?
Let’s recap with our five fast facts.
- The UN defines apartheid as “Inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
- All Israeli citizens, regardless of race or religion, enjoy full and equal rights within Israel – even though minorities can and do face social prejudice, like every country.
- The West Bank is split into three areas. 90% live in Areas A and B, which are governed by the Palestinian Authority. Area C is controlled by Israel, and the 300,000 Palestinians who live there are PA citizens but also subject to Israeli military law.
- Most of East Jerusalem’s 350,000 Palestinians are not citizens but residents, whose status can be revoked if they move away from East Jerusalem or pose a security threat.
- The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have refused Israel’s offer of citizenship twice, and only 15,000 have applied for citizenship over the past two decades, with 40% approved.
Those are the facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
I am not at all a Harry Potter guy. Yes, I’m a nerd, but not that kind of nerd. But my colleague and friend, and writer for Unpacking Israeli History, Adi, is exactly that kind of nerd. She’s great. And she told me about a scene from Harry Potter that I think about pretty often.
By book 5 of the series, things are getting scary for Harry and his buddies. That’s too bad. The worst wizard of all time – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitler – is back. His goon squad, the Death Eaters, are terrorizing innocent people. (Bizarre name.) And Harry and his friends find themselves under the thumb of a nasty authoritarian teacher with a penchant for physical punishment.
They hate her. But when they complain about her to a trusted adult, wondering aloud if she’s with the bad guys, he reminds them, quote:
The world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters.
In modern parlance, that translates into not everyone you dislike is a Nazi. Not every war is a genocide. Not every leader you disagree with is a “fascist” or a “Marxist.” Not every unfair policy is apartheid.
Words matter. Precision matters. Context matters. The more we abuse and inflate our words, the less meaning they have, and the easier it becomes for bad actors to test and redefine them.
Take “Zionism.” Once, it meant “the belief that Jews deserve self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” Today, it’s been warped into a fantasy of Jewish supremacism. Zionists are terrorists. Zionists are Nazis. Zionists are Judeofascists, made-up word. Zionism is an endorsement of genocide.
Stop. These claims are tired, they’re everywhere – from the graffiti in American cities to the subreddit devoted to quilting. Seemingly overnight, it’s become normal for college students to claim, straight-faced, during a disciplinary hearing, that Zionists don’t deserve to live. Okay.
It’s become normal to rip down or deface hostage posters because kidnapped babies and grandparents are settler colonialists from a genocidal state. It’s become normal to open your Twitter feed and see videos of mobs running over and kicking the crap out of Israelis mere miles from the annex where Anne Frank hid for two years. It’s become normal for the attackers to justify their attacks on Jews in Amsterdam, or Montreal, or the University of Pittsburgh, as retaliation “for the children” of Gaza.
I believe we have an obligation to learn our history, no matter how ugly it can get. I believe we have a responsibility to call things by their proper names, which is why we’ve referred to Sabra and Shatila and Kfar Qasem and Deir Yassin as massacres. I am committed to this. Full stop.
So I have no problem saying that Palestinians get a raw deal. That they’re discriminated against, particularly in Area C of the West Bank. That they’re treated badly. That they live under a military occupation, denied the freedoms that every human being deserves.
I was going to say, “but.” Instead, I am saying, “And.” Two things can be true. And, “raw deal” is not apartheid. “Discrimination” is not apartheid. “Military Occupation” is not apartheid. To borrow from Professor Lupin, The world isn’t divided into good people and apartheid-ists. And yes, this is me trying my best to make “apartheid-ist” a real word.
Accusing Israel of this raw deal without asking how we got here, and what role Palestinian leadership has played in this situation, is plain dishonest, or incomplete, or both.
And here is the thing. When you tarnish Israel, and Israelis, as apartheid, or an ethnostate, or whatever other jargon is popular at this exact moment, you’re not only being inaccurate.
You’re doing something else. You’re demonizing Israel and Israelis, pushing them farther from a workable solution. And you’re infantilizing Palestinians completely, robbing them of all their agency.
As Micah Goodman puts it in his book Catch 67, quote:
Under Israeli law, the current legal status of the territories is considered temporary. Israel’s position is that the primary reason why no Palestinian state has yet emerged is that Palestinian leadership has for years been refusing to accept one in negotiations. The situation is confusing because it is paradoxical: the status quo is perpetrated not at the insistence of the occupiers but by the rejectionism of the occupied… Whereas the Black in South Africa demanded to be made equal citizens of their country, the Palestinian national movement is not demanding to be part of the State of Israel – it is demanding the creation of an independent state apart from Israel.
But every time that option has been put on the table, it’s been soundly rejected.
In 1937, with the Peel Commission.
In 1947, with the Partition Plan.
In 2000, at Camp David, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 91% of the West Bank and all of Gaza.
In 2008, in Annapolis, Ehud Olmert offered 94% of the West Bank, with land swaps to compensate for the remaining 6%.
There is always a reason why these have been rejected; sure. And now, I will use the word, “but.”
But, three of those four proposals were met with violence.
OK, you might think. But that doesn’t justify what’s happening in the West Bank, especially in Area C. That doesn’t justify the unequal distribution of water, or the lack of building permits, or the expansion of settlements.
And I get that. I get it. But it’s never as black and white as people want it to be.
For years, dovish Israeli administrations have tried to compromise. The PA refused. The PA kept paying out monthly salaries to any Palestinian who commits a terror attack against Israelis. The higher the death toll, the more money they get.
So what do you do, when you have 400,000 Israeli citizens living on territory that the Palestinian Authority has twice refused to claim, even when it was offered? What do you do when your partner on the other side of the negotiation table is an autocrat with a PhD in Holocaust denial who refuses to stop financially incentivizing terrorism? And no, I am not talking about Hamas; I am talking about Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the ostensibly moderate PA.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
But no one who calls Israel an apartheid state is looking for a conversation. They’ve made up their minds that Israel oppresses Palestinian simply because of their race or religion – not because of the long history of terrorism and rejected peace proposals.
And the lack of nuance scares me. Especially because it isn’t limited to Israel’s critics.
I started last week’s episode by describing how young Jews react to the accusation that Israel is apartheid. No it isn’t, they say. There’s a tacit understanding that apartheid is bad. That no one deserves to be subjugated.
But lately, I’ve encountered young people who merely shrug and say, well, if they’re gonna be terrorists, that’s what they get. They don’t deny the charge, even though it’s incorrect. And they’ve relinquished the moral high ground, without even realizing it. Maybe they don’t even care at this point.
And that both scares me and makes me sad. Because we are the Jewish people. We have a long, long history of ethics. A moral compass. A code of conduct. And we have the ingenuity to find better solutions than this.
This is my friend Yehuda HaCohen, one of the most interesting peace activists I’ve ever met. He lives in the West Bank because it is historically and Biblically Jewish territory. And he has no interest in enforcing apartheid or segregation or racist policies against Palestinians.
He believes there is a better way, and that we will find it. Yehuda and I are quite different people, but wow, what a fascinating human, someone who I spent hours with, and someone who I learned a lot from. Here he is:
“All of the things we did, all the things that Zionists did, right? Ingathering a broken and scattered people from all over the world back to the land they’d been displaced from 2000 years earlier, that was impossible. If anybody talked about doing it, they’d be considered crazy. They’d be living in a fantasy. If anybody talked about reviving a dead language back to everyday use, they’d be living in a fantasy. When Yair talked about expelling the British from our land, freeing our country from the British empire, the Jews are going to free their land from the British empire you’re living in a fantasy. All the things we’ve done already are so much more impossible than the things we want to do now”.
Side note: Yair Stern was the leader of Lehi, the most extreme pre-state paramilitary. You can learn more about them in our episode on the Black Shabbat, linked in the show notes.
A wise man once said if you will it, it is no dream. Our moral imperative is to will a better world into existence – one in which everyone is free and safe, in which my friend Noor can visit Ramallah whenever he wants and my friend Samer can hop on a plane easily and Jews can walk the streets of Jerusalem without fear. A world where we don’t need walls or checkpoints. Where Palestinians can come to the beach in Jaffa without first crawling through a hole in a fence, and where Jews can surf in Gaza safely.
BUT we can’t build that world unless we look our problems in the eye. And we can’t build that world when we’re hung up on inflated, inciting rhetoric. When we’re demonizing one another. When we’re refusing to accept our responsibilities towards each other.
And that starts by telling the truth.