I like to joke that I’m an introvert dressed as an extrovert. Inside, I’m somewhat of a curmudgeon with strong opinions about All the Things, typically none of them consequential. (Like, when hosting a meal, put out your beverages immediately. And stop sneezing into your hands. It’s disgusting.)
But you’d never know how secretly obsessive I really am, because I spend 80 hours a week talking to strangers and facilitating community in my private life.
And I really love it. I do.
Because these aren’t just any strangers. They’re young people, not exclusively Jewish, at all, who are eager and interested to learn the story of Israe, it’s always in the news – with all its complications, its beauty, its nuances, its warts, and its black eyes.
Mostly, people are excited for these conversations. They want to learn. They’re open to listening to the different angles of the same story they think they know. But there’s one topic that really gets a room going. Like, this is the party starter. One topic where opinions seem to come from the gut and the heart, from feelings rather than facts.
It turns out that nothing, nothing, gets people fired up like the following question:
Is Israel an apartheid state? I said it, I asked it, I did, is Israel an apartheid state?
Maybe you’ve heard this question, slash allegation, slash accusation before. Maybe you’re like 90% of the Jewish students I talk to, who scream NO WAY!!!!, without quite understanding why people believe that Israeli institutions are inherently racist when the person who is espousing it really does not seem antisemitic at all and when some Israeli NGOs even claim it. Maybe you’re like the 16-year-old who once raised his hand in a crowded lecture hall and told me, in perfect earnestness, “I have no idea what Apartheid is, but I know I’m supposed to say Israel is not that.”
Honestly: kudos to that guy. For real. He was open. He was honest. And he revealed something both true and upsetting: when it comes to learning about Israel, all sides have a tendency to prioritize slogans over facts.
When I ask this same question of non-Jewish students at America’s most elite private high schools, I get the same knee-jerk responses from some. Of course Israel is an apartheid state. Everyone knows that, so why am I even asking?! But if I ask for more information, like what exactly that means, well, the conversation goes something like this:
That’s Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab, talking to a representative of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Auckland in February of 2023. The student is sitting at a table strewn with literature and Palestinian flags… but when Yoseph asks her about her political stance, she can’t muster a single fact to support her opinion.
And look. I get it. I’m not here to call out college students or sixteen year olds. I’m not criticizing anyone. This isn’t a personal failure of high school and university students. It’s a failure of the systems that educated – or rather, didn’t educate them. It’s about the indoctrination that goes on.
Plus, apartheid isn’t an easy word to hear. Not for anyone.
Who likes thinking about state-enforced systems that separate people by race? Who enjoys grappling with the question, “Hey, does this huge group of people lack basic rights for no reason other than their ethnic identity?”
But it’s not just that the question is a bummer (such a bummer), forcing you to confront inconvenient truths and ugly realities when you’d rather be, I don’t know, talking to the group chat about whether to start Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes in your fantasy football league (at the time of this recording, it’s absolutely Jackson, and sorry if that went over some of your heads).
For millions of Jews and Arabs, the question of Israeli apartheid is a trigger. Depending on where you’re standing, it’s either a painful reminder or a personal attack. Or both.
For the past year, so many Jews have felt besieged from all corners. On social media, in the news, at our universities, in our elementary schools, Jews are hearing that the Jewish state is illegitimate, that quote-unquote “Zionists” aren’t welcome anywhere, that they have to cut away an essential part of their identity to fit in. Plenty of Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, have serious problems with Israeli policies. But these conversations aren’t about Israeli policy. In fact, they’re not conversations at all. Showing up outside synagogues with megaphones isn’t a conversation. Vandalizing the homes of museum directors for some imagined crime isn’t a conversation. For over a year, Jews and non-Jews around the world have been demonized and branded genocide-aires just for suggesting that maybe a country of 10 million people shouldn’t just be outright destroyed.
On the other side, Palestinians have spent the past year feeling dehumanized. They’ve watched the death toll in Gaza tick higher and higher, trying desperately to help their friends and family before it’s too late. They’ve rallied and demonstrated and voted for the war to end, for institutions to divest from Israel, for the US to stop arming Israel, with very little success. Hearing people question the claim that Israel is an apartheid state, that Israeli law is stacked against them, just adds insult to injury.
So I recognize I’m wading into a minefield here. But here’s what I think.
I think that whatever you feel about this question is valid and understandable, no matter what quote-unquote “side” you’re on. We all have feelings. While facts may not care about your feelings, here is the reality, feelings often don’t get about your facts. They’re natural. I’ve got them in spades, I feel. Again, mostly about fantasy football and where people sneeze, but hey, everyone needs hobbies.
Here’s what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to sloganeer, or give “talking points,” or parrot the “myths and facts” that each side presents. That would do us all a disservice. You’re listening for propaganda, you can get that anywhere.
You, listening, can handle complexity. You deserve complexity. And, also, that’s not what you come to this podcast for. We both know that.
Because this isn’t some theoretical debate you can use to score social points or demonstrate your commitment to one ideology or another. We are talking about a daily reality for millions of Israelis and Palestinians alike. And when we retreat to the familiar, knee-jerk opinions we’ve been trained to parrot, we are hurting real people, and not giving enough credit to ourselves.
Denying someone’s lived reality is a great way to push them towards extremism. The reflexive, context-free claim that Israel is an apartheid state ignores some very important background and robs Palestinians, and Palestinian leadership, of agency.
How infantilizing. How unproductive. And it ignores the fact that extremism breeds extremism. There’s no better way to drive Israelis into the arms of the hard right than to reflexively demonize their country.
So for the next two weeks, we’re going to explore this claim.
Yes, two weeks. This is a two part episode because we have a lot to cover.
In this episode, we’ll talk about what apartheid really is and talk about the situation in the West Bank. And next week, we’ll talk about East Jerusalem, and come to some conclusions based on all the facts and the different perspectives. What I ask from you, dear listener, is to loosen your shoulders, put your guard down, and listen.
I am also asking one other thing. If you don’t like my conclusions or my analysis, that’s okay. But don’t just unsubscribe and leave a 1 star review telling the world how full of crap I am. Let’s engage. Let’s have a real conversation. As always, my email is noam@jewishunpacked.com. And I love hearing from you.
One more note before we begin.
I’ve tried to conquer my own biases to the extent that I can. But I know, and you know, that every story contains bias, and every human contains bias. No matter who you are or what story you’re telling, everyone makes choices about what to emphasize and what to omit. I’m no different. But at the very least, I’ve done my best to be honest and thorough, because this podcast is guided by the three Cs. Content, curiosity, and courage.
Content comes first – we need to know the facts. But it takes curiosity and courage to listen to uncomfortable truths. To confront realities that don’t jive with yours, to remember that yours is not the only narrative. And it takes compassion, too – okay, a fourth C – especially when you’re listening to someone describe their suffering, trauma, and pain.
So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about life in Israel and the West Bank. Let’s lay out the facts and listen to the people whose lives they govern. Welcome to our two part episode on Is Israel apartheid?
Yalla. Let’s do this.
Prologue: The Claim
… and so I don’t shrink from my ultimate conclusions that this ideal of Zionism, of a state project, has come at the expense of another group of people – that it has erected an apartheid project. I believe that.
Even if you don’t recognize the voice, you probably recognize the name of the person speaking. Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American journalist, famous for his stylish prose and his willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about race, history, and identity. He’s testified before Congress and won a McArthur Genius Grant and published award-winning, bestselling books in multiple genres – many of which I’ve read and loved. He’s a special dude. Some have even described his voice as “prophetic” for this generation. That’s a lot.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from his normal fodder about American race relations. All his life, he’d heard the situation was complicated. That it required nuance, history, maybe a PhD to fully understand. But after a ten-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, he came to a conclusion.
It wasn’t complicated. And it was apartheid. Here he is again:
You know, we were traveling all over the West Bank, and there were, you know, roads that we could take, or that we couldn’t take, rather, because we were traveling the way to Palestinians I would normally travel, and then there were other roads that Jewish settlers were able to take.
[…This was during a period where I was being made aware of the fact that] if a Palestinian is arrested on the West Bank, they are subject to the military system of justice, whereas if a Jewish settler is arrested on the West Bank, they’re subjected to the civil system.
This is the point where I was made aware of the differing water laws that, you know, govern you depending on who you are, and entire separate system of justice that was unequal, entire separate system of governance I should say, that separate and unequal. As the descendant of someone who was, or peoples who were, born into a system of governance that was separate and unequal, it was very hard for me to not be struck by that emotionally.
There it is again: that strong emotional response that affects all of us, that shapes our stories and our opinions and our worldview.
But put aside his emotional connection for a second. Is he right? Has Zionism “erected an apartheid project” with different water laws, different justice systems, different governance for people who are kept separate and unequal based solely on their religion?
Well, to answer that, we’ve got to go back in time. We are a history podcast, after all – so our understanding of apartheid should be rooted in history. And the history of apartheid as a legal, institutionalized system starts 76 years ago, on the southern edge of the map…
Part One: A Brief and Ugly History of Apartheid
South Africa, 1948. The National Party government had just taken power. But no one was fooled by their bland name. Because the National Party was made up of white supremacists. Actual Nazi-style, if you ain’t white, you ain’t right type of white supremacists.
Usually, I don’t take white supremacists very seriously. They’re not really my thing. In the US, they tend to march around waving tiki torches (where do they buy them anyway?) and having strong opinions about the casting of live-action Disney remakes, which seems like… maybe not the most important issue in the world? Just sayin’, don’t @ me, Disney adults. (By the way, if you missed this so-called “controversy” over Disney casting a Black Little Mermaid, well… honestly, you’re doing something right, so good for you.)
But the white supremacists of South Africa were doing a heck of a lot more than that. They ruled a diverse, majority-Black country, using every lever of power to institute a state-planned, state-enforced system of racial discrimination.
To make sure no one escaped the system, they divided the entire country into four racial categories: White, Black, Colored (you know, mixed-raced), and Indian. By the way, I know that the term “colored” as a way to refer to people has a tough history in the US, but since it was the official term used in apartheid South Africa, I’m going to apologize, you’re going to hear me say it a couple more times when referring to multiracial South Africans. So, trigger warning in effect.
Your race was your destiny, determining where you could live, who you could marry, what kind of job you could get, and even what services you could access. If your appearance didn’t clearly match one of these categories, the government would run highly scientific tests on you to decide where you fit in. And when I say highly scientific, I mean… not at all.
Take the infamous pencil test. Listen to this, it’s wild. Some government official was literally paid to put pencils in people’s hair and watch what happened when they shook their heads. If the pencil fell out, the person was white. If it stayed in, they’d get classified as Black or Colored. And since genetics are weird and unpredictable, some members of the same family might get classified as white or colored while others were deemed Black… meaning that by law, those families now had to split up.
After all, the Group Areas Act decreed that people of different races couldn’t live in the same neighborhoods. So the government forcibly removed millions of Black South Africans from their homes, shoving them into overcrowded townships far from the big cities. Meanwhile, the Separate Amenities Act made sure white people had top of the line public services, while Black South Africans were left with the dregs.
Apartheid, after all, means “separateness” in Afrikaans – similar to the “segregation” of the United States, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But where the United States Supreme Court pretended segregation was, and I quote, “separate but equal,” South Africa’s National Party had no such illusions.
The apartheid system was designed to be separate and unequal. And the National Party wasn’t shy about using all the powers at their disposal to enforce it. The parliament, the courts, the police, and the military worked in tandem to ensure that Black South Africans were kept disenfranchised. It was impossible to escape. Every deck was stacked.
I could tell you about the laws that kept Black students uneducated and trained for a life of servitude. I could tell you about the laws that prohibited people of different races from mingling. Like the comedian, Trevor Noah. He’s what the National Party would have called “Colored,” meaning mixed-race. His mom was Black. His dad was white. And that’s why his autobiography is called Born a Crime. According to the Mixed Marriages Act, Trevor shouldn’t exist.
If these laws sound at all familiar to you, that may be because they were painfully similar to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow Laws of the United States. In short – and please prepare yourself, because I’m about to say something highly sophisticated – apartheid South Africa was bad. Really, really bad. In fact, the UN’s apartheid convention calls the system “inhuman.” The Rome Statute of the ICC declares it “inhumane.” I see you adding the E in there, Rome Statute. Well played.
Black South Africans fought back. They may have been institutionally and legally powerless, but they were still the majority. Groups like the African National Congress (ANC) led protests and strikes, marching and campaigning side-by-side with white folks, including many Jews – who were classified as white under this system, in case you were wondering.
It didn’t matter how hard the government cracked down or how many protesters they banned or jailed or exiled or killed. Internal resistance made the country ungovernable. Nations all over the world slapped South Africa with sanctions and boycotts, destroying morale and decimating the economy.
And then there was the internal shame. Many white people were disgusted by the system and dedicated themselves to ending it. Others had lived with it just fine – until the world started boycotting their country. It was demoralizing and embarrassing to see musicians and sports teams and global institutions boycott and censure South Africa.
The pressure was overpowering. Less than 50 years after the National Party took power, the government buckled and the system fell apart. In 1994, South Africa held its first democratic election, Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president, and they all lived happily ever after in their “rainbow nation.”
Well, okay, not quite. But this isn’t Unpacking South African History, which, side note, someone should really start.
So let’s move back north, to Israel, and ask: knowing what we know about apartheid South Africa, does the charge of “apartheid” apply? Are organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch correct to call the Jewish state an “apartheid” regime?
Well, we’ve defined apartheid. But we haven’t defined Israel.