Buscador avanzado

An undated photograph of a segregated Cape Town beach in apartheid South Africa. Credit Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images

Among critics of Israel, it has become ever more common to accuse the Jewish state of imitating apartheid South Africa. This month, an obscure United Nations agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, whose membership comprises 18 Arab states, caused an uproar when it issued a report accusing Israel of applying the same racism in its conflict with Palestinians that made South Africa an international pariah. The United Nations secretary general swiftly repudiated the report, and it was removed from the agency’s website.

The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is a staple of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement, which has made the South African comparison practically the lingua franca of anti-Israel activism.…  Seguir leyendo »

Tunisians voters line up at a polling station in Menzeh, near Tunis, in 2011. (Amine Landoulsi/Associated Press)

The A-word reappeared in Israel this week. The country’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, approved a scheme that would have seen a crude form of segregation of Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, with Palestinians banned from using Israeli-run bus services in the occupied territory.

At the last moment the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, intervened and overturned Ya’alon’s decision, suspending the scheme – but not before a collective howl of protest from Israeli opposition leaders and human rights groups. The leader of the leftwing Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On, could not have been clearer: “This is how apartheid looks,” she said. “There is no better or nicer way to put it.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Does the term 'apartheid' fit Israel? Of course it does.

The storm of controversy after Secretary of State John F. Kerry's warning that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state" reminded us once again that facts, data and the apparently tedious details of international law often seem to have little bearing on conversations about Israel conducted at the highest levels of this country. As was the case when other major figures brandished the "A-word" in connection with Israel (Jimmy Carter comes to mind), the political reaction to Kerry's warning was instantaneous and emotional. "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and any linkage between Israel and apartheid is nonsensical and ridiculous," said California Sen.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israel isn't, and will never be, an apartheid state

The war against Israel has passed through three phases.

The first was the attempt to annihilate Israel by conventional means. It began with Israel's birth in 1948, when Arab armies nearly captured Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and ended in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israeli forces came within artillery range of Cairo and Damascus.

The next stage, starting in the early 1970s, sought to cripple Israel through terror. Suicide bombers nearly paralyzed the country, but by 2005 they too were defeated.

That is when Israel's enemies launched the third, and potentially most devastating, campaign: to isolate, delegitimize and sanction Israel into extinction.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Feb. 4, 1965, as a teenager, I left South Africa, the country of my birth, for a new home in a place I’d never been — Israel.

I loved South Africa, but I loathed the apartheid system. In Israel, I saw a fresh start for a people rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, a place of light and justice, as opposed to the darkness and oppression of apartheid South Africa.

Now, almost 50 years later, after decades of arguing that Israel is not an apartheid state and that it’s a calumny and a lie to say so, I sense that we may be well down the road to being seen as one.…  Seguir leyendo »

If there is one thing the Middle East does not need is more crazies; more violent, hate-filled fanatics who mindlessly hurt others for no legitimate reason, or no reason at all. That’s why recent events in Israel proved so disheartening to those of us who have not lost hope that one day reconciliation and peace can reign in the region.

And yet, in the aftermath of a repulsive attack by a group of young Israelis who nearly killed a young Arab, there were signs that Israel is not about to fall into a self-excavated moral abyss, as the pessimists are too quick to presage.…  Seguir leyendo »

Opportunities to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination. All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

On Saturday the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will open its third session: after Barcelona and London, this session will take place in South Africa, the location of a seminal struggle for self-determination by a community oppressed by apartheid.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Israel's liberal left has been warning about this for decades – and now those cautionary words seem like prophesies. Lines of Israeli authors, academics and campaigners have long said that the ugly occupation of the Palestinian people would corrode Israel and derail its democracy. Human rights advocates repeatedly warned that a nation capable of meting out such punishing discrimination to another people would eventually turn on itself. And so it has.

The country is in thrall to such anti-democratic sentiment and mob rule racism, manifesting at such breakneck speed that it is hard to keep up. In the last few months alone two Arab citizens of Israel were "disappeared" by the state's secret police; an Arab member of the Knesset was stripped of her parliamentary privileges for being on the Gaza aid flotilla; and now a Palestinian man from Jerusalem has just been convicted of rape after pretending to be Jewish and having consensual sex.…  Seguir leyendo »