https://melaniephillips.substack.com
The campaign to demonise and delegitimise Israel has recently moved into a higher gear with the increased use of one particularly vicious falsehood.
This is the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
The claim is as fatuous as it is pernicious. Apartheid was the name given to South Africa’s systematic oppression of its black inhabitants who were denied political, civic and human rights.
By contrast, Arab Israeli citizens have fully equal rights. They study in Israel’s universities; enjoy Israel’s beaches and parks; receive equal treatment as patients in Israel’s hospitals and work there as doctors and other medical staff; serve as members of the armed forces and as judges; and are represented by members of Knesset who are currently lynch-pins in Israel’s governing coalition.
Those Arabs who live in the disputed territories don’t have Israeli rights — for the very good reason that they aren’t Israeli citizens. They have no civic entitlements purely because the status of those territories remains unsettled as a result of Palestinian Arab rejectionism and violence — and because Arab states regard them as a nuisance preferably to be ignored.
The “Israel apartheid” smear, however ludicrous, isn’t new. It has its roots in the infamous 1975 “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution. Although that was revoked in 1991, it was resurrected at the scarcely-less infamous UN conference in Durban in 2001.
At that anti-Jewish hate-fest, the NGO forum referred to “Israel’s brand of apartheid and ethnic cleansing methods” to justify advocating “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel”. This spawned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and launched a propaganda campaign against “apartheid Israel,” resulting in grotesque campus “Israel apartheid” weeks.