The New York Times‘ warning (4/11/19) that Israel/Palestine is “on a trajectory to become what critics say will be an apartheid state” echoed predictions that the Times has been making since the first years of the 21st century.
Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Israeli prime minister earlier this month, the New York Times’ editorial board (4/11/19) wrote:
Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel is on a trajectory to become what critics say will be an apartheid state like the former South Africa—a country in which Palestinians will eventually be a majority, but without the rights of citizens.
A harsh criticism? Actually, the paper has been saying that Israel/Palestine could “become” an apartheid state for the better part of two decades. It ran a piece in 2003 (1/29/03) arguing that
if Israel does not give up the territories, it will face a choice: relinquish either democracy or the ideal of a Jewish state. Granting Palestinians in the territories the right to vote would turn Israel into an Arab state with a Jewish minority. Not allowing them to vote would result in a form of permanent apartheid.
For almost 20 years, the paper has suggested that Israel/Palestine risks devolving into an apartheid state if it continues to rule over Palestinians in the territories—Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—who cannot choose their rulers. This population includes approximately 4.75 million occupied Palestinians—320,000 in East Jerusalem, 2.8 million in the rest of the West Bank and 1.8 million in besieged Gaza—to say nothing of the millions of Palestinian refugees who cannot return to their homes and participate in elections because the people who put on those elections won’t let them.
That situation has remained the same, not only for the period that the Times has been publishing material saying the arrangement might someday add up to apartheid, but since 1967. Yet the Times persists in characterizing Israeli apartheid as a hypothetical future development. The paper acknowledges that governing millions of Palestinians but denying them the vote is a form of apartheid, so there’s no justification for saying, after nearly 52 years of such disenfranchisement, that that will eventually constitute apartheid, but for some unspecified reason doesn’t yet at this point.
Tom Friedman’s Groundhog Day
Thomas Friedman has now been warning that Israel was “becoming an apartheid state” for more than 33 Friedman Units.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman appears to be having a Groundhog Day experience: He keeps waking up, looking at Israel’s ethnocracy, and saying that if it continues to be apartheid, it will become apartheid. In 2002 (10/16/02), he commented:
If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies.
2010 came and went, and the “apartheid-like” conditions remained, but Friedman persisted in treating Israeli apartheid as a mere possibility, writing (2/1/11) of the 2011 protests in Egypt:
If Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
A year later (8/1/12), Friedman said:
It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the US keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real US friend would promise to do. Otherwise, Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa.
Two years after that (2/11/14), Friedman said that “Israel by default could become some kind of apartheid-like state in permanent control over…2.5 million Palestinians.” Even in this so-called criticism of Israel, Friedman does the state a favor by acting as though the West Bank Palestinians are the only ones disenfranchised by Israel, overlooking the refugees and Gaza, even as Israel continues to control the latter. (He also appears to leave out Palestinian Jerusalemites.)
Evidence for Already-Existing Apartheid
As Friedman and his paper kept predicting that Israel/Palestine could turn into an apartheid entity, evidence mounted that it is exactly that. For example, United Nations special rapporteur John Dugard found in 2007 that “elements of the [Israeli] occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law.” He went on to say that at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank and surrounding Jerusalem,
a [Palestinian] person may be refused passage through a checkpoint for arguing with a soldier or explaining his documents…. Checkpoints and the poor quality of secondary roads Palestinians are obliged to use, in order to leave the main roads free for settler use, result in journeys that previously took 10 to 20 minutes taking 2 to 3 hours…. In apartheid South Africa, a similar system [was] designed to restrict the free movement of blacks —the notorious “pass laws.”
Another UN special rapporteur, Richard Falk, noted in 2010 that “among the salient apartheid features of the Israeli occupation” are “discriminatory arrangements for movement in the West Bank and to and from Jerusalem,” as well as
extensive burdening of Palestinian movement, including checkpoints applying differential limitations on Palestinians and on Israeli settlers, and onerous permit and identification requirements imposed only on Palestinians.
A March 2017 report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
That July, however, Friedman (7/12/17) continued to treat Israeli apartheid as something that might happen down the road, wishing that President Trump had admonished Netanyahu in a meeting between the two:
Bibi, you win every debate, but meanwhile every day the separation of Israel from the Palestinians grows less likely, putting Israel on a “slippery slope toward apartheid,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently warned.
Last September (9/19/18), Friedman was still worried about this supposedly theoretical scenario:
Without some dramatic advance, there is a real chance that whatever Palestinian governance exists will crumble, and Israel will have to take full responsibility for the health, education and welfare of the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel would then have to decide whether to govern the West Bank with one legal authority or two, which would mean Israel would be choosing between bi-nationalism and apartheid, both disasters for a Jewish democracy.
Netanyahu, Friedman went on to say, has failed to offer “any new, or old, ideas on how to separate from the Palestinians to avoid the terrible choices of bi-nationalism and apartheid.”
Erasing Palestinians
Setting aside the troubling assertion that Israelis and Palestinians living as equals would be not only a “disaster,” but as bad a “disaster” as apartheid, Friedman ignored the fact that just two months earlier, the Knesset had passed the Nation State Law that defined Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The law asserted that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” even though 20 percent of the population living inside Israel is not Jewish; encouraged “the development of Jewish settlement” and vowed that the state will “promote its establishment and consolidation.” It declared that “the state’s language is Hebrew,” deprecating Arabic, the first language of roughly half the people under that state’s control.
The Nation State Law demonstrates that the bad faith, future tense descriptions of Israeli apartheid are overly narrow, in that they focus exclusively on the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. Yet on the Israeli-held side of the Green Line, Palestinians are systematically discriminated against.
It’s not only the occupation that make Israel/Palestine apartheid. It’s the Israeli state’s foundational principles and actions: driving two-thirds of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes at its birth, subsequently making more than 2 million of them refugees, and then denying their right to return, despite its being mandated under international law.
Meanwhile, Jewish people anywhere on Earth are given the right to immigrate, because Israeli leaders want to maintain a demographic advantage. They pursue this goal—with decisive help from their sponsors in Washington—through their longstanding operational policy mantra: maximum land, minimum Arabs.
Not even three full days after the New York Times’ most recent brooding about how Israel might “become” an apartheid state, Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolition of 500 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. Is it apartheid yet?
An apartheid from reality
Because things have changed in 20 years. Gaza is no longer under Israeli rule so claiming that we are their rulers are ridiculous. And more of tge West Bank is under Palestinian Authority rule as Area A. Israel has less control over them than it did 20 years ago. Also claiming that the “refugees” are subject to apartheid is ridiculous, refusing to let outsiders in isn’t apartheid.
Also get this through your head, we have no interest in giving up our country to a “one state Solution”. I’m fairly center left but I’d sooner violently resist such a thing together with the right than accept it.
Gaza is under the complete control of Israel which can arbitrarily decide who and what gets in and out. That defines “being under Israeli rule”. You deceive yourself if you think you are “fairly center left”. Human rights are universal with no exceptions. Until you accept that you’re no better than Netanyahu.
Gaza has more than one border area, stupid. Not surprised you either don’t know that or lied by omitting it. But it’s that kind of thinking that makes the Left what it is today (that’s an insult if you were wondering).
Ah yes, once again, the personal insults that conceal a weak argument that makes the right what it is today. The border with Egypt is still a controlled border. Gazans do not have the fundamental right to control their own border. They can’t come and go without the approval of a foreign country. How many boats carrying nothing more than medical supplies or humanitarian aid trying to reach Gaza have to be intercepted and looted by Israeli armed thugs before you face the reality of what international law still recognizes as an occupation regardless of whether any Israelis live there.
Gaza is blockades, just like Germany and Japan during World War II, and it has a border with Egypt. Israel does not directly rule it. And by Israeli standards I am center left. That doesn’t mean I have to recognize invented human rights.
Your analogy of Gaza with Germany and Japan during WWII should make self evident how delusional you’ve become. As for “invented human rights” I’m sure you’re referring to other people’s rights but not your own.
Gaza repeatedly attacked Israel. It’s a de facto independent state under Islamist rule so naturally a blockade is the response to repeated attacks on Israel’s civilian population. And by invented human rights I mean stuff not enshrined in intern law.
Thank you so much, Russell Branca. The human race needs more like you.
Get this through your head… You and the likes of you are just bloodthirsty racists. Some day, maybe sooner than you think, you’ll have to pay your dues!
When Jordan OCCUPIED the West Bank and Egypt OCCUPIED Gaza, did any of these Human Rights Warriors complain that Jordan or Egypt was running an apartheid state? Do any of them condemn the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the truly Apartheid “state” of ISIS (ask any Yazidi — if you can find a live one)? One has to wonder why the concern is only for alleged victims of actions taken by Jews. Plus, wanna know why there is no state of Palestine for Palestinians? RACISM, on the part of the Arabs. They have been offered sovereignty — by Israel — multiple times and have refused every time. Why? Because it is unthinkable to have a sovereign Jewish state, of any size, on Muslim land. The “Palestinians” never asked for their own state until May 15, 1948. Makes you wonder what happened on May 14th …
‘s May 1948? Oh yes, NAKBA began and it’s never really stopped with land stolen from the Palestinians, along with their history. Yes, they are controlled by an apartheid state, Israel. For example, see how electricity is often just cut off, or farm lands polluted by Israeli sewer systems which are built above Palestinian lands. Too, when Palestinians went to the fence to protest, the Israeli soldiers fire on them and always seem to shoot in an bodily area that is designed to maim and destroy. In fact Palestinians can’t even fish in international waters as Israel goes after them there too. Imagine living in a land where a gang of soldiers shows up and drags you and your family from your ancient home and gives it away to a Jewish family. Israel’s 21st century actions are replicating what the 20th century nazi did, with a lack of truth and justice —and fairness. Imagine living in a land where one can never be sure of electricity or clean water, or whether your shelter will be bombed away—– and all this is still going for 70 years.
Ah yes. The foundation of the situation in the Middle East was laid by the British, who then absconded, washing their hands like Pontius Pilate. Same pattern laid by the Evil Empire on the subcontinent, hence we have Indians and Pakistanis in perpetual religious ethnic conflict. Perhaps the base model, whose residue prevails since the British colonial occupation in the 1600s, is in the north of Ireland. “Rebel” Ulster was colonized by the Brits who shipped impoverished Scots Presbyterians (emmiserated by the English conquest of Scotland) whom they put in charged. The payoff for the Brits was the subjugation of the subhuman Irish Papists and the Scots were rewarded with political and civil power and with expropriated native Irish Catholic land.
“is it apartheid yet?” Not even close.
Oh, I agree with the story in full, 100% and more – but this surname, Shupak, my gosh, it’s funny, author needs to use google-translate with one of the serbo-coatian languages.
It does seem somewhat disingenuous to state that the Israeli government is in charge of Gaza and the West Bank. They have their own elected governments and Israel are not in control of them. They place border restrictions because of the violence that has come about since the founding of Israel. Whether or not you agree with the creation of the state of Israel seems an irrelevant point now. The country exists and many people live there. Violence is not the appropriate way to deal with the issues in the region. The authorities on both sides need to recognise that certain concessions will have to be made for this conflict to stop but the current attitudes of both seem to be preventing this.
I don’t think ‘disingenuous’ means what you think it means. Disingenuous is bending over backwards to swallow the Israeli government’s flimsy, ahistorical justifications, obfuscations, and apologia, hook, line, and sinker.
I went to a lecture by Desmond Tutu in Jerusalem at Christmas 1988 when he said that “apartheid in South Africa was a picnic, compared to what happens to the Palestinians.” That’s 30+ years ago, and how it has deteriorated and became so much worse over the years. I don’t understand why the world does not impose sanctions on Israel like it did on South Africa!! Israel would soon toe the line if you hit their pockets!!
The settlers are the terrorists in West Bank. They steal land, destroy property, vandalise homes and cars etc. Life for Palestinians is so restricted. Something needs to be done. Man’s inhumanity to man….it’s the worst form of apartheid.
It is interesting that U.S. policy Re: Israel/Palestine has been able to move steadily to the right, as Israel’s policy moves to the right. There is no longer a pretense that a “peace process” is working towards a “two-state solution”. It should be obvious by now that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is, quite simply, an occupation. (It is obvious to most of the world, but the U.S. has been able to support the Israeli myth that they are somehow the victims in all this.) Check out resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly to get a clear view of world consensus on this issue. Read the Goldstone Report, by a South African jurist, who was then hounded by Israel to retract some of his conclusions.
Can’t/won’t FAIR transmit this blockbuster narrative to the NYTimes’ Public Editor or Ombudsperson?–with concurrent transmittals to all MSM print and visual outlets?
This article is so on point that it makes my heart ache all over again for the agony experienced by the tortured Palestinians. As every pro-Palestine program I aired on my local public-access cable TV system from 2005-11 (some 3,000 of them, original plus repeats) stated as a preface: “For the Palestinians, yesterday was worse than the day before; today was worse than yesterday; tomorrow will be worse than today.” TFriedman manifestly doesn’t give a damn about that reality….
What really sets Israel and the Jews apart is their hypocrisy which I wrote an article about on my Word Press site: Alaskamanspeaks.org; If Gaza is not a perfect replica of the Warsaw Ghetto, then what is it? The constant denial of even basic human rights to the inmates of Gaza prison should be roundly denounced in the United Nations; yet few are willing to speak out in their name for fear of offending the USA. They need Israel to continue buying arms and ammo from them. Yet Israel is supplying China with the latest technology for controlling their population, doing 3 1/2 billion in business with them last year. Tom Friedman is himself a hypocrite so anything he writes is not worth the paper it is written on. I take Paul Krugman over him any day. This worlds leaders become more heartless, (If that is possible) every day. Take the US/Trump seeking to outlaw divestment in Israel…..