This piece appeared in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail on 26^th May 2014

by Peter Wertheim
Peter Goers’ column in last week’s Sunday Mail titled “Why I weep: the 720km wall, a symbol of apartheid” appeals to the emotions, and to outdated anti-Jewish religious motifs, but ignores the facts.
The simplist­ic applic­a­tion of the “apartheid” tag to the Israel-Palestini­an conflict misses the essential dif­fer­ence between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. In South Africa, three different racial groups – whites, blacks and coloureds – saw them­selves, and were seen by others, as of one nation­al­ity, South African. The conflict in South Africa was a struggle by blacks and coloureds for equal rights with whites as citizens of the same national community.
Jews and Palestini­ans do not see them­selves, and are not seen by others, as members of a single national community. Each is a distinct national community in its own right. Each of them has a com­bin­a­tion of shared language, customs, beliefs and tra­di­tions derived from a common past which gives them an his­tor­ic­ally determ­ined social identity in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.
The Israel-Palestini­an conflict has therefore not been a struggle for equal cit­izen­ship rights between people of the same national community. Rather, it has been a struggle by each national community for political inde­pend­ence, statehood and sov­er­eignty. In short, the conflict between Israel and the Palestini­ans in the West Bank and Gaza is an inter­na­tion­al one, whereas the conflict between the races in South Africa was intra-national.
Within Israel, Palestini­ans are fully-fledged citizens. They vote in Israel’s elections, and twelve of them are currently members of the Israeli Par­lia­ment. There are Arab judges in Israeli courts, including Israel’s Supreme court.
Israel’s Jews and Arabs have much the same life expect­ancy and infant mortality rates, use the same public transport, eat in the same res­taur­ants, get treated at the same hospitals, share the same beaches, theatres and cinemas, shop at the same malls, attend the same public schools and uni­ver­sit­ies and work side by side in many occu­pa­tions.
By agreement, Israel and the Palestini­an Authority currently share admin­is­tra­tion of the West Bank, pending a final set­tle­ment of the conflict. Any move by Israel to extend its civil law jur­is­dic­tion to the West Bank would be con­sidered as an illegal annex­a­tion of that territory under inter­na­tion­al law.
The measures Israel has been forced to take to prevent suicide bombers from the West Bank entering Israel and murdering Israeli civilians have indeed resulted in Israel imposing restric­tions on Palestini­ans in the West Bank.
What Goers calls “720km of barbaric wall” is in fact mostly an elec­tron­ic­ally monitored, wire fence only a few metres high. It is concrete only in places where Israelis have been targeted by sniper fire. Even Bob Carr, a severe critic of Israel’s set­tle­ments, declared in an interview on SBS radio on April 27 that “If there were bombs going off in Sydney, I would have built a pro­tect­ive barrier faster than the Israeli Cabinet did”.
It is disin­genu­ous for Goers to imply that any but a handful of fanatics want to destroy the Islamic mosques and Christian churches in Jerusalem. There was an attempt to set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque in 1969. The arsonist was a mentally disturbed Christian fun­da­ment­al­ist from Australia.
Israel goes to extraordin­ary lengths to protect the holy sites of all three mono­the­ist­ic religions, and wor­ship­pers flock to them from all parts of the world. Prior to the 1967 war, these sites were under Jordanian control. Jews were barred from visiting Jewish holy sites and ancient Jewish cemeter­ies were desec­rated.
Goers ridicu­lously describes Jesus as a “Palestini­an”. How many other “Palestini­ans” have had their bar mitzvah when they turned 13? And cel­eb­rated the Jewish Passover? And prayed in Hebrew? Israelis are not “oppress­ive or bellicose”, as Goers suggests. They are a people like any other – het­ero­gen­eous and varied. To reduce them to a single, malevol­ent type is bigotry.
Israel has offi­cially embraced the principle of “two States for two peoples” which the UN endorsed as long ago as 1947. The con­tinu­ing denial by the Palestini­ans and the Arab states of the right of the Jewish people to national self-determ­in­a­tion remains the true “root cause” of the conflict. Goers’ silence about this is telling.
Dis­crim­in­a­tion exists every­where, including in Australia, but dis­crim­in­a­tion is not apartheid. To apply the stigma of “apartheid” to demo­cra­cies like Israel and Australia is to drain the concept of all substance. Factual and lin­guist­ic precision is more likely to enhance under­stand­ing of intract­able problems. Goers’ reckless and inflam­mat­ory rhetoric is dem­agoguery. It should have no place in Australia.
Peter Wertheim is the Executive Director of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.