Preoccupied with the paradox of the co-existence of civilized taste and bestial behavior, the literary critic George Steiner has written much about the conduct of Nazi officers who murdered Jews by day while listening to classical music by night.Many years ago, when Steiner first highlighted this paradox, Jews were widely seen as archetypal victims; at the same time, they were regarded as pre-eminently civilized, “People of the Book.”
It is one of the great ironies of modern history that, in the aftermath of the Nazi effort to eliminate European Jewry, a racially exclusive Jewish state emerged that has shown itself to be capable of monstrous inhumanity.
Yet, despite the mounting evidence of Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people, few Jews are prepared to acknowledge that their collective credentials as civilized human beings are other than exemplary.
Indeed, many think of Jews as possessing, especially by comparison with Arabs, an inordinately well-developed sense of the value of human life — as was illustrated not long ago when the British Jewish actress, Maureen Lipmann, remarked that for Palestinians life is cheap.
It is because of this self-image that the suggestion that Israel is an apartheid state arouses such howls of indignation in Israel and among the Jewish diaspora. The other day, at the London launch of Ben White’s book, “Israeli Apartheid”, which details Israel’s apartheid-style subjugation of the Palestinians, an Israeli couple repeatedly sought to shout the author down, denouncing him as a liar.
White is by no means the first writer to draw a parallel between Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and apartheid South Africa, but nobody has made the case more concisely. Sub-titled “A Beginner’s Guide”, his book is a brisk and lucid summary of key facts, which could be of great value in the worldwide campaign to achieve justice for the Palestinians.
White points out that, for all the differences between Israel and apartheid South Africa, the similarities are unmistakable. In the South Africa of old the legal system “consolidated and enforced dispossession” by securing the “best land control over natural resources for one group at the expense of another,” and exactly the same applies to the Israeli legal system.
What is also true is that the discriminatory laws, commissions of inquiry, spot fines, pass books, police raids, location permits, removal vans, bulldozers etc., that defined South African apartheid now find striking parallels in the humiliations routinely visited on Palestinians.
Consider above all the stark resemblance between the sealed-off, ostensibly autonomous, reservations that were known in South Africa as “Bantustans” and the vicious system of segregation to which Palestinians are subject in the occupied territories. In 1984, Desmond Tutu noted that Bantustans were “arbitrarily carved up” pieces of land with “no territorial integrity or any hope of economic viability” intended to give a “semblance of morality to something that had been described as evil.” Tutu’s account of “fragmented and discontinuous” settlements in “unproductive and marginal” parts of the country with no control over “natural resources or access to territorial waters” could equally be a description of conditions in the West Bank.
None of this is to imply that Israeli apartheid and that formerly practiced in South Africa are indistinguishable.
Unlike Israeli apartheid, the South African version meant the rule of the white minority over an overwhelming black majority. Nor can Israel be accused of practicing South African “petty apartheid”: There are no public lavatories in Israel marked “Jews” and “non-Jews.” Within Israel, moreover, Palestinians enjoy full voting rights and their own political representatives. And yet, as Ben White remarks, in a sense Israeli apartheid is more extreme. For whereas South Africa exploited blacks as cheap labor, Israel was founded on a Zionist project aimed not at making use of Palestinians but at their elimination, their complete disappearance as the prelude to the creation of an all-Jewish state.
The fact is that Zionist thinking has never yet come to terms with the living reality of the Palestinians. This state of denial is by no means uncommon even among Israel’s more erudite apologists. In her new book, “The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot”, the eminent U.S. Jewish historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb, discusses the contribution to the Zionist cause made by the leading British 19th century novelist, George Eliot, while barely acknowledging the existence of the Palestinians, let alone the injustice they have suffered.
Though herself a nonbeliever, George Eliot nursed a passionate attachment to the idea of the Jews putting behind them centuries of persecution and making a triumphant journey to the Holy Land.
In her novel “Daniel Deronda” (1876), the eponymous protagonist, who discovers that he is Jewish, is impelled by forces almost beyond his understanding to migrate from Britain to Palestine — not to escape anti-semitism but to fulfill a proud and unique ethno-religious destiny.
Himmelfarb lauds George Eliot because she saw Judaism as intrinsic to the evolution of modern civilization. “Daniel Deronda”, she writes, enshrined a conception of the Jews and their religion that anticipated the thinking of the Soviet dissident turned Israeli citizen, Natan Sharansky, who evokes Judaism as an identity, a national consciousness, that “gives life meaning beyond life itself.”
“The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot” speaks to the sensibility of Jews like Sharansky whose Zionist zeal has inspired them to exalt their own needs and aspirations, their own being, above everybody else’s. In the minds of such Jews, Palestine remains the geographical entity projected by Zionist propaganda: a “land without people for a people without land.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb attempts to reaffirm Zionism as a noble cause. Ben White by contrast exposes the chasm between the noble idea of Zionism and its increasingly ignoble reality. It is hard after reading their books not to conclude that apartheid was the inescapable outcome of the Zionist enterprise. It is hard not to conclude, too, that the Palestinians are victims of a fantasy, a literary vision of Jewish redemption that was translated into fact with ruthless indifference to the welfare of others.
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