Anti-semitism, apartheid, and sensitivity in talking about Israel

John Kerry got in trouble. His crime, as Israeli columnist Noam Sheifaz put it, was “speculating that theoretically, in the distant future, Israel could do something bad.” Specifically, he said that unless a two-state solution can be brokered between Israel and Palestine, Israel will either end up with a democratic society without a Jewish majority or an apartheid state in which Palestinians don’t have equal rights. The problem was that he said the word apartheid. And the right-wing pundits have pounced, calling him an anti-Semite and saying that he should resign as secretary of state. So what’s with these words “apartheid” and “anti-Semite”? Is it anti-Semitic (racist against Jewish people) to say anything about Israel that isn’t cut-and-pasted from the Israeli lobby’s talking points? I wanted to share some perspective that I gained after a conversation with a rabbi friend that began very heated but ended well.

On Holy Saturday this year, the night before Easter, we held a Taize service to commemorate the day that Jesus spends in the grave. As part of this service, we read some psalms and other scripture passages that expressed anger and frustration with God for all that is not right in the world. One of the psalms we read was Psalm 137, a psalm written by Israelite captives in Babylon mourning their exile. Here is the second stanza:

How could we sing the Lord’s song

in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

above my highest joy.

As I’ve pondered this psalm and the relationship that Jewish people have to their homeland Israel, it’s occurred to me that I don’t have any idea what that’s like. I don’t write songs like that about Boston, the city where I was born, or Houston, the city where I spent my childhood, or Durham, the city where I spent my adolescence. I wrote a few days ago about the way that white people have historically been defined as a people without specificity. That is our privilege. White people don’t need to have a homeland, because we are at home everywhere. Jews are not. That’s why it’s unjust for a privileged white Gentile like me to make the snarky point that it’s inherently racist for Jews to want their own homeland, even if trying to ensure a Jewish majority in the population of Israel causes the racist treatment of Palestinians.

If someone were to tell me that America sucks, I wouldn’t be offended at all. If someone were to point out to me all the evil imperialist things that white people have done throughout history, that wouldn’t bother me either. I talk about these things all the time. So when Jewish people are defensive in contesting reports of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, I don’t understand because I’m not defensive about other people hating on America or white people. But that’s part of my privilege talking. I don’t know what it’s like to see the dream of my ancestors fulfilled before my eyes immediately on the heels of the greatest injustice in world history that almost wiped my people out and then to watch this dream face constant physical and ideological bombardment for all of its existence.

When we say the word “apartheid,” the word certainly has a “technical” meaning, but it also involves making a particular historical analogy to South Africa. To be fair, South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu is not uncomfortable making that analogy: “I go and I visit the Holy Land and I see things that are a mirror image of the sort of things that I experienced under the apartheid.” I’m not going to say that Desmond Tutu doesn’t have the right to make that comparison. But I don’t.

Because the Israelis are not the “white people” the same way that the British and Boers were in South Africa. Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade are not the same as Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. There really were suicide bombers who blew up buses and discos in the not-too-distant past a little more than a decade ago. I’m sure there have been plenty of cynical ulterior motives at play in the logistics of laying out Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank which purportedly serves the purpose of protecting Israel from terrorism. I don’t think the wall should exist and I’ve protested against it. But there is a big difference between the actual security concerns posed by the ANC to the South African regime and those posed by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups to the Israeli government.

So even if “apartheid” has a technical meaning, the analogy it evokes is unfair. Israel is not a straightforward colonial state like the 19th century colonies in the Global South set up by the European empires. It is basically a refugee camp set up by the British Empire on land that was already inhabited as their penance for complicity in the near extermination of the Jewish race. The conflict between the Jews and Palestinians is not analogous to the conflicts of the past several centuries between white colonists and dark natives. It is more analogous to a conflict between refugees and indigenous people, like if Central American immigrants and native Navajo in Arizona got into a quarrel over something. Except that the Jews are also originally from Israel, which is why no analogy really works.

Furthermore, the power that Israel has with the United States government isn’t really their own power. The only reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have the US government wrapped around his pinky is because the right-wing culture warriors are trying to poach Jewish votes away from the Democratic Party while simultaneously playing to their psycho Armageddonist evangelical base who want to ramp up the conflict in the Holy Land so Jesus will come back. Thus the Democrats are paranoid about proving how zealously uncritical of Israel they are and the Republicans are constantly looking for opportunities to one-up the Democrats in their zeal to be Zionists of the year. But that isn’t because Netanyahu or Jewish people have any real power with the US government; they’re just props in somebody else’s game.

Now none of this is to say that it’s all right for Israeli settlers to burn Palestinian olive orchards. Or for Israeli jets to bomb Gaza with white phosphorus shells. Or for Palestinians to get their houses bulldozed randomly with a few hours’ notice to make way for a new settlement. Or that Israel should be entitled to $3.1 billion in annual military aid from the US with no accountability whatsoever. And it doesn’t make me an anti-Semite if I can’t come up with four bad things that Palestinians did and list them right here so that everything is perfectly “balanced” and completely canceled out, because injustice doesn’t cancel out.

But I don’t think it’s a disingenuous Orwellian move for Jewish people to take offense at the use of the word “apartheid” in talking about Israel. And I’m willing to change my vocabulary.