Posted on 06/25/2003 4:39:55 PM PDT by SJackson
The Israeli far Left would not opt out on any notorious analogy in its relentless attempt to disfigure the face of Israel. The more radical Left would go as far as equating the defense policy of Israel to the Nazi brutality and reviling Jewish settlers as Nazis under Israeli mantle. The more moderate circles of the far Left, who still refrain from slipping to such lows as to foul the debate with bloodcurdling analogies between Israel and Nazism, content themselves for the time being with a vile campaign to establish Israel´s international image as an apartheid state.
At any rate, the spokesmen of the far Left are right about the scale of apartheid in Israel; however, they typically turn reality upside down. Israel is indeed plagued with apartheid that strives to perpetuate the inferior status of Jews as second-rate citizens. While the apartheid at state level discriminates against Jewish citizens, at international level, it endeavors to victimize the Jewish nation. The anti-Jewish apartheid, which incorporates circles of the international political world with their Israeli left-wing accessories, feeds on anti-Semitic traditions ingrained in the culture of nations, as well as among Jews.
The domestic apartheid claims that Jewish citizens are not entitled to live in all parts of their homeland and restricts their residence to the Jewish reservation, while citizens descended from Arab immigrants are entitled to settle in all parts of the Jewish homeland. In other words, Arabs can live all over little (pre-‘67) Israel as well as in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha), while Jews are supposed to be compressed into the confines of little Israel. Moreover, the anti-Jewish apartheid also advocates discrimination against the right of Jews to freedom of movement. Thus, the mobility of Jews is likewise restricted to the confines of the Jewish reservation zone, while Arabs can move around the entire Jewish homeland.
The present restrictions on the mobility of Arabs arise from security constraints, as a result of the Palestinian terror campaign. Despite the plague of Arab terrorism, the Arab citizens of Israel reside in Jewish towns and are free to move everywhere without any restraint. Had it not been for the Palestinian terrorism, the Arabs of Yesha could have also resided and moved all around the country, while Jews would have been still subjected to restrictions of residence and mobility for the fear of Arab hostilities. Such conjuncture is effected through the Arab tactics of "peacetime" apartheid, which slyly maintains terror at a dim and measured level. On the one hand, such terror confines the settlement and mobility of Jews, but, on the other hand, does not incur drastic Israeli defense measures that would impose constraints on the Arabs.
In terms of the international-scale apartheid, Jews are defined as the world´s natural victim. In other words, the international champions of apartheid suggest that the Jewish Diaspora experience as the world´s ultimate victim qualifies the Jews as a scapegoat nation in their homeland, too. International apartheid denies the right of Jews to settle even in that tiny sliver of their historical homeland presently called the Greater Land of Israel. In the realm of apartheid, Jews are thus demanded to replace their past Diaspora ghettos with a modern Israeli ghetto within the narrow walls of a congested demographic corridor, "as Jews deserve." As far as the apartheid loyalists are concerned, the profound Jewish bond with the Land of Israel, so ardently preserved throughout the prolonged exile of the Jews, despite the adversity of their fate as the most persecuted nation in human history, bears no significance. Likewise, the partisans of international apartheid ascribe no significance to the astounding historical fact that during the entire period of Jewish exile, no foreign nation has ever ventured to claim national right over the Land of Israel, or any part of it as its own sovereign territory.
In contrast to its denial of the exclusive rights of Jews to their homeland, international apartheid grants the status of a nation to the descendents of Arab immigrants, who under the auspices of the Ottoman and British colonialism were drawn in droves to the Land of Israel following the economic opportunities engendered by the returning Jews. Within decades of return to their homeland, the Jews turned the land of desolation, maladies and destitution into a flourishing land, which attracted numerous immigrants from the neighboring countries. At any rate, international apartheid stops at nothing in its fervent race to undermine the Jewish state. It thus bestows sovereign rights upon that Arab "nation", originally devised as a political instrument against Israel, within the sole homeland of the Jews. The Jews thus bound to run their national life under existential constraints of acute land deficiency, while the Arabs enjoy the benefit of endless territorial resources.
As a typical expression of discrimination on anti-Semitic grounds, international apartheid will not bear in mind to champion the cause of self-determination for the large Arab nation dwelling in France, for the Turkish nation living in Germany or for the Indian nation naturalized in Britain. As far as the apartheid loyalists are concerned, even the Kurds, who constitute a real nation of a unique ethnic, lingual and historical distinction, are not entitled to a state of their own. In sharp contrast to its unmitigated disregard for the national rights of large national minorities, the "virtuous" apartheid supporters insists on their demand that the Jews alone should share their tiny homeland with a fake nation artificially derived from the Arab nation, which benefits from unlimited territorial assets.
The civil and national apartheid against the Jewish inhabitants of Israel is ideologically bolstered by the moral apartheid that readily identifies with the enemies of Israel at the expense of Jewish existential interests. Since the establishment of Israel, its Jewish citizens have been exposed to wars, terror attacks, violence, embargos, ostracism, defamation and incitement by the Arabs. The basic moral rules of human civilization should consequently make it obligatory that every political settlement between Israel and the Arabs compensate the Jews for all deliberate atrocities inflicted on them by the Arabs. But moral apartheid is ridden with paradox and absurdity, whereby Israel is the party required to compensate the Arabs for the plight that the Arabs inflicted on Israel.
Along the same warped lines of twisted morality, the terms "occupation" and "right of return" have been stamped in the worldwide public opinion as bywords symbolizing the moral rights of the Arabs to national sovereignty in Yesha, as well as relocation of Arab refugees into Israel. In other words, moral apartheid unquestioningly accepts the historical point of departure defined by the Arabs from the Moslem conquest of the Land of Israel, while at the same time it ignores the exclusive historical identity between the Jewish nation and the Land of Israel, which left its mark on humanity more than any other historical memory. Moral apartheid stays impervious even to the awesome nature of the unique Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel that endured centuries of agonizing exile. Thus, by every sound moral criterion, the Jews are those entitled to settle their entire historical homeland and to struggle against the powers of occupation that took over the Jewish land. Powers that go as far back as the Islamic invasion and up to the British Mandate, which nurtured the demographic legacy of Islamic colonialism.
The most typical manifestation of anti-Jewish apartheid in Israel is the deprivation of the Jewish right to enter and pray on the Temple Mount. It turns out that the loyalists of apartheid, who demonstrate particular sensitivity to freedom of worship, are not at all disquieted at the revocation of the Jewish right of prayer on the Temple Mount. That the gravest expression of anti-Jewish apartheid is manifested on the Temple Mount is predictable, for the holy mount is a mirror reflecting the Jewish national image, and the course of events on the Temple Mount mirrors the state of Jews and their place among the nations.
The left-wing detractors of Israel, who accuse the Jewish state of an apartheid policy against Arabs, exemplify the moral abyss to which Jews may slide through bad habits of alienation from Jewish morals, even as far as turning the facts of reality upside down. The Left would habitually brandish the banner of Jewish morals, while in fact it refers to liberal Western values that constitute only a small part of the Jewish moral set. The ingrained confusion between Jewish morals and Western moral codes urges the far Left to condemn Israel as an apartheid state that discriminates against Arabs, while in fact Israel and its Jewish citizens are the victims of international apartheid. Unfortunately, not only is anti-Jewish apartheid cultivated by the Left, but it also enjoys the cooperation of Israel´s "right-wing" leadership.
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Dr. Judah (Yehuda) Tzoref, an extra-parliamentary activist for Eretz Israel, is engaged in independent research on theoretical physics.
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