Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo
A Palestinian demonstrator holds portraits of late South African leader Nelson Mandela and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as he stands in front of an Israeli soldier during a demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier, in the West Bank village of Bilin, December 2013.
On February 1, Amnesty International released a 278-page report, boasting 1,559 footnotes, accusing Israel of the “crime of apartheid.” It followed a report published in 2021 by the New York–based Human Rights Watch (213 pages, 866 footnotes), and the much shorter, unfootnoted ones by the Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem, based in Jerusalem (also in 2021), and the Tel Aviv–based Yesh Din from 2020. There is a great deal to argue about in these reports, including the truths they contain (or do not) and the way they use the word “apartheid.”
I do not plan to try to adjudicate the argument here, but I do need to point out that while the new Amnesty International report has been extensively commented upon by the Israeli government, the U.S. government, “pro-Israel” groups, “pro-peace” groups, “pro-Palestinian” groups, and other human rights organizations, if you get your news from The New York Times exclusively, you would be entirely ignorant of its existence. Not a word about the report has appeared—not even a Bret Stephens denunciation! I was so shocked by this silence that—intrepid reporter that I am—I emailed both the Times international editor, Michael Slackman, and Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, to ask about this weird decision. I received no response.
This is amazing. After all, The Times is not only America’s paper of record, it is also the hometown paper of America’s (secular) Jews. (“I love the Times like it was my child or my parent,” explains Miriam Nessler in Paul Rudnick’s 2020 play Coastal Elites. “On the census, when they ask for religion, I don’t put Jewish, I put The New York Times.”) When former Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren took the job as editor of the Forward in 2019, she told Ben Smith—a Forward alumnus—that she hoped to make it the “Jewish New York Times.” His reply: “But The New York Times is already the Jewish New York Times.”
Former Israeli government spokesman Zev Chafets once explained that within the Israeli government attention was paid to the Times correspondent first, with whoever was the U.S. ambassador at the time following closely behind. The paper had “primacy’’ because “if it was in the Times it was automatically going to be everywhere else.’’ (You will have to read my book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, when it comes out this fall, if you want sources for those quotes.)
Because the Amnesty report was circulated before it was publicly released, Israel and its allies in the U.S. were able to get a jump on it. Israel initially tried to get Amnesty not to publish it, because it was, allegedly, “false, biased, and antisemitic.” Its foreign ministry issued a statement insisting Amnesty was “just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts,” and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.” The Israelis also insisted that Amnesty was endangering Jews all over the world. The Anti-Defamation League echoed this and said the report “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism around the world.”
An extremely rare joint statement was issued by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, AIPAC, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, and B’nai B’rith International calling the report an “unbalanced, inaccurate, and incomplete review” that “inexplicably focuses on one aim: to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish and democratic State of Israel.” As to our government, State Department spokesman Ned Price declared, “We reject the view that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid.”
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, found the report quite compelling, finding it to be “a detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and attempted erasure that the Palestinian people have endured since the Nakba.” And 14 Israeli human rights organizations—both Jewish and Arab—while not endorsing the details of the report itself, condemned the attacks on Amnesty, also in a rare joint signed statement. “Many of the most pre-eminent scholars of Jewish life, history and persecution have warned that the struggle against antisemitism in the world is being weakened by the unbearable, inaccurate and instrumentalized use to which the antisemitism accusation is lodged for political ends, in order to avoid debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards the Palestinians.” Caught in the middle were liberal Jewish groups that treat Israel’s actions critically, but see the word “apartheid” as political poison. This was the gist of the statements I saw from J Street, Ameinu, T’ruah, Americans for Peace Now, New York Jewish Agenda, and many others.
A few points:
1) The debate in the U.S. about Israel and “apartheid” is almost always a game of whataboutism that leads directly to a discussion of whether Israel is, or is not, South Africa. Each of these reports, including Amnesty’s, ties the word “apartheid” to its definition in the 1988 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, which reads: “inhumane acts” undertaken “in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” But almost all anyone ever hears or talks about when the word is used in the context of Israeli policy is “South Africa.”
2) But the South African example is pretty much the entire argument of the BDS movement when you ask its supporters just how they expect Israeli Jews to turn their country over to their hated enemies, as if including such existential national repurposing is an iron rule of declared international boycotts, regardless of the vast differences between the two. You can see its power in this piece co-authored by one of the movement’s founders. Israel’s hard-line defenders, on the other hand, almost always insist that to even bring up the apartheid charge—even when tied to the ICC definition rather than the South African example—makes one an antisemite (oh, and by the way, the Arabs are worse).
3) The very same people who insist that it’s antisemitic to use the word “apartheid” for Israel insist that it is also antisemitic for people to boycott products from the West Bank, because the West Bank is part of Israel—which, ironically, confirms the allegation of apartheid, because the West Bank is obviously run on the basis of discrimination against the population based on their nationality.
4) In Israel, the word “apartheid” is not at all the taboo it is here. Back in 2018, Caroline Morganti wrote in Haaretz that that newspaper’s editorial board had already compared current Israeli policy in the West Bank to apartheid at least 13 times since 2006. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken wrote an article called “Apartheid,” and so did many others. In Yedioth Ahronoth, former Cabinet minister Yossi Paritzky wrote an op-ed, “Our Apartheid State.” Back in 2008, former Cabinet minister Yossi Sarid wrote, “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck—it is apartheid.” And former education minister and Israel Prize laureate Shulamit Aloni said that Israel “practices a distinct and even violent form of apartheid against the native Palestinian population in the West Bank.”
Centrist and even right-wing Israeli politicians have also used the phrase, and many have used the term as a warning to Israel to change its ways. The list includes: Shin Bet directors Yuval Diskin and Ami Ayalon; former prime ministers Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Yitzhak Rabin; Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni. Morganti notes, “Even Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud), known for her support for annexing the West Bank and desire to see an Israeli flag over the Temple Mount, said in 2013, ‘Continuation of the status quo … [and] over time, the State of Israel will truly become an apartheid state.’” And in December of last year, Israel’s most famous living writer, David Grossman, said, “Maybe it should no longer be called an ‘occupation,’ but there are much harsher names, like ‘apartheid,’ for example.”
Odds and Ends
My friend Todd Gitlin died this past week. Here is the appreciation I wrote of both his friendship and his contribution to American culture, politics, and intellectual life.
I would not call Jason Epstein, who also died last week, a “friend.” But he was a great man—and his interest in my work was my ticket to getting an agent and then my first book contract back in 1989, even though I did not end up signing with him at Random House, though I probably should have. (I picked the wrong agent, alas.) Whatever. Even without having edited yours truly, his contributions to American literary culture are so monumental as to resist measurement.
Wednesday was apparently National Bagels and Lox Day: I have strong mixed feelings, both positive and negative, about Noam Chomsky, but if you were looking for more reasons to distrust him, there’s this: According to the author Maya Arad, at MIT, if you met Chomsky in the afternoon, “he would take out some frozen bagel he’d brought from home and put it on the radiator to thaw, and then fill it with some processed cheese, and have some mass-produced kind of cookie for dessert. And it would simply make me sad.”
We are a bit long again today, but here is some wonderful stuff from Austin City Limits’ recent awards ceremony; see especially the part honoring Lucinda Williams. And here is an amazing ACL lineup from a previous awards ceremony, doing “Not Fade Away,” marred only by the undeserved musical prominence of Jeff Bridges amidst all this genuine musical talent. Finally, here is 2:27 of loveliness from Linda Ronstadt circa 1967.
