Katie Halper, the leftist and commentator, wrote earlier this month for The Daily Beast about being “cancelled” from her paintings on The Hill TV’s YouTube show, Rising, for criticizing Israel. It is a respectable, almost heroic statement: a journalist who loses her task of telling the fact and the state to the bad guys.
I don’t know what happened on stage in Rising, and I don’t write for Halper’s former bosses. Regardless, the comment she was given was fired, which defended Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s characterization of Israel as an apartheid state, temporarily and temporarily. He played freely with the facts and was, in the end, simply wrong.
Israel is an “apartheid state. ” According to Merriam-Webster, apartheid is “racial segregation” and more particularly “a long-standing policy of segregation and political, social and economic discrimination against the non-white majority in the Republic of South Africa. “
This definition is easy to dissolve: Israel has no racial segregation imposed by law. This is a simple fact to check.
There are Arab citizens – citizens with full and equivalent rights – in the Israeli parliament, in the Knesset, as well as in the Israeli judicial system, the Supreme Court added. There are Arab doctors, teachers, policemen, teachers and countless other professions, running back and forth with Jews. Not all of them are Palestinians, and it is not up to Halper (or anyone else) to delineate their national identity. And there are many Druze and Bedouins, who are part of the Arab population. in Israel, they serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Calling Israel an apartheid state also solves a confusing problem: it makes no difference between the State of Israel within the Green Line, Israel’s eastern border before the 1967 Six-Day War, and the occupied West Bank.
Make no mistake, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of the Gaza Strip is a war crime that has lasted for decades and continues, with ethnic segregation and no equivalent cover under the law. But it is internal to the State of Israel.
Claiming that this is the case, and considering everything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as an unmarried entity, is not only false, but also plays into the hands of the Israeli right and Jewish settlers, who insist that the West Bank is (and will be) part of “Greater Israel. “I’m not a reader of ideas, but I’m convinced that’s not what Halper or Tlaib have in mind with their criticism of Israel.
At this point, I will have to make it clear that I am not an apologist for the Israeli government or for the violence it has inflicted on the Palestinian people.
I spent more than two years leaking classified documents that revealed some of Israel’s misdeeds in the West Bank.
No one can say that I do not fight for Palestinian independence, and no one can accuse me of not advocating, at the cost of my own freedom, an early end to the Israeli profession of the Palestinian territories. And I am lucky and proud to work for a media outlet, Haaretz, which advocates daily – in Israel – to finish the race, both in its news policy and in its opinion sections.
Yes, there is discrimination and racism against Arabs in Israel. The owners are reluctant to rent their apartments to Arab students; Unfortunately, “mixed” relations remain debatable and widely disapproved; and a Knesset member who proudly threatens to expel Arab citizens after the upcoming elections is increasingly popular, most commonly among young voters. And they deserve strong and unequivocal condemnation. But even taken collectively, they do not correspond to apartheid.
What is more wrong to call Israel a component state of Heidism, besides being inaccurate, is the damage being done to imaginable cooperation with other people in Israel who are on its side and want to end the occupation. When it makes everyone part of the problem, we struggle to be part of the solution, either because we don’t feel welcome or because we are explicitly told so.
There are many other people in Israel who advocate the two-state solution, who fight racism and need to live a just, non-violent life. Let us not be complicit in a crime that is not actually being committed. Let us concentrate on who commits it.
Facts matter and matter.
Halper, Tlaib and pro-Palestinian advocates around the world are entitled to their opinion. They can and should defend the reasons they have. But distorting facts and distorting the meaning of words is not the solution.
Anat Kamm is the deputy editor-in-chief of Haaretz’s opinion section.