Two items of note on the Guardian comment pages yesterday; two breaths of fresh air in the otherwise noxious atmosphere of Seamus Milne's universe. (Naomi Klein's there too, lest we begin to breathe too easily.) First, the Guardian has chosen to run Carol Gould's disturbing piece about metropolitan anti-Americanism in this country. This is the piece that some bloggers weren't sure about, partly because of its anecdotal character and partly, it seemed to me, on account of its provenance: it was first published in FrontPage magazine, which is edited by chastened New Leftist David Horowitz. Anyhow, it's now there on the comment pages of the Guardian.
But the piece I really wanted to blog about, Benjamin Pogrund's attack on the equation of the state of Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, and of Zionism with racism, is for some reason not available online. (This might have something to do with the fact that Pogrund's copyright is acknowledged at the end of the piece.) Anyhow, it's worth summarising. Pogrund starts by noting that the description of Israel as an "apartheid" state gathered force "in the run-up to the UN anti-racism conference in Durban in August-September 2001 and was given aggressive expression there." He then says that the events of September 11 "pushed the 'new apartheid' campaign to the backburner", but that nevertheless the phrase is now "increasingly heard". It seems to me that the increasing vigour with which this and related phrases are uttered has everything to do with September 11 2001, or at least with the reaction to it among a certain sector of liberal-left opinion. As Norman Geras put it recently, "Something changed, and it happened after 9/11. Only, I think the reasons given in this piece as to why it changed don't exhaust the set. Certain alignments within would-be 'progressive' political culture - ones which I write about here often enough not to have to spell them out on this occasion - have played a crucial part. You now hear and read things in certain quarters which would have been nearly unthinkable even five years ago." And one of the things that we hear is that Israel is an "apartheid state". To apply the term "apartheid", which has a very specific and narrow cultural, historical and political meaning, is, says Pogrund, to "stretch meaning to illogical lengths". In pre-1994 South Africa, Pogrund goes on:
[S]kin colour determined every single person's life. ... In Israel, Arabs are approximately 20% of the population. In theory they have full citizenship rights; in practice they suffer extensive discrimination, ranging from land use, diminished job opportunities and lesser social benefits, to reports of a family ordered off a beach. None of this is acceptable, and particularly in a state that prides itself on its democracy. ... [B]ut it is not remotely the panoply of discrimination enforced by parliamentary legislation. Anyone who says that Israel is apartheid does not appreciate what apartheid was.Indeed. Everything is what it is and not something else.
There is another lie which usually accompanies this one, and it's that "Zionism is racism". This, Pogrund argues, doesn't stand up to scrutiny either.
Israel has a Jewish majority and they have the right to decide how to order the society, including defining citizenship. ... [I]t is ... clearly unfair to give automatic entry to Jews while denying the 'right of return' to Palestinians who fled or were expelled in the wars of 1948 and 1967. This unfairness is a tragic consequence of war, which again is anything but unique to Israel.I think this doesn't go far enough and was reminded when reading Pogrund's piece of something Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in an address to the United Nations in 1975, setting out the United States' objection to a resolution equating Zionism with racism:
Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or -and this is the absolutely crucial fact- anyone who converted to Judaism. Which is to say, in the terms of the International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, adopted by the 20th General Assembly [of the UN], anyone - regardless of 'race, colouor, descent, or national or ethnic origin ...' The State of Israel, which in time was the creation of the Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much as the range of 'racial stocks' from which it has drawn its citizenry. ... [W]hatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be 'a form of racism.'Moynihan's address is collected in The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, edited by Mark Gerson.