Don’t fight Apartheid Week: Responding to Haaretz’s Burston

I love Bradley Burston’s writing. He is clever and passionate, and more often than not, he is upset by the same things I am. But I found his post on Apartheid Week deeply misguided, both morally and politically.

Briefly, Burston claims that “Apartheid Week” is both a political failure and a moral abomination, since it is organized by the BDS movement that aims to destroy Israel. Mixing the moral issue – whether Apartheid Week is justified – with the question of effectiveness (is it working?) tends to blur the debate. To make things simple, I won’t address BDS’ and Apartheid Week’s success – I think the jury is still out on this one – and instead talk about the moral position Burston is taking.

Burston writes:

It’s Israeli Apartheid Week. You can tell the truth. About BDS. And about Israel as well. It’s not the robust and vibrant democracy that’s hailed by the right, even as the right works to curb freedoms. It is a troubled democracy, a compromised democracy, under threat from within, under threat from its own government, eroded by war and internal strife and external threat and the human and moral costs of the religion of manifest destiny.

I could agree with almost everything Burston wrote, if his post wasn’t about the Palestinian issue. When it comes to the question of Palestinians rights, Israel isn’t a democracy. There isn’t a lot to debate here.

The Palestinian population under Israeli sovereignty is divided into at least three groups: more than one million citizens, 300,000 residents (in East Jerusalem) with selective rights and 2.5 million without any rights, living in the West Bank. Some people include Gaza in this picture as well – but this is a different debate. Regardless, most Palestinians are not part of the Israeli democratic game. They are also unable to work as a collective, because each sub-group has its own set of tools and problems.

From the Palestinian perspective, Israeli democracy is all but meaningless. When non-citizens fight for their rights, they do it outside the democratic game, because they don’t have any other option. It is in this context that we should examine Palestinian strategic and tactical choices, such as the BDS or Apartheid Week.

It might all seem very banal, but it’s not. Here is an example that might illustrate this point: Suppose the Israeli public decides, with an absolute majority, not to ever give Palestinians equal rights. Should the international community, or any solidarity activist, respect this decision just because it was made in a democratic way? Of course not. Jews debating among themselves what to do with the Palestinians under their control have nothing to do with democracy; it’s a case more similar to the South African apartheid or to the segregation in the American South – an example Burston himself uses.

Again, it’s not about the fact that Palestinians are not independent, or even the issue of the occupied land. There are people who think that the Basques are under Spanish occupation as well, or that the Kurds should have their independence from Turkey. But in all those cases, the occupied nation was incorporated into the occupying country, and at least in theory, has equal rights. This is not the case in Israel – the Palestinians are both under our control and outside our system. They don’t see hope in democracy because they are not part of it, and they don’t need to respect it.

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Burston goes on to recognize “a change” happening in the Israeli debate. After a long, undemocratic push by the right, he sees signs of hope:

It’s Israeli Apartheid Week. You can tell the truth. There is something in the air here, something distinctly unfamiliar. Something good. A whiff of democracy. A dim horizon of light. The stirrings of hope. And all from the most unlikely of places.

This week alone, in an extraordinary expression of the power of non-violence, a 68-day hunger strike by one jailed Palestinian forced Israelis, for the first time, to truly face and begin to debate the carefully hidden practice of administrative detention, imprisoning Palestinians without trial, criminal indictment or other due process. This week, under threat of a possible High Court order, and with an international media spotlight on the case, officials struck a deal under which the prisoner, Khader Adnan, will be freed in April.

This was a week in which Israeli society as a whole began to re-examine itself. In the Prime Minister’s Office, the unthinkable occurred: an untouchable, Netanyahu-bosom, backroom boss actually resigned in response to harassment allegations brought by colleagues. In Tel Aviv, the decades-old ban on public transportation on the Sabbath was overturned, in what may prove to be a step of more symbolism than substance – but this in a country where symbol be more weighty by far than substance.

And, in a move that could have profound implications for Israeli democracy, the High Court quashed the law which exempts the ultra-Orthodox from universal military service…

I don’t share Burston’s optimism, but this is besides the point. What’s important is that he is interpreting internal developments within Jewish society as something related to the status of Palestinians, and as a direct consequence, with their desired political behavior.

To be clear, what many – including myself – perceive as undemocratic developments happening recently in Israel are an internal issue of the Jewish public (and perhaps the Palestinian citizens). They have nothing to do directly with the Palestinians non-citizens, because they weren’t part of democracy to begin with. More than anything, we are experiencing a power struggle  in Jewish society between two elites, in which “protecting democracy” serves as the battle cry for one side, and nationalism is the driving force for the other. In this game, Burston and me are on the same side – but we should be aware that by “fighting for democracy” we are protecting our own rights, and not the Palestinians’.

The Palestinians are addressing their rights through Apartheid Week. The examples Burston cites above have nothing to do with the Palestinians. Note that even the case of Khader Adnan is mentioned in the context of Jews debating “the carefully hidden practice of administrative detention.” The practice was only hidden to some Israelis. From Adnan’s point of view, he couldn’t care less about the Jewish “debate” over administrative arrests. He simply wanted to get himself, and other prisoners, free from this imprisonment without due process.

In other words, “the battle over Israeli democracy” is not about the occupation. At best, it’s about the ability of Jews to discuss the occupation. Like many Jewish Israelis, Burston is mixing the two. And while there are some positive developments regarding the democracy issue, there are absolutely none regarding the occupation, as even “dovish” parties today prefer to deal with other issues. There is no end in sight. We are getting further away from a two-state solution with each passing day, and nowhere near a different kind of solution. The Israeli strategic choice is the status quo.

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Here comes the most problematic part of the text, when Burston compares Israeli occupation to American segregation, but draws the wrong conclusions:

In the democracy that was the United States in the year 1840, there were those who said that slavery was essential, irreversible, eternal, God’s will. And that people of color and women of all races should not, and therefore would not, be granted the freedoms and rights of full citizenship, that the only good Native American was a dead one.

(…)

All Americans deserve democracy and self-determination. So do both of the native peoples of the Holy Land, Palestinians and Israelis alike. Just as in 1840 America, in this Holy Land there are people working on both sides, quietly, continually, toward that goal. Not freedom for one people at the expense of the other, but freedom and independence for both.

If anything, this analogy should serve as support for Apartheid Week. If the world in 1840 was anything like today’s, wouldn’t it be any honest person’s duty to oppose segregation by all means necessary? If slavery existed in America today, wouldn’t we all have supported “Alabama Apartheid Week” on our campuses? One should of course remember that slavery didn’t end by “people working on both sides, quietly, continually, toward that goal,” but with a national disaster. I would take BDS any day of the week if the alternative is the American Civil War.

Also, I really hope that Burston’s message for the Palestinians was not that they need to wait another 115 years to get equal rights under the Israeli law, and an extra fifty for some equal opportunities. The Israeli occupation will soon celebrate its 45th birthday. That’s a long time as it is. Apartheid legislation in South Africa officially began in 1950 and ended after four decades. We already left this milestone behind us. Why shouldn’t the Palestinians have their rights today? Isn’t this what the word “rights” is all about?

For us Jews, Israel still is a democracy, and we should use the opportunities it gives us to oppose the occupation. Often, things we see on the Palestinian side will make us uncomfortable, but we should remember that Palestinians are living in different political circumstances, whether it is in Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza, or the diaspora. We can show solidarity when we find it suiting, and avoid it on other occasions. But as a rule, I think Israeli progressives – and no doubt Burston is one – should be very careful when criticizing Palestinian tactics of opposition to our occupation, especially when those are non-violent ones.

Don’t fight Apartheid Week: Responding to Haaretz's Burston