This article from 2021 is one of my favorite pieces of floundering apologia. At no point does it manage to establish any factor to distinguish Israeli apartheid from South African apartheid. The closest it comes is claiming that Israeli apartheid isn’t meant to be permanent
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choosing to apply the apartheid label would seem to question the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state and its continued existence.
This an admission that they don’t consider what’s actually happening to Palestinians to be relevant to whether or not it’s an apartheid state, the “truth” is all about whether or not the accusation is perceived to threaten the existence of the Jewish state.
And it’s worth pointing out that with the other big historical example of an apartheid state, South Africa, when they ended apartheid there, the country continued to exist. South Africa is still there, still a country. The only way Israel can “cease to exist” in this context is if you consider being a theological ethnostate an essential part of the state.
Representing over 20% of Israel’s population, Israeli Arab citizens serve as judges, ambassadors, legislators, journalists, professors, artists and play prominent roles in all aspects of Israeli society. And for the first time, as of June 2021, an Islamist Arab political party is a partner in a governing coalition.
“We can’t be an apartheid state, we’ve got an Arab friend!” Also, there’s something very weasel-wordy about talking about 20% of “Israel” being Arab but not talking about the total population of Arabs in the combined Palestine-Israel region.
My question for Israel is always why does it or any state have a right to exist? If a state is going beyond world laws and customs we decided after WWII that it’s fine to abolish a state and reforge something that doesn’t suck as much shit. There was a second German Reich and then the third Reich that Hitler created… and that was completely dismantled (yes, yes NATO, Paperclip, etc. you know what I mean). Nazi Germany, it was decided, did not have the right to exist. Same for the empire of Japan and fascist Italy.
No country has an absolute “right to exist.” People do. Countries do not. If your country is violating the supreme law of “don’t murder people in other countries or steal their shit” then do not expect people to believe your country should exist anymore. This is simple logic, I think, but Zionists seem to really struggle with it.
My favorite whataboutism (after they get done huffing and puffing about ANTISEMITISM (to which the reply is “so you think ALL Jews are Zionists? That all Jews are a monolith? That is the definition of anti-Semitic rhetoric. That there is a collusion and broad agreement amongst all Jews and that they all think the same way.”)) is “so, what, pfft the US shouldn’t exist?! They did and do more crimes than Israel!” And the dipshits seriously don’t know what to say if you say “yes. I agree. The international community should abolish the United States as a toxic force of death and corruption worldwide.”
I dunno, it’s weird having principles that always apply because I don’t have to make exceptions and excuse the atrocities of the US or Canada or the UK, etc. They’re all “bad” and in a just world would be divided up and not re-constituted until certain conditions were met. But we don’t live in a just world and we’re talking about a country’s right or not to exist. That doesn’t only apply to Israel, as much as the ADL would like to try to twist the focus to be solely on how everyone singles out Israel, it just isn’t true.
Whataboutism? What about deez nuts?
