Is this not apartheid?

By Saree Makdisi

Former President Jimmy Carter has come under sustained attack for having dared to use the term "apartheid" to describe Israel's policies in the West Bank. However, not one of Carter's critics has offered a convincing argument to justify the vehemence of the outcry, much less to refute his central claim that Israel bestows rights on Jewish residents settling illegally on Palestinian land while denying the same rights to indigenous Palestinians.

Consider the evidence: Israel maintains two separate road networks in the West Bank — one for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers, one for Palestinian natives. Is that not apartheid? Palestinians are not allowed to drive their own cars in much of the West Bank; their public transportation is frequently interrupted or blocked altogether by a grid of Israeli army checkpoints — but Jewish settlers come and go freely in their own cars. Is that not apartheid?

A system of closures and curfews has strangled the Palestinian economy in the West Bank — but none of its provisions apply to the Jewish settlements there. Is that not apartheid?

Whole sectors of the West Bank, classified as "closed military areas," are off limits to Palestinians, including Palestinians who own land there — but foreigners to whom Israel's "Law of Return" applies (that is, anyone Jewish from anywhere in the world) can access them without hindrance. Is that not apartheid?

The one glaring error in Carter's book is his insistence that the term "apartheid" does not apply to Israel, where, he says, Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are given the same treatment under the law. That is not true.

Israel loudly proclaims itself to be the state of the Jewish people rather than the state of its actual citizens, one-fifth of whom are Palestinian Arabs. According to Israel's high court, "there is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people." Non-Jewish citizens are left in, at best, an anomalous situation.

Israeli law offers different privileges to Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The amended nationality law, for example, prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel married to Palestinians from the occupied territories from living together in Israel.

A similar law, passed at the peak of apartheid in South Africa, was overturned by that country's Supreme Court as a violation of the right to a family. Israel's high court upheld its law just last year. In fact, the South African version of institutionalized discrimination was never as elaborate as its Israeli counterpart — nor did it have such a vocal chorus of defenders among otherwise liberal Americans.

Many of Carter's critics would not tolerate such glaring injustice in the United States. Why do they condone the naked racism that Israel practices? Perhaps because they are all too aware that they are defending the indefensible, that the emperor they keep trying to cover up really has no clothes. There is a limit, however, to how long such a cover-up can go on. And the main lesson of Carter's book is that we have finally reached that limit.

Makdisi is professor of English and comparative literature. A longer version of this article recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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