Parsing “Apartheid”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Washington behemoth famous and notorious for its clout on Capitol Hill, prefers to work behind the scenes. Sure, once a year they throw a giant party in the Washington Convention Center that over half of Congress regularly attends along with a press contingent worthy of the Olympics. But their motto is that they have no enemies in Washington, only friends and potential friends. So when a recording leaked of Secretary of State John Kerry warning that Israel risked becoming an apartheid state if a two-state solution is not reached soon, AIPAC’s swift and forceful denunciation showed how much power the label “apartheid” has. But what AIPAC’s statement failed to recognize, and what other knee-jerk defenders of Israel also seem to ignore, is that Kerry wasn’t playing the role of an anti-Zionist BDS-supporter who thinks Israel can do no right. On the contrary: when someone like John Kerry warns that Israel risks international isolation and the possibility of becoming an apartheid state if the status quo continues, Zionists would be wise to heed the advice and do everything in their power to prevent the worst case scenario from becoming fact.
Kerry’s comments, which came at a closed-door meeting of a trade-focused NGO and were first published by The Daily Beast, were much more nuanced than his detractors, including AIPAC, suggest:
“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative, because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state. Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”
Israeli leaders have for years pointed to the two-state solution as the only possible way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kerry pondered aloud what would happen if such a solution can not be reached, a definite possibility after the latest set of failed peace negotiations, and he came to a conclusion that more American supporters of Israel should start to consider. If there is no Palestinian state, then Palestinians continue living under a combination of Palestinian autonomous rule (Area A and part of Area B in the West Bank) and Israeli military rule (Area C and part of B). But recently, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has publicly considered what would certainly be his nuclear option: the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority and the transfer of control of the entire West Bank to the Israelis. Essentially, it would force Israel to annex the West Bank and take responsibility for the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Overnight, Israel would become responsible for everything from education to healthcare to police for roughly three million Palestinians currently living in Area A.
Despite the bellicosity wafting over from the Israeli far-right, one would hope that the usually pragmatic Netanyahu would understand the complete impossibility of Israel taking control over Area A. Because then Israeli apartheid would be fact, not slander. Israel would be administering inadequate services to a population that lacks any other citizenship while restricting its freedom of movement and ability to participate in the democratic process. They would be, in every sense of the phrase, second-class citizens.
But that state of affairs doesn’t exist right now. The PA, despite its threats, will not disappear into the night- it receives too much foreign aid and provides too many jobs to Palestinians that its dissolution would be disastrous not only for Israel, but even more so for the Palestinian population of the West Bank. The U.S. State Department immediately condemned even the suggestion that such drastic measures would be taken. Indeed, it would set back any semblance of a peace process to pre-Oslo days, over twenty years ago.
AIPAC surely knows all of this- if not their members then at least their professional staff. So how can it get away with condemning Kerry for the use of the word “apartheid”? Because for AIPAC, the occupation of the West Bank doesn’t exist. They speak of a multi-cultural, tolerant, cosmopolitan, democratic Israel that does exist- but only on one side of the security barrier. AIPAC and most Zionists would support a two-state solution- it has long been AIPAC’s stated policy. For them, the idea that Israel of the pre-1967 lines (with land swaps, of course) is a democratic bastion of stability in an ever- and increasingly tumultuous region remains a matter of fact. But it is impossible to ignore that lurking on the other side of the green line is a reality that makes Israel’s enemies compare it to Bantustan-era South Africa and makes its friends desperately warn of the consequences of further settlements and a lack of a permanent peace deal.
Israeli and American Zionists cannot allow their rigidity to become rigor mortis. By not listening to their friends- and indeed, John Kerry is such a friend- they risk falling deeper into both the traps their enemies have set and those that they have unwittingly set for themselves. John Kerry is telling a chain-smoker to quit smoking before he gets cancer. Israel doesn’t have the cancer of apartheid yet, but to borrow an anti-smoking slogan, there has never been a better time to quit.