Last week the Human Rights Watch published a 213-page report accusing Israel of apartheid. “Visualizing Palestine”--the product of two-years and tens of millions of dollars by this U.S.-based NGO--claimed that the Israeli government promotes policies that “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.” While the Israeli government rejected the report as “fictional claims” by a group with a “longstanding anti-Israeli agenda,” the Palestinian government officials praised the report as highlighting Israel’s “colonial occupation” and “racist” policies.
For a long time, "apartheid" has been synonymous with South Africa’s racist, oppressive, and murderous system that the country’s white minority exerted on its black majority. However, it’s clear to most that the situation in Israel and South Africa are extremely different. For example, Israeli Arabs are guaranteed citizenship and participate actively in Israel’s government. Khulood Badawi, who helped write "Visualizing Palestine", is in fact an Israeli Arab who votes in Israeli elections (she was also fired from the UN for distributing false images). Irwin Cotler, a retired Canadian Justice Minister and legal expert, fought against South African apartheid directly and was arrested for speaking Nelson Mandela’s name in public. He called this report “absurd” and “demeaning” to the “real authentic struggle against real apartheid.” Though the report directly linked the situations in South Africa and Israel, the Human Rights Council skirted the accusation’s inaccuracy by writing an entirely new definition of apartheid.
It’s clear that the term itself isn’t what’s important here but rather the more pernicious public relations battlefield. In the report, the Human Rights Watch depicts Israelis as having lighter skin/hair in a light background and the Palestinians as having dark skin in a contrasting background.
This outraged many Jews, who pointed out that the majority of Israelis are Sephardic (North African, Spanish, Middle Eastern) and have dark skin/hair themselves. Through the inaccurate comparisons to South Africa’s white vs. black oppression and these racial caricatures, it appears that the Human Rights Council seeks to thrust the history of American racial oppression onto Israel/Palestine. Incorrectly painting the issue as white vs. black to deceive America (Israel’s staunchest ally).
In response to the report, Human Rights Watch's founder, Robert Bernstein, said that the body had “lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields.” In other words, this ideological warfare distracts from the legitimate issue of settlements and occupation of the West Bank, which is debatable under international law (parts of the West Bank have often unsuccessfully been offered as part of a two-state solution, debates over Israeli safety and Palestinian wellbeing persist today).
In context, this HRW report follows the steps of the U.N., which has been accusing Israel of apartheid for many years. In fact, the U.N. similarly has allowed some of the most bigoted and oppressive countries to join rights committees. Eritrea, China, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Somalia, are on the Human Rights Council. Iran is on the Commission on Status of Women. The result? The Human Rights Council condemnations 2006-2019:
UNHRC Condemnations, 2006-2019:
North Korea 12 Zimbabwe 0 Myanmar 25 Venezuela 1 Pakistan 0
Somalia 0 Belarus 9 Eritrea 9 Israel 85 Turkey 0
Sudan 0 Syria 32 China 0 Saudi 0 Qatar 0
Iran 9 Iraq 0 South Sudan 5 DR Congo 0 Nicaragua 1
Sri Lanka 3 Lebanon 0 Sweden 0 Burundi 0 Belgium 0
Norway 0 Mexico 0 Algeria 0 Hamas 0 Ireland 0
France 0 Russia 0 Egypt 0 Spain 0 Libya 1 UK 0
As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism (which is widely praised) says, “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Well, the above data demonstrate that antisemitism, one of the world’s oldest forms of racism, is well and healthy today (though Jews are not a race, for thousands of years people such as Hitler have treated them as such). It plagues the United States, our colleges, our youth, as Jews once again become the boggart, the Harry Potter creature that takes the shape of whatever someone fears. Too white, not white enough, capitalist, communist, anti-christian, anti-muslim, etc. Though Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a champion of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights (quite the opposite in Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries), there are obviously problems that need to be addressed. But when Israel is attacked far more than others and most often inaccurately, then it’s difficult to address these problems in the public sphere.
The American Defamation League (an outspoken opponent of antisemitism), however, criticized a U.S. decision to declare such human rights groups--Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam--antisemitic. Though the ADL acknowledges their antisemitism, it believes that the decision will politicize the fight against antisemitism, and that such groups are “crucial to ensuring robust civil society and democratic protections worldwide.”
Questions:
- How should the U.S. involve itself in problems of bigotry abroad? And in the human rights bodies--in which the U.S. is a member--that so often act counterproductively to human rights (U.N., HRW, etc.)
How can we fight against misinformation campaigns that seek to augment bigotry and polarize people?
How can we learn accurately about complex issues such as conflicts in the Middle East?
https://visualizingpalestine.org/
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/990993903/israel-accused-of-apartheid-crimes-by-human-rights-watch
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/27/israel-committing-crime-apartheid-human-rights-watch
https://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-slams-us-effort-to-declare-rights-groups-anti-semitic/
2 comments:
Misinformation has always been a problem, and is becoming even worse today. While there's no absolute solution to ending the spread of bigotry through misinformation, good journalism and coverage of these topics from large reputable news sources is the best way to combat misinformation, or at least provide awareness about the misinformation.
The US should always deal with bigotry abroad, but we should definitely choose our battles. We as a nation need to be able to stop things from happening in other countries to prevent things that are not democratic from spreading. One way we can stop the misinformation from spreading in other countries and ours, is to stop giving the media so much power by feeding into their crap, and we need to rid our country of crooked politicians, all of them lol. The only way to learn accurately about complex issues in the Middle East is to be open minded, and actually be there to help solve their problems. We need to be apart of foreign affairs and help those who need it.
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