We got a chance to dig through some not entirely new emails on the plane ride back from Chicago (or, more precisely, during the two hour delay while sitting on the plane - because, and we quote, there was "a problem with a microchip"). Anyway, David Gerstman gave us the heads up about this post by one of the top South African bloggers. It's an uncompromising - but quite straightforward - takedown of anyone who would suggest that there are salient similarities between Apartheid South Africa and modern day Israel.

Of course there are trivial similarities between any two situations. There are a billion or so flames on Usenet that have the logical structure "Hitler wore pants / You wear pants / Therefore you're Hitler". But the Nazis weren't the Nazis because they wore pants. The Nazis were the Nazis because they created an elaborate bureaucracy to carry out an ideological project of total extermination - when people reference Nazism, that's the part of Nazism that they're referencing. To "make" Nazism into anything else is an act of argumentative dishonesty - of trying to get the "punch" of referencing of Nazism without doing the work of actually justifying what makes the accusation so devastating.

Ditto for apartheid. Apartheid is an elaborate political and ideological system meant to structurally foreclose a race. But Israeli Arab citizens are full citizens of Israel in a way that blacks in South Africa never were. They have proportional representation in the Knesset, they have all the protections and rights granted to citizens, etc. There are Arabs who hold high office in the Israeli political and military echelons. Is there inequality that's tangled up in race/class/gender? Of course there is - as there is in every country. But we don't accused any of those countries of apartheid because they lack what made apartheid so horrible - the legal exclusion based on race.

Not letting Palestinian refugees become Israeli citizens isn't an act of apartheid. It's immigration control. Israel can't be expected to give special privileges to everyone who shows up knocking at the border any more than China can (China been letting in a lot of North Korean refugees lately? Apartheid!) Just because the Palestinian refugees really, really want to destroy Israel - that's not a reason why Israel should be more generous to them than it is to other people who aren't Israeli citizens either.

Israel's policies in the West Bank may be condemnable (we think they're more or less justified, but we recognize that there will be reasonable disagreement even among Zionists). But they're not driven by a legal regime targeting all Arabs. Which means that no matter how horrible it is, it quite simply lacks the very thing that makes apartheid apartheid.

References:
* Soccer Dad
* Part Hate [It's Almost Supernatural]

Previously:
* Israeli-Arab Knesset Member In Canada To Condemn Israeli Apartheid. Read That Again. "Israeli-Arab Knesset Member". "Apartheid".
* Zionist Apartheid Regime Appoints Arab Cabinet Minister... Wait. What?
* Is Jimmy Carter Just An Old-Fashioned Christian Fundamentalist, Anti-Semitic Bigot?