Kerry's warning to Israel lost in furor over 'apartheid'
Instead of internalizing the warning from US Secretary of State John Kerry about a single-state solution, pro-Israel advocates in the United States and the Israeli right focused instead on his choice of words.
It’s too bad that US Secretary of State John Kerry used the explosive term “apartheid” to warn of the severe implications of burying the two-state solution. It is also too bad that professional Jewish politicos, headed by the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), once again managed to turn the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy into a weapon in the struggle between the two rival parties in the United States.
The term “apartheid” does an injustice to pre-1967 Israel, before the war during which the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip areas were conquered. In those days, Israel did not have racist laws that discriminated against people. There was no political reality in which a despotic minority ruled by force and fascist laws over a majority lacking any political rights or basic civil rights. Then the war came, and its outcome is known.
Instead of dealing with the bad news, Kerry’s critics attack the messenger for the way the tidings were formulated. What would those same “friends of Israel” say if the secretary of state were to make do with the diagnosis that the alternative to the partition of the land into two states is the unification of its populations under the rule of a single state, the State of Israel? Every child realizes that if Israel grants full citizens’ rights to the inhabitants of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, the Jews would become a minority in their own country. On the other hand, if Israel annexes the territories and fails to grant equal rights to the Palestinians, or if it perpetuates the occupation, it will have a hard time taking pride in being a democratic state.
Kerry attempted to ring the same warning bell that many Israelis have been ringing day and night. He didn’t join the Israeli left; he simply repeated the same message that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered five years ago in his 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University. At the time, Netanyahu explained that the two-state solution was the only way to ensure that Israel preserved its Jewish character and democratic nature.
