Another Apartheid
Sixty years ago, the State of Israel was founded. During the subsequent Arab-Israeli War, Israel was able to greatly expand its borders beyond those allocated by the UN, and to drive out a large proportion of the Palestinians living within those borders.
This latter was particularly important as the Zionist leaders of the time (I am using 'Zionist', incidentally, to mean someone actively promoting a racially Jewish state within the historic region of Ancient Israel) did not want to go down the apartheid path taken by South Africa - a settler minority lording it over a larger, exploited native majority. But the borders proposed by the UN both failed to meet the Zionists' minimum territorial desires, and would have contained a population which was around 40-45% Arab; with the Arabs said to have the higher birth rate. The Zionists' solution was 'transfer' - moving Arabs out of the Israel in some way. This had been a stated objective for at least 10 years: according to Jewish Agency records (held in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem) in June 1938 Zionist leaders were looking for "maximal transfer" of Arabs out of a future Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion stating: "I support compulsory transfer. I don't see in it anything immoral."
In the event an official policy of compulsory transfer wasn't needed - between the Israeli Defense Forces clearing certain areas of Arab inhabitants (particularly on the Northern Front), and the actions of Jewish terror groups such as Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang, about 80% of the Arab population fled the country. That gave ethnic Jews a clear majority in the new state, a situation which could be maintained through overtly racist immigration policies, such as the Law of Return, and the more recent Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.
In 1967, following the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which changed this population balance. The present population of Israel is 7.28 million, around 20% of them Arab, whilst the West Bank and Gaza Strip have over 4 million Arabs. In addition there are around 4 million registered Palestinian refugees who, under UN resolutions 194 and 3236, have the right to return to their (or their father's/grandfather's/...) homes and properties. So those Zionists who want a pure, or near-pure, Jewish state are therefore back to the original problem - proper democracy would give power to non-Jews. Meanwhile, in Israel itself the old liberal attitudes were fading.
Back in 2002, Desmond Tutu, who knows a thing or two about injustice and apartheid, caused a stir by writing a number of articles (see, for example, here and here) comparing the situation of Palestinians in the occupied territories with that of blacks in apartheid South Africa:
I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
And:
Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the occupied territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
He calls for divestment from Israel:
The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure--in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation. Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies' stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. ... Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than forty US campuses are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.
Inevitably, Tutu was promptly labelled "anti-Semitic" by the so-called 'Jewish lobby' - who presumably don't realise that Palestinians are Semitic too. I don't know who this 'Jewish lobby' really represents - it can hardly be the Jewish voices throughout the world who have spoken out against the brutality of the Israeli regime and its treatment of its neighbours. Whoever it is, they have generally been an effective block on discussion of Israel's behaviour in much of the US and European media. According to Wikipedia, Tutu "has drawn attention to a letter signed by several hundred prominent Jewish South Africans drawing an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies", which ought to have given pause to those who throw the "anti-Semitic" slur around so easily.
There are, of course, significant non-parallels between the Israeli situation and apartheid South Africa - most notably that the minority of Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens do have normal democratic rights within Israel (apart from some aspects of immigration policy). The main true parallel seems to be around the apartheid policy of offloading its black majority into citizenship of "bantustans" as a way of denying them democratic rights in the South African state, whilst still grabbing the best land for the white minority, plus all the paraphernalia of state oppression required to suppress black political rights and divide and control a subject people. For apartheid South Africa, to some extent, and for Israel most emphatically, massive political and economic support from the US help them to do this.
One of the depressing aspects of discussion about Israel and justice is the attitude of the religious right, in both the US and the UK. They claim the Bible gives the Holy Land to the Jewish people unconditionally and without accountability. As so often, I can only assume that they are reading the Bible with their eyes shut. Israelite possession of the Holy Land was conditional on their keeping their side of the bargain: the Torah. Jesus summarised the Torah in two ways: firstly as the Golden Rule, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."; and secondly as the two great commandments, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself".
As Desmond Tutu put it:
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgement.
How have you treated the so-called least among you? What you've outlined
is really my point about religion. If we haven't learned the basics of
treating others the way you want to be treated, then what good is a
religious state? What makes religion the basis for most wars? Because too
many churches are thinking in man's terms instead of the Spiritual terms
that gave birth to the religious.
2008 and the world is still in sad shape.
Actually, Israel is a racially defined state, rather than religious: you
can be Jewish Moslem, or Jewish atheist and still belong (although they are
reputed to make it difficult for Jewish Christians to enter). Nevertheless,
I do agree that supposedly 'religious' states tend to be a problem - they
seem to take nationalist attitudes and then use religion to justify them
and to resist accountability. Religion seems to work better from a position
of political weakness.
Maybe for some of the major skirmishes. But the minor dust ups in
underdeveloped nations often have a religious tinge to their wars. Whether
it's Myanmar or Tibet, tribal skirmishes in Africa, the growth of the
Muslim/Islamic population in Europe, the battle between India and Pakistan,
etc. Man made religion continues to dehumanize people of different faiths
similar to what took place in Biblical times. I don't see the growth in
those institutions that assume theirs is the only way. It's a sickness!
I was thinking about doing a post on this, but it's hopeless - the research
is just too interesting. Did you know that toward the end of the nineteenth
century they had their own equivalent of the Cold War in Europe - complete
with deterrence due to Mutual Assured Destruction (not called that of
course)? Interlocking alliances into two major power blocks meant that war
in Europe would be too awful to contemplate. Except that 40 years later the
military establishments on both sides had not only contemplated it, they'd
decided they could win it "by Christmas". Sounds to me like the US military
under Reagan.