Twenty years ago, after watching a live transmission of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, I wrote an editorial in which I speculated on what might have been going through Yasser Arafat’s mind as he witnessed the ceremony.
I imagined him wishing that the path to a Palestinian state could be as smooth and relatively painless as the final phase of South Africa’s transition to an inclusive democracy.
My editor disagreed and insisted on dispensing with that portion of the editorial. He felt I had got carried away by my enthusiasm for Mandela and that the parallels were spurious. After all, the Oslo accords were less than a year old and he thought a two-state solution would manifest itself in due course.
I wished he was right, but reserved my right to skepticism. The Oslo process provided grounds for hope, but it was also open to interpretation as a means of entrenching the status quo.
The irrepressible archbishop Desmond Tutu was among the first public figures to articulate his impression of parallels between Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians and pre-enlightenment South Africa’s denigration of “kaffirs.”
Furthermore, in the past couple of decades it has become commonplace to refer to Israel’s preferred path toward disengaging from the Occupied Territories as a recipe for Bantustans — the supposedly autonomous “homelands” that South Africa’s racist white minority set up to corral the dark-skinned natives.
This is because each of the maps even the most relatively liberal Israeli governments have drawn up of a supposedly post-occupation scenario have envisaged a Palestine that would fall far short of a viable state.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry has faced an inevitable backlash this week after stating in a leaked private conversation that a unitary Israel — that is to say a country that entrenched the occupation instead of ending it — risked becoming an apartheid state.
This is a fairly mainstream opinion in Israel, given that it has been expressed by two former prime ministers — Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. It’s anathema for Kerry to share their view, though; in the US, the retrograde Emergency Committee for Israel, chaired by the diehard neocon William Kristol, has already demanded that Barack Obama must dismiss his secretary of state.
Kerry’s remarks follow his futile mission, like so many secretaries of state before him, to breathe a semblance of life into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It would be hard to enumerate the number of times such efforts have failed before, even with far less dogmatic and recalcitrant leader than Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of affairs in Israel.
None of them, though, has seriously deterred the US from essentially bankrolling Israel, particularly its military wing. This phenomenon is closely related to the strength of the Israel lobby in America — which, as Peter Beinart eloquently illustrates in his 2012 book “The Crisis of Zionism,” has been hijacked by shortsighted, narrow-minded Likudites — partly because, in his view, younger American Jews no longer tend to identify with Israel.
From Beinart’s self-professed Zionist viewpoint, Israel’s trend not only militates against the ideals of its founding fathers but poses a fatal threat to its democratic pretensions — in part by perpetuating the myth of Jewish vulnerability when in fact Israel has convincingly demonstrated time and again that it has nothing to fear even from its most hostile neighbors.
Netanyahu’s entirely predictable reaction to last week’s announcement of a unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas presaged the end of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, although it was already plain that the US-mediated process wasn’t going anywhere.
There is a fairly straightforward explanation for this: The Likud-led Israeli coalition has never had any intention of making the minimum concessions required for a two-state solution. The more doggedly reactionary elements of that coalition make Hamas seem almost moderate by comparison — although one can be sure that Kerry’s mundane mention of apartheid will overshadow the demand by at least two of Netanyahu’s ministers that in response to the Palestinian application for membership of 15 international institutions, Israel should unilaterally proceed to annex 60 percent of the West Bank.
Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama has been keen to embellish his legacy with a lasting pact in the Middle East. Unfortunately, notwithstanding his lack of personal chemistry with Netanyahu and Tea Party-style racist hostility from Likudites everywhere, he has sought to do so by abandoning the progressive vibes he imbibed, as an upcoming politician, from liberal Jewish and Palestinian friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (an entity he just recently threatened to dismantle if negotiations were suspended, but now evidently hopes to refresh with a unity administration ahead of elections), has told a rabbi that he views the Holocaust as the 20th Century’s most heinous crime against humanity. That’s a worthy view, all the more so because it is so rarely expressed in the Arab world. It’s notable, though, that a Palestinian teacher who recently took his students on a tour of Auschwitz was widely excoriated, with some critics complaining he ought to have focused on the Nakba instead.
That view, though, emerges from an inability to recognize that monumental calamity as a cautionary tale against violating the basic rights of any segment of humanity, rather than a poor excuse for passing on the pain.
It is instructive to remember, though, as Primo Levi recalls in his searing Auschwitz memoir “If This is a Man,” that the term “used by the old ones of the [concentration] camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection [i.e. extermination in the gas chambers]” was Muselmänner.
