Last week, a number of North American campuses saw activities, including shameful propaganda films and talks delegitimizing the Jewish state as an oppressive apartheid regime. The official End Israeli Apartheid Week is over, but for Jewish students, the fallout is just beginning. 
Washington Square News, the paper of New York U. gave op-ed space to Andrew Jensen to argue that IDF checkpoints, Israeli bypass roads and the security fence are forms of apartheid to dominate the Palestinians:
We use the term "apartheid" because it is accurate. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons, and systematically oppressing them." This is the situation in Israel today.
While Jensen quotes the international convention's definition verbatim, astonishingly, he says not one word about Palestinian terror attacks prompting these security measures.
To their credit, Washington Square News editors, devoted an entire section to apartheid controversy where Jewish students were able to respond. Unfortunately, lies repeated often enough take on a reality of their own.
So why isn’t Israel the apartheid state Jensen would have reader believe?
Israel ’s Arab citizens have full civic rights, even enjoying greater democracy than their brothers in neighboring Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Public facilities are not segregated between Israelis and Arabs. As Benny Pogrund wrote last year:
Nearly three years ago I underwent an operation in a Jerusalem hospital. The surgeon was Jewish, the anaesthetist was Arab. The doctors and nurses who looked after me were Jews and Arabs. I lay in bed for a month and watched as they gave the same skilled care to other patients - half of whom were Arabs and half of whom were Jewish - all sharing the same wards, operating theatres and bathrooms.
After that experience I have difficulty understanding anyone who equates Israel with apartheid South Africa. What I saw in the Hadassah Mt Scopus hospital was inconceivable in the South Africa where I spent most of my life, growing up and then working as a journalist who specialised in exposing apartheid.
Israeli Arabs participate in public life to the extent that when Israeli president Dalia Itzik travels abroad, the acting president in her absence is Druze Knesset member Majallie Whbee (pictured ). Absurdly, another elected Israeli official, Knesset member Jamal Zahalka spoke at apartheid week events on Canadian campuses. Zahalka presumably traveled on an Israeli passport and received a degree of VIP treatment in order to peddle the apartheid claim.
Restrictions on the West Bank and Gaza, which Jensen slammed, are not about apartheid but about protecting the lives of Israeli citizens from terror organizations that reject peace with Israel. Despite unfortunate hardships the security fence and checkpoints create, the statistics show clear success at preventing terror.
On one key point, Jensen's Palestinian and South African parallels break down. While the Palestinians overtly call for Israel's destruction, seeking a purely Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, blacks never sought the destruction of the South African state. They merely wanted to end the apartheid regime. Ever since the 1948 UN partition plan, Mideast diplomacy has mostly focused on a two-state solution. Israelis and Palestinians committed themselves as such by accepting the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements.
Further fueling the week's rhetoric is the recent release of Jimmy Carter’s error-ridden book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid . The title makes clear the former president’s position on the subject. Lee Kaplan writes that Carter has an upcoming appearance at UC-Santa Cruz to plug his book. Never mind the mass resignation of the Carter Center’s advisory board, questions of Carter’s Arab funding , the president’s persistent refusal to debate the book’s claims or the significant factual errors as documented by our colleagues at CAMERA. Despite the mistakes, Carter's stature as a former president gives the book unwarranted credibility.
The Durban Strategy
Apartheid Week is really part of a larger strategy to erode the Israeli state’s legitimacy through what Professor Gerald Steinberg described as the Durban strategy: just as South Africa’s apartheid regime had to be destroyed (and rightly so), Israel has to be destroyed too.
Consider the following:
* At Stanford, Students Confronting Apartheid Israel (SCAI) used the end of the week to launch a divestment campaign. Mishan Aroujo, of the Stanford Israel Alliance wrote in the Daily Stanford:
Many international observers of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict view it as a dispute over land. Many Israelis, however, see their very existence at stake. After all, SCAI’s website as of Jan. 27, 2007 has a myths and facts section containing the line “Myth #4: Israel has a right to exist free from terror.”
* The Durban strategy reaches very high echelons. According to AP, a new report published on the web site of the UN Human Rights Council (in pdf format) makes the same apartheid accusations with the UN’s imprimatur. (See Anne Bayefsky's sharp response.) The author, John Dugard (pictured ), is no stranger to HonestReporting.
Apartheid week may be over. But the fallout continues. HonestReporting-Campus asks students to be on the lookout for articles in their campus papers. Please send your alerts to director@israelactivism.com.
