By David Cumin on Radio NZ…
Sometimes it is easier to dwell in the past than deal with the present. It is understandable that the present would challenge some people as more Arab states normalise and thaw their relations with Israel, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel now form part of the Israeli coalition government, and those same citizens continue to outperform their fellow Arabs in neighbouring states on all sorts of indicia from human rights to education to life expectancy.
Yet, the claim that Israel is akin to Apartheid South Africa is absurd.
Two reports cited in a recent opinion piece by national chairperson of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, John Minto, both distinguished Israel from South Africa’s reprehensible regime, despite what the article implies.
It is absurd to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa when the Arab population of Israel that constitutes 20 percent of its citizenship, as well as all other minorities, vote, have equal civil rights and are protected at law from discrimination.
Israel’s accusers focus on the Law of Return – the assurance given to Jews around the world that they will always find a home in Israel – as an example of Israel’s “apartheid”. This law was implemented when the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 when one of its most pressing needs was to absorb hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees rendered stateless after the Holocaust.
Since then it has absorbed millions of Jews – many of them refugees – including 850,000 who fled Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 1940s-50s. To assert that providing this refuge from the racism that has seen Jews ethnically cleansed, ghettoized, enslaved and massacred over millennia, is itself a racist inversion.
Read David Cumin’s full article on Radio NZ here.
