South African Israelis must lead the Fight against the Apartheid Libel

By Rolene Marks

A recent poll published by the Times of Israel and various other publications) revealed some startling statistics. The article discussed how some 25% of American Jewry believes that Israel is an Apartheid state. This is an extremely worrying statistic and just recently, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Nachman Shai, warned how we could lose the support of US Jewry if this continues. Over the past few years we have seen the chasm between Israel and American Jewry grow wider and the aggressive accusations of Apartheid by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and others grow louder.

The BDS movement exploded into the global consciousness after the UN Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The launch of BDS in South Africa was not coincidental as the country was both the birthplace of Apartheid and its defeat. In the narrative against Israel, optics are important and what could be more symbolic than this? At the very centre of the BDS delegitimisation, is the accusation, in fact the charge that Israel is guilty of practicing Apartheid. The rationale is that if Israel is labelled as a pariah, as was South Africa, then the Jewish state can no longer be part of the family of nations, until it changes its abhorrent policies.  And more than this, BDS is also unwavering about their end goal – the end of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. This has been stated by the founder of the movement, Omar Barghouti and stated on their website. The difference in the South African context however, is that during the heinous Apartheid regime, the global community wanted the racist policies of South Africa changed but never called for the country to cease to exist.

The Oxford dictionary defines Apartheid as “a policy of racial segregation of other groups from the white inhabitants. Adopted by the successful Afrikaner National Party as a slogan in the 1948 election, apartheid extended and institutionalized existing racial segregation. The word is recorded from the 1940s, and comes from Afrikaans, meaning literally ‘separateness’.”

These Apartheid laws governed every aspect of a black person’s life – from freedom of movement, the right to equal education, who they could marry all the way to separate amenities for colour groups.

While other countries have often implemented racist laws at some time in their history, Apartheid was unique to South Africa and the narrative to her people, because it was the only country in which these laws were legislated. South Africa is the “ground zero” of the BDS movement, and it is important that if anyone wants to counter BDS and their narrative, that they examine the South African paradigm very closely and understand it.

It is a narrative that is being appropriated by a sophisticated anti-Israel element to push an exclusionary, antisemitic agenda.

Israel is by no means perfect. Like every other country, we have our many challenges, including the scourge of racism, but it is not state policy as it was in South Africa.

I grew up in South Africa at the height of Apartheid and the years of States of Emergency. I bore witness to the daily humiliation, discrimination and appalling treatment of my black and coloured (a term used for people who were of mixed race) countrymen. Many of you reading this are probably wondering why a white woman is writing about the Apartheid experience.

My answer? As a young, proudly Zionist Jew, I learned through belonging to a youth movement that Apartheid was not compatible with my Jewish and Zionist values. It was in this Zionist youth movement that many of us were taught to question the system and subsequently become young activists, often at great risk to our safety. I remember when I was14 years old, that I marched for equal rights and was filmed and questioned by the police. But we were proud because this to us was tikkun olam (Hebrew for ‘repairing the world’). We were speaking up for our fellow citizens who had no voice and no agency under a racist regime.

I am not the only Israeli South African with a story to tell. There are many of my countrymen in Israel and if you want to educate people against the Apartheid Israel canard, you need to talk to us. It is our lived experience, it is the narrative of the country in which we grew up.

Many of us here have “struggle credentials”.  There are those who were forced to flee, those who were arrested and even tortured, those who witnessed unbelievable cruelty, there are those who challenged the government or the legal system. And there are those who chose to leave because they could not live under a regime that persecuted another; because we understood all too clearly what this meant.

And yes, ex-pat South Africans have a duty to stand up to this abhorrent canard. We cannot be apathetic or complacent. We must remember that as olim, Israel has given us so much and now it is time for us to take the lead in the fight against the exploitation of the narratives of both South Africa and Israel.

The BDS movement and anti-Israel detractors are engaging misinformed South Africans, with little or no understanding of the complexities of the conflict, to give impetus to their agenda. Why aren’t you speaking to those of us who understand and have lived experience in both countries?

The contribution made by South African Jews to the fight against Apartheid were extraordinary and disproportionate to the size of the community. We have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share in the fight against the narrative that claims Israel as an Apartheid state. To be reticent about engaging and involving ourselves would be both a missed opportunity – and detrimental to the education of our diaspora communities.

We owe South Africa so much – we were formed there and given the freedom to speak out and protest against injustice and human rights abuses.  It is therefore our duty never to demean Apartheid and the real devastating consequences it created.  To call Israel an Apartheid state is an abomination.

There is only one answer to this odious comparison is by condemning unreservedly the central charge of Apartheid through engaging its victims as well as those who fought to destroy it.

As the Jewish world gears up for the 20^th anniversary of the UN Conference against Racism, you can absolutely place your bets that this charge of Apartheid is only going to gain more momentum. Remember the stated endgame.

The time to engage with us is now – before it is too late.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

The Human Rights organisations seems to be focusing a lot of attention on Israel – at the expense of other conflicts around the world.

By Rolene Marks

Ken Roth has an obsession. Hardly a day goes by without Ken fixating on the State of Israel. Ken Roth is the Director of Human Rights Watch, an alleged (and I don’t say this lightly!) social justice orgnaisation. Human Rights Watch (HRW) mandate is to be a watchdog for human rights violations all over the world. Ken Roth has decided that the focus of his efforts should be on Israel. Israel is an imperfect country but is a democracy with the rule of law. It seems that lately, Ken Roth is fixated on Israel and this is evident in his almost obsessive tweeting about the Jewish state.

Hardly a day goes by without multiple tweets from Ken, pushing a clearly negative narrative and dare I say, agenda? A few weeks ago, he had the audacity to blame rising antisemitism on the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza during the recent conflagration between Israel and Hamas, using an article from left-leaning publication, Ha’aretz to try and bolster his claim. This resulted in a mega-pile on from organisations and individuals alike who called him out on his flagrant antisemitism.

Tablet Senior Writer Yair Rosenberg tweeted, “Here’s the director of Human Rights Watch blaming Jews for antisemitism. Antisemites, like all bigots, have used alleged acts of their targets to justify attacks on them (‘they killed Jesus! they swindle!’). Obscene for an ostensible human rights group to push their propaganda.” He added in a later tweet: “Antisemitism wasn’t caused by Jews ‘killing Jesus’ in the Middle East centuries ago. That was the bigot’s excuse. Antisemitism isn’t caused by Israeli actions in 2021. That’s the bigot’s excuse. Antisemitism is caused by the hate of the bigot, who will always find a new excuse.”

UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer noted that Roth had issued his tweet during Tisha B’Av “when Jews mourn the destruction of their Temple & sovereignty in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Since then, the Jews faced burnings, expulsions and the Holocaust. Now there is Israel. We’re thrilled & proud. And we’ll never take lessons from an antisemite.”

Roth tried to walk back his Tweet, saying “Interesting how many people pretend that this tweet justifies antisemitism (it doesn’t and I don’t under any circumstances) rather than address the correlation noted in the Haaretz article between recent Israeli government conduct in Gaza and the rise of UK antisemitic incidents.”

But Sam Sokol, the author of the Haaretz article, tweeted that Roth had used “an article I wrote to try and bolster his point. And it does nothing of the sort.”

But Roth has not stopped there. It has become a daily activity amongst Israel advocates and our allies to call Roth out on his obsessive tweeting about Israel while staying silent on gross human rights violations across the world. He could tweet about the Palestinian Authority crackdown on journalists and critics or the million + Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps in China, or the Biafran people in Nigeria, or the genocide of Christians in that country. There are sadly, countless other conflicts or oppressed people that could do with a smidgeon of Ken’s attention.

Instead he turns his attention to Israel, accusations of Apartheid, excoriating Israel’s leadership – all with a generous serving of Ben & Jerry’s boycott endorsements.

It is no coincidence that Roth is focusing so much attention on the overpriced ice-cream manufacturers boycott, after all it was his colleague, Omar Shakir, who advised the Ben & Jerry’s board.

Omar Shakir, the Director of HRW Israel-Palestine, was booted out of the country in 2019 for BDS activities that contravened Israel’s laws. He has now dedicated his energy and time to publishing reports accusing the Jewish State of war crimes during the May conflagration and a separate one accusing the country of practices of Apartheid – while scarcely a mention about any transgressions from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. Shakir even went so far as to totally redefine the term Apartheid to push his agenda.

If it smells a lot like vendetta, it probably is.

Robert L Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights watch eventually turned against the organization that he started with noble intentions.

In an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2009, he wrote

“As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world, many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens, who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighbourhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.”

(excerpt from article: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html)

In 2014, Roth all but endorsed Hamas’ use of tunnels to potentially kidnap Israeli soldiers, hinting that this did not contravene international law.

Can HRW, an organization that practices such flagrant bias and whose Directors are routinely accused of antisemitism not just by Jews but by notable politicians and other high profile people, still be taken seriously or even considered a human rights organisation?

The evidence points to the contrary but with high-profile events like the 20^th Anniversary of the UN Conference on Racism taking place next month, HRW is bound to enjoy some attention as they present their “findings”. At least ten countries will be boycotting this event out of concerns for a repeat of the 2001 conference that became nothing short of an antisemitic and anti-Israel festival of hatred.

Many of us are concerned about what will result from this conference, especially in light of escalating global antisemitism. This is where human rights organisations should lead the fight against antisemitism but for HRW, those days are long gone.

They discredit the dignified and noble memory of their founder – and the very foundations upon which they were formed.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).