A trip to the enclaves between the Jewish West Jerusalem and the Palestinian west bank is a depressing experience. This is a region where Jewish and Palestinians neighborhoods are intricately mixed in volatile and hostile coexistence. Walls and fences separate Jews from Palestinians and some Palestinians from other Palestinians. The walls create islands and corridors that make no sense and turn the scenery to a crazy urban labyrinth. The magnificat scenery of hills surrounding Jerusalem, the spectacular temple mount, the Arab villages and Jewish suburbs, is a patchwork of fences and walls; the work of a mad architect. The split roads, with Palestinian on the right side of the wall and Israelis on the left side look eerie and sinister. Metropolitan Jerusalem became a Gordian knot of inextricable political and social mess.
In April I spent a week in Cambridge and was deeply impressed by depth of the anger and hatred towards Blair and Israel that was noticeable even in the peaceful atmosphere of the Newton Institute of Mathematics. I have learnt that in England the situation in the West Bank is commonly understood as a problem of apartheid.
No one can honestly deny the fact that there is a strong racial component to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the similarity with South Africa does not go very far. The racial despise in South Africa was one sided. In the Middle East it is mutual. The Israeli Palestinian problem bears the character of a religious war far more than a racial conflict.
Branding the conflict as apartheid implies a pre-judgment of who is right and who is wrong. I am very angry with many of the actions of the settlers and the Israeli army and government in the west bank. However, the walls in the west bank were a stop-gap response to a wave of suicide bombing. They were not something initiated on the basis of a racist ideology.
The walls in Ireland are over 25 feet high, as high as those in the west bank. But, I do not recall anyone describing British policy in Ireland as apartheid.
Branding the West Bank problem as apartheid does not only imply a pre-judgment. It also implies that there is an clear, obvious and proven solution. The medicine that worked in South Africa should also work here. The calls to boycott Israel are then a logical consequence of diagnosing the problem as apartheid.
For me, an Israeli, the conflict is not only a moral issue. It is also a practical, existential, and an urgent life threatening problem, for which, to my great chagrin, I do not see a prospect of solution in the foreseeable future. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at a stage of a chronic disease that, at best, can be managed carefully. No operation, even a painful one, could cure it now. Surely not as long as the Palestinians elect to be governed by a fundamentalists and the Israelis have a failed lame duck for primer.
When my parents came to Palestine in the late 1930 they did not come as colonizers who wanted to benefit economically by exploiting the cheap labor of the local population and the (non-existent) wealth of the land. My mother chose to leave her her birth place when Austrian Nazis told her: Jewess, go to Palestine. Both of my parents fled for their lives from Hitler. My grandparents and aunts who chose to remain were all murdered in Auschwitz. I and my children were born into a situation that proved to be both dangerous and intractable. For me, apartheid is not a useful paradigm to either understand or address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
