European Union Foreign Minister Josep Borrell has said that the term “apartheid” to describe Israeli behavior towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is “inappropriate”. Does he find the Israeli policy “appropriate”?
Every adjective has its opposite. In doing so, Borrell ignores a rising deep disgust among a growing part of the European electorate towards Israeli policies, especially as general opprobrium, including in American Jewish circles, manifests itself in the face of the repugnant excesses of ministers Israelis like Smotrich and Ben Gvir, under the consenting eye of that rogue Israeli Prime Minister that Binyamin Netanyahu has become.
The latter has been the subject of massive protests in Israel because of his quasi-legal coup to emasculate the Israeli Supreme Court and secure immunity from charges that have been brought against him for several years without their having never succeeded, from one recourse to another. We have witnessed the extremely rare phenomenon of an official reprimand from the United States by the voice of its president, which constitutes a patent interference by the world’s leading power in the internal affairs of its closest ally. The pressures accumulated against Netanyahu obtained a postponement, but not the cancellation, of the measures envisaged and partially garnered by the Knesset.
Do we need to rewrite a bit of history to understand that this accusation of apartheid is highly justified, as the Amnesty International report so well demonstrated last year?
A historical shortcut never does justice to the facts, but let’s try anyway. It was at the end of the 19the century that the mythical return to the promised land of Israel took shape with the publication by Herzl of the book The Jewish State. He saw this creation as the essential response to the many pogroms inflicted since the dawn of time on the unfortunate Jews in the world, especially at the hands of Christians.
British Minister Balfour’s declaration of 1917 proposing the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine set in motion the process that will bring us to the present day. Jewish immigration to Palestine is growing considerably to the progressive detriment of the Palestinians. In 1945, the discovery of the horror of the Holocaust and the massacre of more than 6 million Jews by Hitler’s henchmen aroused an understandable current of sympathy towards the survivors, which led to the partition of Palestine decreed by the Organization of the United Nations in 1947 to the detriment of the Palestinians, then driven out in large numbers from their homes by the Israeli forces and scattered among their Arab neighbours.
The yoke of occupation
The rest is known: the wars between Israel and the Arab countries lead to peace treaties not without Israel having appropriated all of Palestine, the Palestinians who still remained in their former territory falling under the yoke of the occupation Israeli. And it is of this yoke that we speak today!
While it is deeply regrettable that the Palestinians are divided between the intransigent terrorists of Hamas in Gaza and the crumbling Palestinian Authority regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, the reality is that Israel has never really rallied, with one exception, to the idea of a Palestinian state. Hamas serves Israeli purposes by demonstrating the impossibility of an agreement between the three parties.
For more than 20 years, Israeli colonization in the West Bank has continued imperturbably despite the timid objurgations of the major powers of the day.
Living conditions for Palestinians in the scraps of territory that remain to them are appalling. This is what the Amnesty International report demonstrates without fail and without exaggeration. Ultimately, the Palestinians are paying the price for the horror of the Holocaust for which they bear no responsibility.
And the Americans continue to support Israel unabashedly except for the occasional little admonishment accompanied by the litany call for the creation of two states, Israeli and Palestinian, living in peace and security side by side. And Bibi Netanyahu, once again, like many of his predecessors, rolls them in flour while Europeans, albeit fewer and fewer, continue to put their heads in the sand, still feeling guilty, almost 80 years old later, the horrors of anti-Semitism. Sadly ironically, the greatest culprits of the pogroms against the Jews, of all centuries, are those same Christians who today do not want to lift a finger to help the Palestinians whom former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said they did not exist…