Jimmy Carter’s Gift of “Apartheid”: Use It

Jimmy Carter’s Gift of “Apartheid”: Use It

from Dissident Voice by John V. Walsh

Eclipsed by the events in Egypt, news from its little neighbor has not gleaned much notice save for media angst that Egyptian democracy might not be as genial as was the Mubarak dictatorship to the relentless, long term ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Palestinians.  But news there was as Israeli “human rights” lawyers went public with a libel suit against Jimmy Carter for his precise little book, “Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid.”  The stunner to the Israelis lies in a single word in Carter’s title, “Apartheid”
Names, names, names.  What constitutes an accurate description of Israel?  There are many appellations, none of them appealing.  The partisans of Israel like to call it “the Jewish state.”  But that name carries a disconcerting note.   We do not like “Islamic states,” and “Christian state” calls forth images of fascism, bigotry and Crusades.  Does “Jewish state” sound any more tolerant?
Then there is the very old fashioned label, “a people without a land and a land without a people.”  Not even the European colonialists of the Americas had the chutzpah to deny the very existence of the indigenous peoples as they were exterminated or put into reservations, the Gazas of the New World.  Though that racist little phrase continued to Golda Meir who denied the very existence of the Palestinians, at least by the time of the terrorist Yitzhak Shamir, the Palestinians had transmogrified into “insects” or “cockroaches.”   At least Shamir allowed for their pesky, subhuman existence.
Then there is “colonial, settler state,” an accurate name well understood by the developing world as it continues its struggle to throw off the hidden shackles of European domination – but not well understood as yet in the more or less post-colonial West.  Of course, there is the “Zionist entity,” again well understood by the oppressed of the Middle East, but a mystery to many in the West who have been trained to perceive it as anti-Semitic.
Carter has popularized the term “Apartheid,” both accurate and easily understood, a term that has a “stench in the nostrils of the world.  And it is precisely what is going on in Israel and the territories it occupies.  Do you want to call Israel a democracy?  Fine if we understand that it is a democracy in the same sense that South African was under Apartheid.  The Apartheid  in the West Bank is so blatant that it can be seen from a satellite where the Jewish colonists have their own roads in the West Bank. And if the West Bank is a haven for terrorists, why oh why would Israelis keep colonizing on the far side of the great “security” wall; in fact, an Apartheid wall.