Our (Imperfect) Democracy
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems very intelligent and knows the power of language more than most members of Congress. That doesn’t mean smart people can’t express uninformed views or get swept up in a wave of ideological conformity driving them to impulsively tweet about what they are sure is the cause of their time and generation.
But there is intellectual laziness in looking at Israel or any country through an American ideological lens or expressing your foreign policy position in a four-word tweet like “Apartheid states aren’t democracies.” AOC is not only wrong, she is also throwing stones from inside her own glass house.
Criticizing a country’s very nature is equivalent to an ad hominem attack and while it’s tempting to respond in kind, it would sidestep an opportunity to educate the many who want to learn before issuing vacuous proclamations. The following is less for AOC than it is for those who admire her and the strong stand she has taken on many salient issues confronting the United States, many of which I agree with like socialized medicine, immigration reform and many of her social justice initiatives.
Before I get started let me just say I despise the current Netanyahu government and every member of it. They are uneducated, uncouth, provincial and care more about their political survival more than their citizens’ well-being, both Arabs and Jews. They have no strategy for the country aside from maintaining the status quo and that includes domestic and foreign policy, which is why they failed to form a new government in the most recent election.
But I am still an Israeli patriot, and love my country and its people, even more so when being bombarded with indiscriminate missiles and ignorant tweets. The ability to make the distinction between a country and its government is fundamental to a democratic mindset, and the inability to distinguish between them ensures that the debate will rapidly devolve into questioning the existence of Israel as an independent country.
As many know, Apartheid was the official term used by the minority-controlled ruling party of South Africa to describe the institutionalized racism that forcefully separated South Africans based on the color of their skin. Israel doesn’t have any racial laws (a uniquely western concept), but instead uses nationality, which fuses ethnicity and religion without regard for belief/tradition or the color of your skin (as many Israeli Jews have the same olive complexion of Arabs making them virtually indistinguishable).
In calling Israel an apartheid state, one might as well describe many US states and cities, which routinely pass discriminatory laws like “stop and frisk,” “stand your ground” and “election integrity” as apartheid states. But if there is any value in the historic significance of South African apartheid, please do not use this word merely for its shock value. I’m not simply making a semantic argument about the precise history of the word but rather calling on Americans to refrain from intellectual laziness…to make an effort to understand a complex history that will be solved with neither a bumper sticker tweet nor a special mission by Jared. And yes, it’s complicated, like most things in the world outside of an orderly ideological construct.
When one speaks about Israel and the occupation, one has to be careful because as it concerns Palestianian Arabs there are in fact four or five different areas in which Palestinians live under some level of control/influence by the State of Israel. This includes Israel itself, where most Palestinian Arabs prefer to call themselves Israeli Arabs as they are full citizens and historically have not identified with the struggle for independence by Palestinian refugees outside of Israel. There is an historic reason for this, but let’s just say it’s the same reason Jews didn’t call themselves Palestinians before Israel became independent.
In Israel proper Arab citizens (whether Christian or Muslim or Bedouin) can live anywhere, work anywhere, vote in all elections, protest, travel (inside and out) and speak/write with complete freedom. Arab Israelis staff government ministries, serve as judges, lead hospitals, teach in academia, appear as anchors in the news media, win national beauty contests and lead nonprofits and businesses. Arabic is an official language of the State of Israel, which unlike Spanish in the US, is taught to most Israeli school children (admittedly not very well). Today Israel has more minorities in its parliament (in % terms) than there are minorities in the US Congress and Israel has had more Arab justices on its Supreme Court (3) than there have been African American justices on the US Supreme Court (2). At the same time, as a minority Israeli Arabs absolutely face discrimination in Israeli society and is something many of my fellow citizens work to change and rectify. And if this concerns you too there are many wonderful non-profits working to effect change.
Israel doesn’t use capital punishment so it looks a lot better than the US in that department, nor is there a right to own an automatic weapon. We also don’t have laws against blasphemy, laws preventing women from teaching boys, or laws outlawing homosexuality that pervade most of the Middle East, and some conservative pockets of the United States. Again, this doesn’t mean there isn’t discrimination here, but please name a country or people that isn’t guilty of discrimination and prejudice.
The second area is East Jerusalem (captured from Jordan in the Six Day War of 1967), where Palestinians are given permanent resident status, meaning they have all the rights that Israeli Arabs have except the right to vote in national elections (they can vote in local elections). Before shouting apartheid, consider for example US territories like Puerto Rico and Guam from where citizens can’t vote for President, or Washington DC, whose citizens don’t have a voting member in Congress. These East Jerusalem Palestianians can apply for and do receive citizenship, but most don’t and few vote. If these comparisons don’t hold up it’s because it’s very difficult to compare one country’s system with another.
East Jerusalemites are still discriminated against for the simple reason that the municipal and national governments do not allocate sufficient resources to education, infrastructure, policing and health care. You can see that the eastern part of the city is neglected and this is both shameful and unfair. I’m against this discrimination but it’s quite a stretch to call it apartheid unless you want to devalue that word and apply it to the US as well.
The complex situation with 6 Sheikh Jarrah apartments in East Jerusalem requires too much history and legal understanding for this blog, but this article explains what it is and what it isn’t. Bottom line, these are apartments that once belonged to Jewish families expelled by Jordan in 1948 (that’s not disputed), but the law that is allowing them to sue to get them back is not reciprocal for Palestinians Arabs who left or were expelled from their homes in West Jerusalem (much like Jews who fled from Arab countries don’t get to reclaim their abandoned property). Discrimination, yes, but hardly apartheid as it’s taken 50 years of lawsuits to even reach this stage and they still haven’t been evicted.
US housing, districting and lending laws pale in comparison. Of course, Israel is not the US, but neither is it apartheid South Africa. There are small Jewish communities which discriminate against Arabs and Arab towns that would throw out any Jew who attempted to move in. That’s the Middle East, a multiethnic region that is at peace with some degree of self-imposed separation because their ethnic and religious identity is still so important to them. It also exists within Jewish communities (between ultra orthodox and secular) and within Arab communities (Druze don’t live alongside Arab Muslims and Arab Christians don’t live alongside Muslim Bedouin).
The case of Al Aqsa and the Temple Mount is also complicated. It is administered by a special entity called the Waqf that is controlled by the Kingdom of Jordan. Its explosive nature means that although it’s also holy to Jews (is called the Temple Mount for a reason) Israel preferred not to change anything. As a result, here the discrimination is reversed. Jews are not allowed to pray on the Temple Mount and are often blocked from ascending. A smart policy in my opinion, but some religious Jews find this racist and discriminatory.
Then there’s the West Bank (Judea and Samaria in Israel/Hebrew) and the Gaza Strip. These are also areas captured by Israel in the Six Day War from Jordan and Egypt respectively. Both have since relinquished their claims which is what makes administering them so incredibly complicated. While the UN General Assembly recognized a Palestinian State in 2012, it still has no internationally recognized borders and remains legally amorphous.
It’s been 54 years of government policy but successive Israeli governments acquiesced and then advanced the settlement of mostly-religious, Israeli Jews into the West Bank. Some of these settlements were in fact the resettlement of Jewish towns abandoned in the War of Independence in 1948, but I view most others as an aggressive move and corrosive to Israeli democracy. This policy has resulted in pockets of Israeli citizens going about their business in a most unforgiving, hostile territory. I’ve been called upon to protect them with my own life and can’t countenance the IDF enforcing such discrimination.
The Jews and Palestinians within the Israeli administered parts of the West Bank have no interest whatsoever in living, learning or working together. It’s self imposed separation abetted by the Israeli government that naturally cares more about its citizens than it does the Palestinian residents. They suffer as a result and have their mobility and development severely restricted. It’s discriminatory for sure, and they deserve to be under Palestinian rule but there are genuine security considerations that sadly complicate matters. Aside from their proximity to Israeli settlements, the West Bank is a highland overlooking the coastal plain of Israel where a majority of the Israeli population lives. Israel at its narrowest point is a mere 9 miles, much narrower than the 14th congressional district of AOC.
Of course most Palestinians in the West Bank actually live within the territory of the Palestinian Authority or what their government now calls the State of Palestine. This means a Palestinian government is responsible for their education, health care, policing, welfare and more. Admittedly, they lack some of the powers and resources of an independent country, including border control as it remains a patchwork of populated areas without contiguity for the time being. Frustratingly neither side seems very interested in discussing a comprehensive change.
These Palestianians technically have the right to vote in their own elections but they’ve actually only had one since the creation of the Authority in 1994. Jews are not allowed to own property or live there. It’s not fair to call this apartheid because they too are still building their country for their own people, which of course is not going to conform with the American notions of freedom.
The last area is the Gaza Strip, where Israel and Egypt have each imposed a blockade on their borders to restrict imports and movement in and out of the territory. Gazan Palestinians live under the complete control of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group whose founding charter calls for the murder of Jews and the elimination of Israel as a state. This is not a place where leaders of the Palestinian Authority are welcome, let alone foreign women without a head scarf and a tight muzzle. These Palestinians certainly have their grievances, but inside the Strip Hamas tosses gay men from rooftops, dresses children up as suicide bombers and invests their donations from abroad in rockets to fire at Israel and in digging tunnels from which to attack Israeli communities. Gaza is a true tragedy, a small strip of land that had a population of only 60K before Israel’s War of Independence. Successive waves of refugees and an unwillingness by Egypt and Israel to empower them made it a hotbed of extremism that is a proverbial hot potato today.
One can’t call it apartheid because Israel doesn’t rule them or impose any law on their people. Israeli settlements in Gaza were abandoned more than a decade ago, but the lives of Palestinians haven’t improved one bit. Israel is not alone in controlling their borders, but can hardly let Hamas arm themselves with Iranian-supplied weapons if the last week proves anything. We welcome fresh ideas at what to do with the Gaza Strip, even from members of Congress, but there are few thornier problems on the world stage than this.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is not simply an embellishment, it actually emboldens our right wing extremists that sound a lot like AOC’s nemesis from Georgia. It is the evidence they seek to show Israelis that Americans don’t pay attention to nuance or detail. They reason that if members of Congress call us an apartheid state, no one will notice if we slowly become one. These are people who would in fact not mind living with more discrimination, something closer to those areas in the Deep American South, where polling booths are removed, zoning laws restrict minorities and Confederate flags still adorn schools and trucks.
The rioting and violence this past week between Arab and Jewish extremists in mixed Israeli towns is most tragic. AOC is fanning the flames with her incautious use of the term apartheid rather than working to calm tensions and foster mutual understanding for people who have no choice but to live together in harmony. Like many Israeli Jews I also have much more in common with my secular Israeli Arab cousins than with my extremist Jewish brothers. I also have more in common with AOC, an inspiring leader in a strong, yet also imperfect democracy, than I do with extremists defending a terrorist organization.
True leaders have the self-confidence to change their minds and positions, if not to admit an error. I don’t expect to change opinions with a single blog but perhaps the intelligent among you will find it harder to reflexively take sides and throw detail and subtlety out the window. Israel is an imperfect democracy which is how a lot of democracies can be described, but its our imperfect democracy. Those of us who love the country will continue working to improve things while defending it from detractors who don’t really care much about any of us, Arab or Jew.
