Old Slogan Isn’t the Full Story

Given the intense pressure against it, the upcoming United Nations racism conference in Durban, South Africa, probably will not include any discussion equating Zionism with racism. The United States has let it be known that if this subject is on the agenda, it may boycott the conference.

But there can be no serious discussion of racism in the world today without a scrupulous examination of the exceptional forms of racial discrimination practiced by Israel.

Obviously, no one will benefit from a return to facile slogans of past decades. The simplistic formula that “Zionism is a form of racism” serves as a sloppy catch-all for Israel’s elaborate systems of discrimination, which need to be understood and challenged in all their complexity. And by pointlessly castigating in sweeping terms the Zionist affiliation, the slogan actually discourages any honest self-examination on the part of Israelis and their supporters.

In raising these urgent concerns, opponents of racism should emphasize that it is not the presence of Jews of European origin in the Middle East that is being called into question but specific discriminatory practices of the Israeli state. One must move, in other words, from the accusatory to the analytical, and from the general to the specific.

The old slogan had its origin in the perfectly reasonable observation that Israeli Jews have been unwilling to grant any group of Palestinians, whether they are citizens of Israel, persons living under Israeli occupation or refugees, equal legal rights.

This is as true today as it was in 1948, and for this reason alone, Israel’s practices of racial discrimination simply cannot be excluded from the Durban conference without rendering the entire meeting a travesty.

Every aspect of life in the occupied territories--East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza--depends on one’s ethnicity: Where one can live, the roads on which one may drive, freedom of movement, access to education, the right to bear arms in self-defense, land and water use, and the entire range of social services all are administered in favor of Jews by Israel in a manner at least as discriminatory as that of apartheid-era South Africa.

Palestinians and Israeli settlers live alongside each other in a completely segregated political and physical reality, separate and unequal in legal, civil and human rights.

The nominal “autonomy” of some Palestinian towns in the occupied territories has not fundamentally altered this relationship.

Within the borders of Israel, things are both different and disturbingly similar. The Palestinian citizens of Israel are allowed many of the rights of citizenship, such as the right to vote. Yet a whole range of social services and amenities is denied to almost all Palestinians on the grounds that they are not military veterans. The services are provided to almost all Jews, including those exempted from army service on religious grounds.

The state owns more than 90% of the land in Israel and reserves it exclusively for the use of Jewish citizens, with the result that housing segregation and inequality are the norm.

Through both legal and informal patterns of discrimination, Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as second-class citizens. This was starkly demonstrated when Israeli police killed 13 of their Palestinian fellow citizens during demonstrations last October.

Israel also practices racial discrimination against the Palestinian refugees who have been prevented from returning to their homes since 1948.

While Israel’s Law of Return allows anyone--anywhere in the world--deemed to be Jewish to enter Israel and gain immediate citizenship, Palestinians have been prevented from returning to their houses and villages simply because they are not Jewish.

What is needed, and what any conference on racism in the contemporary world must include, is a specific bill of particulars that soberly places before the conscience of humanity the systems of racial discrimination that define the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. If the U.N. conference proves unable to seriously address this issue, the international community will be announcing an unwillingness to face the crudest forms of racism existing today.