PrintMarch 3, 2010
Apartheid is Alive and Well in Araby
We stand in the midst of a new round of Israel-bashing called by the organizers of "Israel Apartheid Week." Those doing the bashing are busy turning logic on its head. For them, up is down, day is night, and right is wrong. The collected hatemongers of the radical Left allied with the terminally hate-filled Muslim world, their ranks filled with empty-headed and gullible drones, are combining to shriek misplaced support for an Arab people calling themselves Palestinians, who, they allege, are suffering from apartheid. They make this false charge by slandering the Jewish state, equating it with what was once the South African apartheid regime.
According to the upside-down world of the "hate Israel" crowd, Arabs are separated from Jews within Israel just as the black Africans were segregated from the whites within South Africa. This is where facts retreat into the fantasy world one finds within the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
The real apartheid that exists in the Middle East can be found not in Israel, but within the territories currently occupied by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Arabs ban all Jews from living amongst them. Any Jews found are summarily murdered in cold blood. This is sanctioned by Fatah and Hamas, who both delight in describing the Arab terrorist thugs as heroes -- even naming streets and town squares in their honor. Any Arabs found to have sold property to Jewish purchasers are summarily executed - often in the public squares and streets of Palestinian Arab settlements.
The geographical territory known as Palestine has, of course, never existed as an independent, sovereign nation in all of human history, and certainly never as an Arab state. The current territory within the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip formed integral parts of the ancestral and biblical Jewish homeland. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority sits upon the very Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, known now by its Jordanian name, the West Bank.
The vast territory east of the River Jordan, now called the Kingdom of Jordan, includes large tracts of land that also formed part of the biblical Jewish and tribal lands. But now that same vast territory, which extends eastwards to Iraq, north to Syria, and south to Saudi Arabia (dwarfing tiny Israel in size), is also closed by the Jordanian authorities to Jews, who may not live within its borders upon pain of death. In contrast, Arabs, who make up 20% of the overall Israeli population, may live within the reconstituted Jewish state as citizens enjoying equal rights with justice for all.
The Jordanian regime instituted a law in 1954 prohibiting Jews from living in Jordan. They did this by conferring citizenship to all former residents of geographical Palestine -- except Jewish ones. Israel's population contains Jews who are white, black, brown, and yellow. It is not an apartheid state based on racial differences or concepts of racial purity and impurity. Under apartheid South Africa, blacks were not citizens of the country and were not permitted to vote. Yet the loony Left, allied with the hate-filled Islamic world, continues to accuse Israel of a mythical apartheid system while ignoring the Arab and Muslim perpetrators of the actual apartheid that so clearly exists in the Kingdom of Jordan, in the Palestinian Authority, and within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The tsunami of anti-Jewish bigotry and malice sweeping the universities in America and Europe is desolating. The boycotts of Israel generated from within academia are built upon a fraudulent ethos of Arab distortions and outright lies, yet thy are willingly accepted by gullible students and faculty alike. It seems that the intellectuals who utter their elitist drivel within the corridors of academe are all too often seduced by novelties. But what it sadly, and so often, reveals is an undeniable truth that intellectualism does not automatically confer intelligence or intelligent behavior.
It would be refreshing if the same students, professors, and assorted Israel-bashers could learn how the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have created for themselves what can be described as anti-history. So insanely set are they upon a destructive denial of Jewish patrimony that these same Palestinian Arabs have created for themselves a fraudulent narrative denying even the existence of the Jewish Temples on Jerusalem's Temple Mount -- despite the overwhelming archaeological evidence of Jewish civilization and history in the land spanning millennia. This is why Palestinian Prime Minister Fayad called out the Palestinian rent-a-mob to riot in the streets of Hebron and Jerusalem after Israel declared the ancient Jewish holy sites of the Machpela Cave in Hebron and the tomb of the biblical matriarch, Rachel, as national heritage sites.
In Genesis 23:13, we read about the first Jew, Abraham, purchasing land in Hebron from Ephron the Hittite as a burial plot for his wife, Sarah. His son Isaac and grandson Jacob are also buried there along with their wives -- the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs. But this upsets the Palestinian Arabs because the Jewish tombs are within the territory they demand for a state -- for them, these Jewish sites are an inconvenient truth. Another Jewish holy place in what the world likes to call the West Bank is Joseph's tomb in Nablus, or what was once biblical Jewish Shechem. The good Palestinian Arabs recently desecrated the ancient tomb, filling it with rubbish and excrement, to prevent Jewish prayers and pilgrimage at the site. These are manifestations of apartheid -- Arab style.
With breathtaking absurdity, the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians make claims of historical and lineal descent from the extinct Canaanites and Philistines. They have bred several generations of children in kindergartens imbued with such frightening nonsense, attended by a love of barbarism and a culture of death. They have been encouraged in this by the corrupt neighboring Arab leaders, who for some sixty years have stigmatized them as refugees yet at the same time have barred them from living within their own basket-case countries.
From this horrific Palestinian-Arab sectarianism, the culture of death has developed along with an Islamic refusal to ever make a true and lasting peace with the non-Muslim state known as Israel. Indeed, for the Jewish population and for the subsequent State of Israel, there has been relentless Arab terror since the 1920s.
Consider the massacre of Jewish civilians by their Arab neighbors in Judaism's second-holiest city, Hebron -- the city that not only houses the Jewish burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but which King David first made his capital. That Arab atrocity took place in 1929 during the British Mandate occupation. For all those anti-Israel bigots who scream against Israeli occupation, they should know that the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not occupied at that time. Indeed, the Jewish state was not reborn until nineteen years later, in 1948 -- yet Arabs were murdering and terrorizing Jews all those years before. They should ask themselves why, after the Israel-Arab war of 1948, when the Egyptians occupied the Gaza Strip and the Jordanians occupied the so-called West Bank, neither Egypt nor Jordan felt the need to create a new Arab state to be called Palestine. Neither did the Arab residents demand it. Only after Israel defeated Arab aggression in 1967 and liberated the territories did the Arab world begin to demand the creation of a 23rd Arab state. They should also know that today, some 98% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians live in both the Arab Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the rival Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. There is, in reality, no occupation. So what do they mean when they rant and rave about Israeli occupation, unless it is a call for the very extinction of Israel itself?
There is no such thing as Israeli apartheid against the Arabs. But there most certainly is Arab apartheid imposed upon Jews, who are denied the right to live amongst Arabs even in the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland, which is occupied and controlled today by the Palestinian Authority and the Islamist Hamas.
It truly is an upside-down world, viewed now through a window so terribly distorted as to bewilder and confuse untold millions. It is much more than an Arab-Israel conflict over territory; it is much deeper than that. It is an Islamic refusal to accept a reconstituted Jewish homeland where once the Muslim foot trod triumphal. The very fact that the Palestinian Arabs, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, will never accept a tiny Jewish state within the enormous Arab landmass that stretches from Mauritania in the west to Iraq in the east is clear and present evidence of Muslim and Arab apartheid. This empirical fact must be understood.
In that context, I am reminded that it was the Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi who said, "While Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsees, and Jews, along with several million adherents of an animistic religion, all coexisted in relative harmony, one religion that would not accept compromise stood out from the rest: Islam."
It would be an enlightening and seminal moment in these first years of the 21st century if the eyes and ears of the Israel-bashers could be opened with the realization that they have targeted the wrong nation, and that apartheid is alive and well within the Arab world.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several published books including Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
