Israel is an apartheid state. So what?

Now that I have your attention, let’s seriously consider the question.

It’s currently fashionable for left-wing NGOs to furiously denounce Israel as guilty of apartheid against the Palestinians. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International each released reports going beyond the usual criticism of occupation and settlements to demand the repeal of the Israeli law stating the simple truth that the country is Jewish.

Of course they could present no examples of this law actually discriminating against anyone, because Israel has been the Jewish state since 1948 and nothing about it has changed to explain all the hot air. It’s so unremarkable for nations to define themselves in ethnic and religious terms that the Palestinians do it themselves.

What these NGOs really revealed then was their out-of-touch groupthink.

For their part, Palestinians were insulted by the sudden hype, as if their longstanding grievances were a “blockbuster” discovery just because some white do-gooders finally paid attention. Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka lamented that the apartheid reports “advance liberal conceptions of equality…[that] can, at best, achieve a ‘restructuring’ of the [Israeli] regime rather than its dismantlement.” Many critics prefer to cite Fayez Sayegh, a former propagandist for the Syrian Nazi party, who called Israel an apartheid state in 1965 even before it controlled Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

Accusing Israel of apartheid within its 1948 borders carries the obvious implication that the country should be reconstituted as a single state for all like South Africa. This sounds great to the Western ear, but in practice Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs do not trust each other enough to give up their separate aspirations for self-determination.

A two-state solution is still four times more popular among both peoples than a one-state solution. In fact, one state with formalized apartheid against the other side polls better than the Western ideal of a single egalitarian state. Trying to impose it from abroad is a recipe for the last thing the Middle East needs, another sectarian civil war.

Lack of a local constituency was no obstacle to Human Rights Watch reaching the logical conclusion of the apartheid analogy anyways, and advising Palestinians to stop insisting on their own state alongside Israel; or in the report’s words, “put[ting] off attainment of human rights in favor of a particular political outcome.” Hence the confusion when Amnesty clarified that they do not oppose Israel per se, because why else would you use the apartheid label?

The answer lies in this spectacular trainwreck of an interview in which Amnesty’s clearly ill-informed executives admit they joined the apartheid bandwagon due to peer pressure and Israel’s democratic institutions that tolerate dissent. The same body of international legalese prohibiting apartheid also forbids questioning continued Israeli sovereignty, so Amnesty pretends that apartheid has become compatible with democracy! The shock value of the word is gone.

This begs the main question: so what if Israel is an apartheid state?

These NGO reports aren’t major news stories in Israel. Jews learned to tune out gentile moralizing sometime during the past two millennia of being persecuted by the ancestors of today’s professional activists. And as I’ve previously written, Israel is too powerful to be publicly shamed into conceding territory, let alone abandoning its Jewish identity.

Meanwhile, the official Palestinian leadership can’t abandon their commitment to the two-state solution even if they wanted to, because it’s their sole source of international support. (The Hamas alternative, it need not be said, does not inhabit the realm of human rights discourse.)

At the end of the day you may call Israel an apartheid state as much as you like. The sun will still rise east of apartheid Jerusalem the next morning, and the morning after that, until the two sides resolve their differences through direct negotiations.

Regardless of whether you agree with the apartheid slogan, absent an accompanying revolution in Palestinian and Israeli politics, it’s just that: an empty slogan.