John Kerry: Israel Risks Becoming An Apartheid State

[Viking]

How?

Why do you ask?

How do you get the arab population in the west bank incorporated into israel being both the cause and the result?

[Malthus]

Some commentators - in fact, most I have read - appear to be saying that the "demographic threat" is highly overstated - at least, the "threat" from Arabs.

While the population of Arabs has indeed grown faster than that of Jews, because Arabs have on average a higher birth-rate, the Arab birth-rate in Israel is rapidly falling (and indeed, throughout the Arab world). It is impossible to say of course what will happen in the future, but while the notion of an Arab "demographic threat" has mostly proven useful as political rhetoric - used by the right within Israel to scare voters, and on the left to attempt to scare Israelis into a peace deal. The reality appears to be that, unless current trends drastically change, Israel will remain majority Jewish by a large majority into the foreseeable future - particularly if one doesn't count Gaza and the WB as "Israeli".   

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/03/19/stats-debunk-demographic-threat-to-israel/

http://www.ibtimes.com/israels-demographic-time-bomb-arab-majority-state-213933

A more immediate "threat" comes from the ultra-otrthodox, whose birth rate is higher than that of Arabs or non-ultra-orthodox Jews.

[grumbler]

I have challenged you on this before, the number of births for Jews is very high and the percentage of children born who are non-Jewish has been declining.  I am not so sure this is going to be a steady trend in the future.

The facts are the facts.  An argument that the Jewish birth rate is high (and declining) while the non-Jewish birthrate is higher still (and declining more slowly) doesn't make untrue that most projections that show that Jews will not forever be the majority population of Israel.

Of course, trends could change (the Jewish birth rate trend line has bent a couple of times) and the return of Israeli Arab refugees currently living in neighboring countries would influence this trend as well.

Still, the risk remains that Israel has to choose between being democratic and being Jewish.  Challenge all you like, the risk will remain.

[Sheilbh]

http://www.ibtimes.com/israels-demographic-time-bomb-arab-majority-state-213933

From this piece:

Moscovitch: Annexation of the West Bank by Israel would substantially skyrocket Arab population numbers, and the birth rates of non-Jews would remain high and potentially surpass the Jewish Israeli population. For this reason, it is imperative that Israel not annex the West Bank and negotiate a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians to ensure Israeli security and provide the Palestinians with sovereignty in their own state.

Without a two-state solution and the annexation of the Palestinian population of the West Bank, Israel will eventually turn into a single, bi-national state that would dissolve Israel's Jewish identity.

That's precisely what people are talking about, not the threat within Israel's borders.

OK, can you spell out a scenario for how this might happen. Especially one where when the Israeli government says "no" doesn't end the issue.

I've spelled out the scenario. I don't understand the question to which the Israeli government is saying 'no' to.

Again the mind reading. I hate to feel the need to define cabinet collegiality and explain how in democracies not all members and supporters of a government share it's policies and view 100%. The official policy of all Israeli governments since UNSC242 has been to accept it.

It's not mind-reading it's public statements by ministers and MKs. It's also party policy of one of the coalition parties. My point is that made by Horovitz: the right-wing in Israel is changing and becoming considerably more radical and opposed to a two-state solution.

So far the left and the centre haven't held together nearly as well. Though I do have hopes for Lapid and Yesh Atid (one of whose Ministers accused the Jewish Home party of making 'delusional proposals' and trying to 'sabotage negotiations). Hopefully the right morphing into a far-right will strengthen the centre. But the current polls show the right-religious parties looking likely to increase their majority.

Anyway, Goldberg's posted an article on this whole story which I agree with:

Is Israel an Apartheid State?
APR 29, 2014 11:54 AM EDT
By Jeffrey Goldberg
So, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a mistake by thinking that a meeting of the Trilateral Commission was off-the-record. Is there anything holy in this world? What next? Will the Illuminati be giving TED talks? Are the Elders of Zion going to take questions on C-Span?

In a fit of candor, Kerry told the commissioners (if that's what you call them) that a one-state solution (so-called) for the Israel-Palestine conundrum either leads to "an apartheid state with second-class citizens -- or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state." (A full report on Kerry's remarks can be found at the Daily Beast, whose reporter apparently taped the remarks.)

Carefully coordinated, entirely spontaneous bursts of outrage ensued, not only from Republicans and Israelis, but also from Democrats. "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and any linkage between Israel and apartheid is nonsensical and ridiculous," tweeted Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

I will dissent from Boxer's critique, both because I believe that Kerry is a pro-Israel secretary of state who worries about the Jewish state's future, and because I myself have used the word "apartheid" not only to describe a possible terrible future for Israel, but also as a way of depicting some current and most unfortunate facts on the ground.

In a 2004 New Yorker article I described how the settlement movement was slowly destroying the idea of a Jewish democratic state of Israel:

[Ariel] Sharon seems to have recognized -- belatedly -- Israel's stark demographic future: the number of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be roughly equal by the end of the decade. By 2020, the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola has predicted, Jews will make up less than forty-seven per cent of the population. If a self-sustaining Palestinian state -- one that is territorially contiguous within the West Bank -- does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority.

A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank. Inside the borders of Israel proper, Arabs and Jews are judged by the same set of laws in the same courtrooms; across the Green Line, Jews live under Israeli civil law as well, but their Arab neighbors -- people who live, in some cases, just yards away -- fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws, administered by the Israeli Army. The system is neither as elaborate nor as pervasive as South African apartheid, and it is, officially, temporary. It is nevertheless a form of apartheid, because two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws.

I suppose this passage makes me an enemy of Israel, in the same way Kerry is an enemy of Israel, and in the same way that the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (who is also Israel's most decorated soldier) is an enemy of Israel, because Barak has also warned about the dangers of the status quo: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel," he said in 2010, "it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Few of the conditions I described in that 2004 article have changed, but I have decided, for a number of reasons, to try to avoid using the term apartheid to describe the situation in the West Bank. One, deployment of the word doesn't start conversations, it ends them. (Former Middle East negotiator George Mitchell taught me this lesson.) Real enemies of Israel -- Muslim supremacists of Hamas, anti-Semites in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and so on -- use the term "apartheid" not to encourage a two-state solution that would end official discrimination on the West Bank, but to argue for the annihilation of Israel.

Two, to describe the West Bank as an experiment in apartheid is insulting to the actual victims of South African apartheid, who lived under a uniquely baroque and grotesque set of race-based laws. (I owe a number of friends from South Africa for this insight.)

And three, to describe Israel as an apartheid state, or as a state on the road to apartheid, does not adequately capture the complexity and contradictions of Israel today. In most of Israel -- the pre-1967 Israel, not the occupied West Bank -- Arabs have more rights as citizens than they have in most any Arab country. There is still discrimination, and state resources are still distributed unfairly, but Arabs serve in the highest reaches of all branches of government. In fact, an Arab judge presided over the rape trial of a former president of Israel. As difficult as the facts of that case were to stomach, there was great happiness in Israel that an Arab citizen could send an Israeli president to jail without discernible complaint, even from the Israeli right.

The problem is not inside Israel; the problem is on the West Bank. The settlers who entangle Israel in the lives of Palestinians believe that they are the vanguard of Zionism. In fact, they are the vanguard of binationalism. Their myopia will lead to the end of Israel as a democracy and as a haven for the Jewish people. The regime they help impose on Palestinians is cruel, unfair and unnecessary. Rather than label this regime in an incendiary fashion, I now prefer simply to describe its disagreeable qualities.

But if Kerry, following Barak's lead, wants to warn about a possible apartheid future for Israel, I'm not going to condemn him as anti-Israel. Israeli leaders must open their minds to the possibility that he has their long-term interests at heart.

[Valmy]

The facts are the facts.  An argument that the Jewish birth rate is high (and declining) while the non-Jewish birthrate is higher still (and declining more slowly) doesn't make untrue that most projections that show that Jews will not forever be the majority population of Israel.

But those are not the facts. The Jewish birth rate is increasing, and the non-Jewish birthrate is declining.  This has been true for about a decade.  Granted that is inside Israel.

[Razgovory]

The facts are the facts. 

And as all good Reaganites know, facts are stupid things.

[Viking]

http://www.ibtimes.com/israels-demographic-time-bomb-arab-majority-state-213933

From this piece:

Moscovitch: Annexation of the West Bank by Israel would substantially skyrocket Arab population numbers, and the birth rates of non-Jews would remain high and potentially surpass the Jewish Israeli population. For this reason, it is imperative that Israel not annex the West Bank and negotiate a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians to ensure Israeli security and provide the Palestinians with sovereignty in their own state.

Without a two-state solution and the annexation of the Palestinian population of the West Bank, Israel will eventually turn into a single, bi-national state that would dissolve Israel's Jewish identity.

That's precisely what people are talking about, not the threat within Israel's borders.

OK, can you spell out a scenario for how this might happen. Especially one where when the Israeli government says "no" doesn't end the issue.

I've spelled out the scenario. I don't understand the question to which the Israeli government is saying 'no' to.

The demand by non-citizens living outside israels borders for the vote. Israel doesn't have to annex Jericho, Ramallah and Gaza. Step 1 in saying no is not annexing these cities, step 2 in saying no is refusing to let these cities be annexed. The problem you describe only happens if Israel imposes it on itself. There is no point where such an annexation is forced upon israel. They can continue to occupy in perpetuity arguing the two state solution that the palestinians are incapable of negotiating for.

The people in Oslo area A demand a vote in israeli elections, israel says no, arguing that these people are not israelis but rather palestinians who are supposed to get their own state when their leadership manages to get their shit together. There the matter rests. It doesn't matter if the Area A palestinians are 10%, 50% or 99% of the total population.

Again the mind reading. I hate to feel the need to define cabinet collegiality and explain how in democracies not all members and supporters of a government share it's policies and view 100%. The official policy of all Israeli governments since UNSC242 has been to accept it.

It's not mind-reading it's public statements by ministers and MKs. It's also party policy of one of the coalition parties. My point is that made by Horovitz: the right-wing in Israel is changing and becoming considerably more radical and opposed to a two-state solution.

So far the left and the centre haven't held together nearly as well. Though I do have hopes for Lapid and Yesh Atid (one of whose Ministers accused the Jewish Home party of making 'delusional proposals' and trying to 'sabotage negotiations). Hopefully the right morphing into a far-right will strengthen the centre. But the current polls show the right-religious parties looking likely to increase their majority.

Anyway, Goldberg's posted an article on this whole story which I agree with:

The mind reading bit is not about the minority which has views different from official government policy (as Nick Clegg what that is like), but rather about arguing that the non-crazy cabinet members secretly hold the same crazy views as the crazy ones do.

Goldberg's article certainly doesn't argue that Israel is an apartheid state but rather that his conspiracy theory says it will be.

[jimmy olsen]

The demand by non-citizens living outside israels borders for the vote. Israel doesn't have to annex Jericho, Ramallah and Gaza. Step 1 in saying no is not annexing these cities, step 2 in saying no is refusing to let these cities be annexed. The problem you describe only happens if Israel imposes it on itself. There is no point where such an annexation is forced upon israel. They can continue to occupy in perpetuity arguing the two state solution that the palestinians are incapable of negotiating for.

If they don't officially annex the land, but continue to occupy and rule over them in perpetuity, with no plans to change, how is that different?  How long does Israel have to control the west bank before annexation is de facto rather than de jure? Another 50 years? Another 100 years?

[Viking]

The demand by non-citizens living outside israels borders for the vote. Israel doesn't have to annex Jericho, Ramallah and Gaza. Step 1 in saying no is not annexing these cities, step 2 in saying no is refusing to let these cities be annexed. The problem you describe only happens if Israel imposes it on itself. There is no point where such an annexation is forced upon israel. They can continue to occupy in perpetuity arguing the two state solution that the palestinians are incapable of negotiating for.

If they don't officially annex the land, but continue to occupy and rule over them in perpetuity, with no plans to change, how is that different?  How long does Israel have to control the west bank before annexation is de facto rather than de jure? Another 50 years? Another 100 years?

Well, according to the UN charter, never, time just isn't a factor. Border have to be set by negotiations, not by force. The green line doesn't turn from a cease fire line into a border just because time passes. To be technical there are plans to change, they just need to keep a fig-leaf of negotiations available.

[derspiess]

seems more likely that the Palestinians will be given the option to move. With or without them liking it.

So, they will be assigned to tribal homelands with or without their consent?

Sounds a lot like apartheid to me.

Al-Bophuthatswana FTW.

Anyway I'm not surprised by this Kerry gaffe.  But at least he's not Susan Rice.

[Malthus]

The demand by non-citizens living outside israels borders for the vote. Israel doesn't have to annex Jericho, Ramallah and Gaza. Step 1 in saying no is not annexing these cities, step 2 in saying no is refusing to let these cities be annexed. The problem you describe only happens if Israel imposes it on itself. There is no point where such an annexation is forced upon israel. They can continue to occupy in perpetuity arguing the two state solution that the palestinians are incapable of negotiating for.

If they don't officially annex the land, but continue to occupy and rule over them in perpetuity, with no plans to change, how is that different?  How long does Israel have to control the west bank before annexation is de facto rather than de jure? Another 50 years? Another 100 years?

The Israeli plan isn't to "rule over them", it is to build an armed wall to keep them out (adjusting the wall to take the bits they want) and then cease to care what they do on the other side of it, as long as whatever they do isn't done to Israelis.

I simply cannot see how this plan, if implemented, would lead to the people on the other side of that wall becomming de facto Israeli citizens, whether first or second class.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Did the apartheid government consider residents of Bophuthatswana to be South African citizens or citizens of another country?

[Zanza]

Did the apartheid government consider residents of Bophuthatswana to be South African citizens or citizens of another country?

The residents of the homelands lost their South African citizenship when the homelands were made "independent" countries in the 1970s.

[derspiess]

I just always liked saying the word "Bophuthatswana".  Most others in my Southern African Politics class had trouble pronouncing it

[Viking]

Did the apartheid government consider residents of Bophuthatswana to be South African citizens or citizens of another country?

It's actually a bit complicated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan

But, basically the were deprived of south african citizenship, which they had held or had a right to before. They were being deprived of their second class citizenship to be sure.



The really tricky thing about the west bank is that there have never at any time been any recognized borders or any kind of legitimate settlement previously between arabs and jews. This is an open sore which has remained open since 1948. There is no border. There are no unilateral actions israel can take which will end the conflict short of full return.