Israeli Apartheid, Genocide, Cease-Fire, and Other Myths

It’s been more than three months since Hamas’s massive terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Almost immediately after the news broke of the attack, anti-Semites the world over took to the streets to celebrate and, in many places, continue to do so. Oh, they aren’t anti-Semitic, they’ll tell you, they’re simply against the country of Israel. Yet the victims of the October 7 atrocities weren’t members of Israel’s government or military*. They were infants, teenagers, parents, old people, and the disabled. Victims were raped, tortured, burned alive, beheaded, and taken hostage. Even in other countries, individuals and groups were and continue to be harassed, accosted, threatened, and assaulted, not because they are Israeli (they aren’t) but because they are Jewish. So yeah, the perpetrators are anti-Semitic.

I’m glad we cleared that up.

The thing you have to understand about anti-Semites is that they’ll always find a reason to hate on Jews. Always. The Egyptians enslaved Jews because they had become so numerous in their land of self-imposed exile that the Pharaohs, who imagined an army rising up to threaten their power, used force to keep them powerless. After the an Arab man named Mohammed created Islam on the Arabian peninsula in the early 7th century, Islamic armies of conquerors invaded large swaths of the Roman Empire, including the general region of Palestine, killing Jews (and Christians and others) for the made-up crime of refusing to convert to the new religion. The Nazis imagined unspecified damage caused by the “racially impure” Jews. Today, Arabs/Moslems, leftists, and other terrorist apologists go out of their way to project their own malfeasance and bad intentions onto Jews as personified by the nation of Israel. Why they so hate the Jews is another topic, which I will explore in a future post.

For now, let’s look at today’s de rigueur manufactured excuses: apartheid and genocide, and the related demand for an Israeli ceasefire.

Apartheid

It’s a little difficult to pin down what Israel’s enemies mean by “apartheid” because it’s not clear whether they’re complaining that Israel is a nation from which Arabs are prohibited or that Israel is forcing Arabs to live separately in the Gaza strip. Not that it matters. Both accusations are factually, verifiably, false.

The very word “apartheid,” of course, is designed to invoke emotional images of pre-1991 racial segregation in South Africa, and its impact relies on the ignorance of the audience in terms of both South African and Middle Eastern history. South African apartheid (the word itself is Afrikaans for “separateness”) was an official policy, enshrined in law, of racially segregating the majority black population and other “non-whites” such as Indians from the minority white population. A roughly equivalent American term, though a colloquialism, might be “Jim Crow.”

(Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure, I must mention that I dated a white man from South Africa in the late 1980s, just a few years before a new South African constitution officially ended apartheid. He claimed to oppose the policy in principle but defended it somewhat for what he called practical reasons, which were, as I recall, essentially that the whites didn’t want to be subject to rule by blacks, whom whites believed were too embroiled in tribal rivalries to be able to govern on a national level. It was a fear that was instilled in him since childhood, and needless to say, we didn’t see eye-to-eye on the matter, generally avoided the subject thereafter, and didn’t stay together long in any event.)

That said, I don’t know many details of South African history or the run-up to implementation of the apartheid system. What I do know is that the system was both du jure and de facto. Alleged Israeli “apartheid” is neither, because:

• Arabs live in the Gaza strip because they want to live apart from Jews. Man of them hate Jews and, if given the opportunity to kill a Jew, brag about it and are praised by others for it. That’s why the Gaza strip is called a “Palestinian territory” by Arabs who purport to be the aboriginal peoples of the region of Palestine. The fact that Arab culture developed on the Arabian peninsula while Jewish religion and culture began and developed even earlier in Palestine is either unknown to or ignored by those claiming the Jews have no place there. Nobody claims that Afrikaaners (the white successors of 17th century Dutch settlers) are indigenous to the horn of Africa or predated black peoples there.
• Arabs trying to enter Israel are subject to security measures and, sometimes, denial of entry because Arab extremists have come into Israel to carry out terrorist attacks since Israel has been a country. But it’s precisely because the Arabs of the Gaza strip want to be autonomous that Israel treats their common border as an international border and exercises a right to restrict access by those believed to be entering for nefarious reasons. No one ever considered the black-populated and white-populated areas of South Africa to be separate countries.
• Within Israel itself, Arabs can and do live and work, enjoy citizenship and all its privileges, and even serve in government in Israel. Blacks had none of that in the officially-designated white areas of South Africa or in the national government.
• The Gaza strip is not governed by Israel or by Jews. Its residents elected Hamas sympathizers and others who have ceded control to Hamas operatives.
• A corollary to the “apartheid” canard holds that, because of Israel, Gaza is an “open air prison.” But Gaza shares a southern border with Egypt, another Arab country. The reason people can’t cross from Gaza into Egypt is because Egypt doesn’t want them. None of the surrounding Arab countries do, because everywhere they go, they (in general, not every individual) cause trouble. It isn’t Israel preventing them from going to Egypt.

In short, Arab Israeli citizens have full civil rights that black South Africans never had under apartheid. In fact, if there were no Arab violence against Israel, if “Palestinian” civilians didn’t post videos on social media showing themselves dancing in the streets and praising attacks like those of October 7, Israel would have no reason to subject them to scrutiny when they tried to cross the border into Israel.

Genocide

Is Israel committing genocide against Arabs by killing civilians in bombing of Hamas targets? To determine that, let’s look at what genocide is and examine some examples from recent history.

Merriam-Webster online defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”

Historical examples of genocide include:

• The World War II Holocaust, the center of which was Germany’s Nazi government’s process of rounding up and killing Jews, whether directly or by starvation and illness, in order to entirely eliminate them from Europe. It was the 6 million** Jews who, marked for total destruction in Hitler’s “Final Solution,” were killed in greater numbers than any other single group. But the Nazis also committed mass atrocities in and out of their network of forced labor and death camps against non-Jewish people, killing millions of Soviet prisoners of war, Romani and Polish civilians, the mentally and physically handicapped, dissidents, and homosexuals.
• The Armenian Genocide during World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire massacred as many as 1.5 million** Armenians. Unlike the Germany’s post-war governments who have apologized for the Holocaust, formerly Ottoman Turkey has never so much as admitted that the documented mass murder of Armenians even took place.
• The Cambodian Genocide following the end of the Vietnam War. Brought to the popular consciousness by the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, the actions of the communist Khmer Rouge eliminated up to a third of the Cambodian population, as many as 3 million** people.
• The Bangladesh Genocide, in which Islamic fighters massacred at least 300,000 and possibly up to 3 million** Hindus during the war for Bangladeshi independence in what was then known as East Pakistan. The pro-Pakistani forces also committed mass rapes numbering in the hundreds of thousands**.

And those are just the genocides that occurred in the 20th century and had more than an estimated 1 million victims.

Do you notice what is not on that list? There is no “German genocide,” because the hundreds of thousands (up to millions) or German people who were killed during World War II were not targeted because of their ethnicity or nationality. They were tragic civilian casualties of war, the same way that millions of French civilians were. War is hell, as W.T. Sherman noted, and part of the hell is that innocent people die not because they’re targeted, but because they happen to be where the fighting or bombing happens. (I suppose one could consider the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan to be a genocide, as they deliberately targeted civilian cities. But alas, history is written by the victors, who have argued that the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed in a noble effort to end the Pacific war. Debate that amongst yourselves.)

Nobody disputes that Arab civilians in the Gaza strip have died in Israeli bombings. Their numbers, reportedly as high as several tens of thousands, aren’t reliable because they come from Hamas, who we know lies about everything. (Remember the hundreds killed and wounded when an Israeli missile hit a Gaza hospital? It turned out that was a lie. The number was closer to 50, the victims were in a parking lot outside the hospital, and the weapon that landed there was launched from within Gaza and–if we’re giving the terrorists the benefit of the doubt–might have misfired. But the larger fact is that Hamas operates out of, launches missiles from, and stores armaments in civilian areas like hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods. They use civilians, and even the Israeli hostages they took on October 7, as human shields, a practice prohibited by international law and commonly accepted rules of war. They even prohibited civilians from evacuating when Israel dropped leaflets warning them to move south to avoid planned bombings of Hamas facilities.

In other words, it could be argued that it is Hamas, not Israel, that is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way, while Israel takes pain to protect them from being “collateral damage.” Just like the Nazis did, right? [/sarcasm]

The fact is that it is Hamas, whose charter calls for the abolition of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in its place, attacks Israel and kills Jews to achieve that goal. Israel has never attacked its other Arab neighbors and had only gone to war against them when those nations attacked first. Israel has also signaled its openness for a so-called two-state solution (even though Hamas and other Islamist terrorist groups want a one-state solution, and that one state isn’t Israel). Israel has gone back to the negotiating table again and again, and you don’t do that if you’re intent on committing a genocide.

Cease-Fire

If we go back to Merriam-Webster online, we see that they define cease-fire as “a military order to cease firing” and “a suspension of active hostilities.” The second meaning is what we generically think of when we talk about military conflict. It implies that both sides have to take part; otherwise, the “active hostilities” would continue. Likewise, it takes only one party to resume “active hostilities.”

Let’s look at an historical cease-fire that wasn’t.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. In May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherland, Luxembourg, and France. In April 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The only reason Germany never invaded the the United Kingdom was that they couldn’t march in by land. So instead, they launched the Blitz, an 8-month aerial bombing campaign against London in 1940 and 1941.

Obviously, the United Kingdom fought back. In truth, the U.K. was already at war with Germany, seeing as they did the hand writing on the wall. Adolf Hitler’s goal was nothing short of the complete domination of Europe (“reunification,” he called it), and the U.K. was close enough to the mainland to count.

After the Blitz finally ended, nobody called on the U.K. to declare a cease-fire. Everybody knew, from earlier attempts by Czechoslovakia and Austria to placate Hitler, that Germany would use a cease-fire as an opportunity to sail some ships and waltz into England. How did they know? Because that’s what Germany always did when faced with complacency. (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself had tried to make nice with Hitler, and we all know how well that worked out for the Poles.) Everybody knew that the only way to stop the war was to defeat Germany, utterly and completely.

When someone shows you who he is, believe him. Hamas and its Islamist cousins the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, et al., have been waging war against Israel for decades. Those entities and Israel have agreed to several cease-fires, often brokered or co-brokered by other Arab countries. One of the terrorist groups always breaks it. Every single time. When Israel retaliates, the anti-Semites condemn Israel. Every single time. Why should Israel continue to reach cease-fire agreements with groups that have vowed to keep attacking until Israel is wiped off the map?

The sad fact, which it seems Israel has figured out, is that there is no more making nice with those people. The only way to stop the attacks is to defeat them, utterly and completely. And when another terrorist organization forms and attacks, Israel has to defeat that group, too, utterly and completely. Make it clear that no terrorist group will ever defeat Israel, just as it became clear to the other Arab countries who attacked Israel in the past that they would never defeat Israel.

Only when the terrorists stop attacking Israel and its citizens will Israel’s counterattacks end. Israel’s enemies have shown that, time and time again. As Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu said almost 20 years ago, “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”

The terrorist sympathizers can whine all day long, but they can’t change the reality they helped create.

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* All Israeli adults are required to serve a term in the Israeli Defense Forces. Few, if any, of the October 7 victims were acting in their military capacity when they were killed, raped, tortured, or kidnapped.

** The numbers of genocide victims are difficult to verify, in part because the perpetrators don’t usually keep records of their atrocities. The victims are often buried in mass graves. Every genocide count is a range of numbers, from the confirmed number up to an extrapolated maximum. When I present one number, it’s the latter.