Written by: James van den Heever, Anglican Church
Article source: Supplied

This article is part 3 in a 4-part series. Click here to read part 1.

One of the most hateful insults devised by pro-Palestinian organisations, including the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement (BDS), is that Israel is an apartheid state. The two motions under discussion both accept this as fact. In truth, this baseless accusation is founded on a misunderstanding, perhaps a wilful misunderstanding, of the historical facts.

The first point to make here is that this kind of anti-Israeli demagoguery knowingly conflates the state of Israel with the Occupied Territories, namely the West Bank Palestinian territory. The accusation that Israel itself is an apartheid state is easy to refute: Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel and benefit significantly from affirmative action programmes. They participate in the political life of the country on equal terms, and formed part of the recent coalition under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that displaced Benjamin Netanyahu.

To be sure, there are tensions between Jewish and Arab Israelis, and complaints that the latter are sometimes discriminated against, but this kind of friction is common in multicultural societies, even in America and Europe.

In fact, given the extreme hostility directed towards Israel until recently by the Arab world as a whole, one might argue that these intra-Israeli tensions are rather less than might be expected.

When it comes to the Occupied Territories, the position is completely different. As already noted, Israel’s occupation is solely the result of the numerous wars initiated by the Arab bloc against Israel which, against all the odds, it won. It is worth stressing that Israel has never been the aggressor since its formation in 1948, although it did execute a pre-emptive strike in the face of Arab mobilisation in what was known as the Six-Day War.

Having won these wars, it is perfectly entitled to occupy the conquered territory until it can be relinquished to a properly constituted authority that is prepared to negotiate peacefully, and at the very least, to accept the right of the state of Israel to exist at all. Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza without any peace deal in 2005 replaced an occupied territory with a hostile state focused on its destruction, come what may—disengagement from the much larger West Bank would make even less sense.

As occupiers of an extremely hostile and intransigent polity, it cannot be expected that the Israelis look beyond trying to ensure their own safety. The refusal of the Palestinians to adhere to any of the settlements brokered by various international players has made it impossible for Israel to quit the West Bank; it has also led it to taking extreme measures to protect its own security. To call these measures “apartheid” is ridiculous—they are the actions of a country occupying the territory of an extremely hostile enemy, not a government. Of course, we all wish it were otherwise, but these are the facts.

Given that this conflict has been going on for several decades, and given the extreme bias in favour of the Palestinians shown by much of the rest of the world, it should come as no surprise that Israeli attitudes have hardened. There are undoubtedly portions of Israeli society that see no future prospect of arriving at a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians—hence the push into Palestinian territories by Israeli settlers.

However, one should remain cognisant of the fact that, as noted, the state of Israel was not constituted with firm borders given the existential threat it faced from a hostile Arab world, and that the outcome of the war (or wars, as it turned out) would determine its ultimate boundaries. If the warlike stance of the Palestinians and their Arab masters has backfired, then we need to take that fact into account.

Israel has, in fact, shown little appetite for territorial expansion despite the extreme provocation it has endured. This can be seen in the cession of the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt after the Six-Day War, and its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

While this account has stressed the difficult position in which Israel was placed from its inception, it is also right to point out that by this time it is virtually impossible to arrive at a firm judgment as to the rights and wrongs of this complex conflict. But no judgment worthy of Christ can fail to take into account the undeniable truth that the ongoing misery experienced by the Palestinian people has its roots in the actions taken by itself, and its Arab allies, over the course of the last 60-plus years, and their unwillingness to negotiate peacefully in good faith.

In addition, a case can be made that the Palestinians have been used as pawns in the wider politics of the Middle East by their Arab allies. In his memoirs published posthumously in 1973, Syrian Prime Minister, Khaled Al-Azm wrote: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes, but we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.”

Overall, the Palestinian cause has been used cynically as a rallying point for various Arab causes, and as a way to deflect attention away from despotic or corrupt Arab regimes and also provide a rallying point for the fractured Arab/ Muslim world.

Anecdotal evidence suggests this is exactly why such a controversial resolution was passed by the South African Provincial Synod: the motion was introduced just after a yet another bruising and inconclusive debate about the admission of women to the episcopate. Some delegates have expressed the view that everybody was exhausted and seized this motion as an opportunity to reassert unity.

In tandem, the Palestinian cause has gradually been adopted by the left across the West as a “litmus test” of an individual’s commitment to so-called progressivism. The initial sympathy towards the formation of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust has evaporated, to be replaced by uncritical sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

This shift no doubt follows in the footsteps of Soviet Russia, which was initially extremely critical of the bad faith of the Arab world in relation to the 1948 UN resolution initiating the two-state solution, but which later could not resist the temptation to exploit the situation to further its aims during the Cold War.

The unintended consequence of this uncritical support has created the conditions in which the Palestinian leadership has become highly corrupt. As a result, aid payments from the international community have been interrupted by the fact that many OECD countries consider Hamas, the governing party in the West Bank, to be a terrorist organisation. Again, the situation is complex, but it seems fair to say that a better administration in the Palestinian territories would result in better conditions for Palestinians.

On a more profound level, and mindful of the fact that a fairly substantial minority of Palestinians is Christian, Christendom should recognise that the status quo briefly provided here, is above all, demeaning to the Palestinian people themselves. Palestinians are never asked to account for their actions, and no account is taken of their many underhand and immoral actions over the course of the years, while Israel is always called to account, not least by public opinion within its own borders.

This unequal treatment is clearly unfair to Israel, but it is also unfair towards the Palestinians themselves.

It effectively robs them of their agency. An essential part of being human, and created in God’s image, is to be held to account for one’s actions, both in society and, most important of all, before the Throne of God.

If the former should be seen as a dress rehearsal for the latter, then not allowing the Palestinians to be judged honestly on the same terms as the Israelis is actually an attack on their humanity and equal worth before God.

In Part 4, we discuss how the Church should be playing a significant role in ending the conflict between Israel and Palestinians today

This article is part 3 in a 4-part series. Click here to read part 4. 

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Date published: 10/09/2023
Feature image: Image for illustrative purposes only. Artwork from pixabay.com

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