Monday, September 17, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
I’ve always been curious whether certain words create their
own power or simply draw upon the power of that which they describe. The term “Holocaust,” which starts with soft
vowels implying vastness and ends with knife-sharp consonants, seems like it
would be evocative regardless of what it describes. Yet once this term came into general use to
describe the Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry, it drew upon the
massiveness of that event, eventually pushing out other terms (some foreign
like “Shoah,” some euphemistic such as “Final Solution” – a simple phrase which
itself can mean only one thing to today’s ears) to become synonymous with
history’s most horrific crime.
Fights over the term simply demonstrate its unique power to
move people emotionally. As horrific,
vast and mind-numbing as other historic mass murders have been (such as the
Armenian genocide, which many see as an historic “warm up” for other 20th
century ethnic exterminations), there is a reason we describe these as the
“Armenian Holocaust,” the “Rwandan Holocaust,” etc., rather than describing the
Shoah as the “Armenian genocide of the Jews.”
“Apartheid,” meaning “separateness”, resonates as a word,
even to those unfamiliar with the Dutch dialect used by South Africa’s white
Afrikaans population, implying as it does the English terms “Apart” and
“Hate.” And yet the ugliness of the system
it describes, a form of mass racial discrimination masquerading under formal
legalism, certainly contributes to this term becoming synonymous with bigotry
as state policy.
As with the term “Holocaust,” there are legitimate fights
over whether the term “Apartheid” belongs to the world, or just to those who
experienced the original phenomenon.
Anyone looking over the past century will see enough political murder
and racism to shake their faith in humanity.
But are all murders of any scale a “Holocaust,” and is all
institutionalized bigotry a variant on “Apartheid?” Many (but by no means all) Jews and South
Africans would argue that by allowing these terms to be used to describe
anything remotely smacking of large-scale killing or racism, one is not
universalizing them but draining them of any meaning whatsoever.
In the cauldron of debate over the Middle East, arguments
over the use or misuse of these terms are particularly acute. While some attempts have been made to
describe the Palestinian experience as a new “Holocaust,” this runs into a
problem when you realize that, unlike other historic genocides, the Palestinian
population has skyrocketed since Israel’s birth (especially in the
disputed/occupied territories that are supposed to be serving as stand-ins for
Hitler’s concentration camps).
“Apartheid” is by far the more frequent term of abuse hurled
at the Jewish state for its alleged “crimes.”
Thus the barrier built to stop mass bombing campaigns originating from
the West Bank is not a fence, a wall or even “the New Berlin Wall,” but the
“Apartheid Wall.” Jimmy Carter’s book
“Peace Not Apartheid” has basically been translated to the single phrase:
“Jimmy Carter says Israel is an Apartheid State,” (even if the author himself
has tried to weasel out of the implication of his chosen title).
Web sites with names like “It Is Apartheid” are dedicated
solely to the purpose of making Israel synonymous with Apartheid South Africa
(especially in the mind of people too young to remember the original), with BDS
itself simply a component of a wider “Apartheid Strategy” whose practitioners
believe that by replacing the term “Israel” with “Apartheid Israel” in all of
their communication and correspondence they can, over time, turn their
preferred version of reality into common wisdom.
But who gets to draw boundaries around where the term
“Apartheid” is used, even in debate over the Middle East? Some supporters of Israel have responded to
the “Israel Apartheid” slur by charging Israel’s accusers of practicing,
supporting or ignoring crimes of “Gender Apartheid,” “Sexual Apartheid” and
“Religious Apartheid” within the wider Arab world. And unlike some of the more fanciful charges
against the Jewish state, repression of women, homosexuals and religious
minorities by Israel’s neighbors is undisputable.
But who gets to decide if they are all variations on
“Apartheid?” If enough people started
using the phrase “Apartheid Saudi Arabia,” “Apartheid Syria” or “Apartheid
Gaza” in their daily communication, does that legitimize an accusation
masquerading as a descriptive phrase (a la “Apartheid Israel”)?
This is why the involvement of South Africa and South
Africans in this debate is so significant.
Absent the ability to characterize the Middle East conflict in Apartheid
terms, it becomes a less charged (and, as an aside, potentially more solvable)
political dispute. That being the case,
is it as clear as BDS advocates would like everyone to believe that South
Africans who participated in the fight against the original Apartheid see the
Arab-Israel conflict in the same terms as their own struggle?
To be continued…
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