Benjamin Netanyahu has this week revealed himself as Israel’s own PW Botha, or maybe the Strom Thurmond of The Holy Land.[i]
By way of analogy, let’s consider how we talk about our own history and the Civil Rights Movement. We miseducate students (deliberately, I think) when we teach the history of the Civil Rights Movement as a struggle against racial segregation. Nor do things get any better if we frame the movement as merely a struggle against prejudice (my parents’ word) or “inequality” or even “institutionalized racism”.
Regardless even of the self-understanding of the movement or of the activists and participants in the struggle, the nature of the injustice, power, and social ill to be overcome was far more entrenched, virulent, and intentional than the web of public and private rules, customs, and institutions governing the racially separated use of public facilities and accommodations, or the customary norms that undergirded (and undergirds) the social distancing of blacks in white America.
The words we dare not use to name the social injustice at the core of that struggle are “apartheid” and, with even greater accuracy and precision, “White Supremacy.”
Apartheid (and segregation) are not simply rooted in some generalized tribalistic sentiments about us and them (so just slap your Aunt Crystal next time she simpers out the old “but isn’t it only natural for people to prefer the company of their own kind…”), they are sustained in law because they represent intentional racial separation for the specific purpose of establishing and perpetually enforcing superiority and securing all the benefits of social domination.
And suffer no soft-focus confusion about this: From the end of Reconstruction on, White Supremacy was inextricably intertwined with the fundamental assumptions of mainstream American political ideology—an ideology that transcended (transcends) boundaries of party, religion, or class.
Now, just like Botha and the National Party in South Africa, Strom Thurmond and the whole gang of Southern Democrats in Congress were not simply a race-baiting pack of segregationist troglodytes, they were the elected representatives of White Interests—White Power. As a group of Southern white politicians they were no more nor less evil than any gang of hooded, cross burning, rope carrying, white supremacist Klansmen—but they were twice as lethal because they held the power of law in their hands. And we should all always make sure our children know that these White Supremacist authorities were elected by majorities of nice, church-going folks who were desperately determined to keep the power they were raised to believe they were entitled to—power they believed they needed to hold in order to keep themselves safe from the “droves” of blacks surrounding them.
It is impossible to make any sense out of American history or our nation’s current character or conditions without unflinchingly confronting the role of the ideology of racial supremacy at the heart of institutions and norms like “segregation” and “racial prejudice” and “bigotry” that have warped, and continue to warp, our shared aspirations for democracy and justice.
And while racism may be an unavoidable artifact of human culture, Supremacist ideology is the specific and intentional construction of the dominant social group. (Slap you Aunt Crystal one more time, just for good measure.)
And so…
The calculated final-hour political tactics deployed—with great success, it should be noted—by Benjamin Netanyahu in this week’s election were precisely those of an apartheid party candidate.
First, by stating his rejection of any two-state solution, he has committed himself (and Israel) to continuous brutal conflict with upwards of 4 million Palestinians–conflict that can only end one of two ways: either (1) the complete subjugation of the Palestinians under the hostile rule of what could only accurately be described as a nothing but a regime relative to them, or (2) their Removal (as in America’s genocidal official policy regarding Indian tribes in the 19th century) from any lands Israelis wish to settle.
Second, by using anti-Arab racism to get out the vote, Netanyahu has made Israeli voters complicit in the normalization of not only racist “feelings” but racist intentions and actions as a part of Israeli society.
And thus we have watched Netanyahu’s transformation of Israel‘s government into an apartheid regime.
Here in the United States, progressives must continue insist that we stop whitewashing American history (and contemporary news accounts) when we teach the history (and current developments) of the struggle by black citizens to topple the American Apartheid regime and overthrow the illegitimate imposition of White Supremacist laws and institutions.
What must progressives here[ii] and Israel say regarding this recent, troubling development in Israel’s politics and government?
And, more importantly, to what standard shall we (who somehow enjoy the privilege of judging the actions of others’ struggle for liberation) hold Palestinians as they respond to the reelection of the heinous Likud leader and the policies his politics commit Israel?
[i] Let me warn all potential readers: Call me stupid, addled, asinine, ill-informed, or dangerously unbalanced if you wish, but if you decide it’s okay to call me an anti-Semite for what follows, I will come and punch you directly in your face. If that’s how you roll on matters involving politics and government in Israel, you should either read no further or just stifle yourself.
[ii] And given the recent cynical and disgusting collusion between Congressional Republicans and Netanyahu to bring Israeli politics literally right into our House, why shouldn’t we have something to say about Israel’s dangerous rightwing demagogues—they are, after all, affiliated gangsta homies with our own.
Back to the Root 