March 05, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - In the small, American Jewish community where I grew up, I never heard criticisms of Israel, or experienced anti-Semitism. And yet I was frequently reminded by my Hebrew and Sunday school teachers of the anti-Semitic hatred that Jews had endured throughout the ages, and especially during the holocaust. My grandmother explained, sometimes tearfully, how her family had lost touch with cousins, aunts and uncles in the “old country” during the Second World War, never to hear from them again.

But the narrative did not end there. Israel, I was told, was the only country that Jews could truly regard as safe. Indeed, Jews had a “birth-right” to return to the “Land of Israel”. Based on vague, biblical justifications I was told that we were the “chosen people”.

As a teenager, I found the claim of Israel to be the Jewish ancestral homeland very strange and unconvincing, particularly as my parents had been active in the anti-racist civil rights movement. This feeling was strengthened after I traveled to Israel-Palestine in the mid-1980s. On the eve of what became known as the first Palestinian uprising against settler-colonial domination, I observed widespread fear and blatant discrimination directed against those who were not Jewish, while I simultaneously experienced the touching hospitality of Palestinians. Later, as a young lawyer, working in apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s I again observed widespread fear and discrimination, directed against those who were not white, which reminded me of what I had experienced in Israel-Palestine.

After this last experience, I found the Zionist claim to justifiably dominate another people on the basis of Jewish suffering to echo the claim by white Nationalists in South Africa, who justified racial apartheid in South Africa on the basis of Afrikaaner suffering.

Accompanying the Zionist narrative, a further pro-Israel claim emerged in the late 1990s; referred to as the “new anti-Semitism”, it was argued that criticisms of Israel were a new form of expressing hatred against the Jews. This claim persists, maintained by an assortment of lawfare organisations and Israel-lobby groups, even though it is now strongly questioned by many Jews, including the Israeli film-maker Yoav Shamir who produced an award-winning documentary on this topic.

As I will discuss in this article, which complements another recent article in Mondoweiss by Jonathan Cook, both claims are not only appallingly hypocritical; they also serve as a shameless defence of Israeli apartheid.