Conflict Avoiders

A consistent theme of this blog has been to draw attention to a tendency of political critics to put forward their arguments using a borrowed authority. Thus we see the veterans used by Democrats to oppose the Iraq war, discrimination against minorities used to argue against civil liberties violations, and everyone hiding behind the conclusions of ‘neutral’ commissions.

Now, in the UK’s Guardian, critics of Israel are adopting a similar tactic. A two part series in that paper equates Israeli treatment of the Palestinians with the Apartheid system in South Africa. The series makes for interesting reading; there are undoubted similarities between the two histories, as both became Cold War Western client states, regional policemen against the threat of Third World nationalism. Indeed, the two pariah states did form a close, if awkward, relationship from the 1970s up until the end of Apartheid and the first multiparty elections. And both faced Soviet backed guerilla movements who argued their claims in a fiery language of the universal right to self-determination.

But South Africa became the paradigmatic liberal cause of the 1980s. As colonialism and racist domestic laws were discredited, the consensus on South Africa became universal. Politicians, who shied away from speaking out against the brutal treatment of African-Americans at the hands of US police, felt comfortable decrying the brutality of apartheid. Israel in contrast, has always tugged two ways at the liberal heart-strings; on the one side an impoverished oppressed group that struggles for democracy, on the other, a plucky group of Jews, survivors of the moral absolute evil of the 20th Century, the Holocaust. Now Palestinian sympathizers would like to co-opt the moral weight of the anti-Apartheid struggle.

But while we can understand the temptation, this strategy raises a number of problems. The Guardian article itself quotes Ronnie Kasrils, member of the South African government and campaigner for Palestinian rights, who claims, "there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context." Indeed. The comparison with apartheid shifts the ground of the argument so that the Palestinian claim to justice is based not on their oppression, but on their similarity to black South Africans.

Meanwhile liberal compassion for the victims of apartheid was often a complex affair, exercised when children were shot in the townships, but diluted when nationalists fought back against apartheid troops. Palestinians have already struggled with such vacillations in the past; they should avoid at all costs becoming the next victims of the humanitarian impulse. Surely we should be able to argue against genuine oppression when it exists, without having to resort to this most basic common denominator of liberal politics. Palestinians need democratic rights not because they evoke memories of another downtrodden race, but because they are members of the human race.