Another day, another squalid Guardian op-ed perpetuating the lie that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state.
With Eurovision, an annual international song contest held across Europe, coming to Israel this spring, anti-Israel BDS activists are in the midst of a massive campaign to smear Israel.
Ever since Israel was tipped to win the 2018 competition with eventual winner Netta Barzilai’s Toy, Eurovision has become the latest battlefield on which the anti-Israel BDS campaign has been fought. Last month, leading BDS advocate and former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters penned an open letter calling on the BBC to urge relocation of the contest to another country.
A few weeks later, one of the cosignatories of that letter, musician Brian Eno, has written an op-ed in the Guardian, calling Israel an “actively repressive apartheid-like state.” The piece, entitled, “Israel must not be allowed to use Eurovision as a propaganda tool,” is a litany of half-truths and decontextualized facts.
It’s sad that this needs to be stated at all, but words have meaning. Apartheid is a legal system in which laws discriminate based on race or ethnicity. There is no dual system of law in Israel for Jewish and Muslim or Arab citizens.
You can read more about the Apartheid State Libel at HonestReporting’s dedicated resource page.
Under apartheid, black and white people didn’t have access to the same public services. They couldn’t sit on the same park benches and bus seats. They attended different schools, went to different swimming pools, and if black people were seen in certain areas at night, they could be shot on sight. Beaches, taxis, trains, even toilets were totally separated by race.
None of this is true for Arab citizens of Israel. There are plenty of ways to legitimately criticize Israel, but the apartheid claim is absolutely not one of them.
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It’s important to understand the legal distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Arab citizens of Israel are governed by the same laws, go to the same courts, and enjoy freedom of movement throughout the country. This not the case for Arab citizens under Palestinian Authority control. The reason for this is the same as why Canadians in the USA, for example, do not enjoy equal rights to American citizens – they are not citizens. Just as Canadians don’t have the right to vote in America, neither do subjects of Palestinian Authority have a right to vote and run in Israeli elections. Arab citizens of Israel, however, have both these rights.
Nevertheless, despite the ongoing periodical outbreaks of violence between Israel and Arabs under PA control, Israel grants entry permits to many thousands of non-citizens daily. Even then, Arabs who legally enter Israeli territory do not face the kind of discrimination experienced by blacks in apartheid South Africa.
Providing cover for Hamas
Beyond the atrocious apartheid claim, Eno repeats other Hamas talking points wholesale, never stopping to demonstrate a modicum of balance or willingness to address difficult truths.
Eno describes a cultural center in Gaza bombed by the Israeli armed forces last year as, “a place of music, theatre and dance.” The problem isn’t with what Eno says as much as what he doesn’t say; according to the IDF, the site also functioned as a Hamas nerve center, a hub of terrorism, weapons and hate.
Hamas, the terrorist group which seized control of Gaza in 2007 and has reigned with an iron fist ever since, routinely uses civilian infrastructure as a cover for its weapons and command centers. While doing so is in direct contravention of international humanitarian law, Hamas knows that as a sub-state actor, it is seen as the underdog facing the mighty Israel, and will escape censure. As a result, Israel is forced to either avoid hitting an ostensibly “civilian” site and allow Hamas to continue operating unimpeded, or to attack and face strong media and NGO criticism.
In simply categorizing the location of the strike as a mere cultural center, Eno parrots the Hamas line, and provides the terror organization with cover to continue its war crimes, and attacks Israel for defending itself.
Mischaracterizations and Missing Context
Eno uses scare quotes when mentioning that Israel imprisoned a poet for “inciting terrorism.” In reality, there is very little room for argument here. The poem called on people to “resist” and “evict” Israelis at a time when stabbing attacks on Israelis were practically a daily event. This simple fact isn’t mentioned in the Guardian article. Neither is the minor, inconvenient detail that the video released by the poet showed masked Palestinian youths hurling Molotov cocktails and rocks at IDF soldiers. Penning a poem at such a time, and creating a video which glorifies acts of violence, is incontrovertibly an act of incitement to violence and potentially murder.
Beyond that, Eno seeks to portray Israel as excluding Palestinians from the event, writing that “Israel’s myriad restrictions on the movement of Palestinians will ensure that almost all of them are excluded from the Eurovision festivities.” The reality is far more complex. As outlined above, there is no automatic right for non-citizens to enter any country. Despite this, Israel grants many thousands of Palestinians permits to enter Israel daily.
Then there’s the patently false description of the Gaza protests as “peaceful”. In the most recent protest, an IDF officer was injured Friday after an explosive device was thrown at him. Are grenades, machetes and guns “peaceful”?
This is what a border infiltration from #Gaza into #Israel looks like. See the man (0:30) clutching a meat cleaver? Imagine hundreds like him coming into Israeli territory, hoping to murder as many Israelis as possible.
This is what Israel is up against. pic.twitter.com/97c9jvEWOT
— (((Emanuel Miller))) (@emanumiller) May 14, 2018
From start to finish, Eno’s argument relies on numerous exaggerations, missing context, and falsifications. While there is plenty of room for opinion in the media, when the attack crosses the line to being more than slightly economical with the truth, it poisons the debate by sowing the seeds of mistrust and dishonesty.
