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Worried about apartheid? Too late, Mr Olmert, it’s already here

Tony Karon, writing in The National:

"In a remarkable interview last November, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert cautioned that unless it could achieve a two-state solution quickly, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. The reason, he said, was that Israel would be internationally isolated. “The Jewish organisations, which are our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

And:

"Even as Israeli officials admitted last week that they were hoping to “rebrand” Israel’s image abroad, the Israeli media were reporting that six Israeli soldiers who had fought in Gaza were alleging that men in their units had indiscriminately killed Palestinian civilians because of what they said were permissive rules of engagement. There is only so much that “rebranding” can achieve when it is the product, rather than its packaging, that is at the root of the problem.

And that is where the apartheid warning used by Mr Olmert and other Israeli advocates of a two-state solution becomes an unintended confession. It is not some demographic milestone that will tip Israel into the realm of apartheid, because apartheid is a qualitative rather than a quantitative term: it refers to a situation in which a whole category of people were denied the rights of citizenship in the state that ruled over them. South Africa’s apartheid would have been no more acceptable to the world had black people comprised 45 per cent of the population rather than 80 per cent. And since 1967, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza have been living under the control of a state that denies them citizenship.

What Mr Olmert and others are really saying, without realising it, is that Israel is already in an apartheid situation – and that if it doesn’t end that situation soon, the world will notice and begin to respond accordingly."

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