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Source: https://jcpa.org/article/the-baseless-charge-that-israel-is-an-apartheid-state-again/
The Baseless Charge that Israel Is an Apartheid State, Again
(Ynet News) Dore Gold - The baseless accusations that Israel has adopted an apartheid system similar to South Africa's pre-1994 racial doctrine just won't go away. Former South African Supreme Court Justice Richard J. Goldstone, chief prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, wrote in the New York Times on October 31, 2011, that descriptions of Israel as an apartheid state are "unfair and inaccurate slander." "In Israel there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute." Goldstone headed a UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict in 2008-9, which tried to argue that Israel had deliberately killed civilians in that war. Goldstone eventually retracted the principal conclusions of his own report. The details here matter. In apartheid South Africa, there were white hospitals and black hospitals. Yet anyone today who wanders into the Emergency Room at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem will find both Jewish and Palestinian Arab patients treated by both Jewish and Palestinian doctors working side-by-side. Charging Israel with apartheid is not only unfair, it is completely inaccurate. So why do writers persist to argue that Israel is an apartheid state? Because Israel's adversaries are waging an ideological war against the Jewish state. Advocates of the Israel-apartheid libel hope that their campaign will lead to Israel's eventual replacement with a Palestinian Islamic entity. This campaign against Israel has had vile aftereffects that need to be noted. It is no coincidence that the world is witnessing an upsurge in anti-Semitism. Anti-Israel demonstrations today frequently have signs that refer to apartheid. Those pushing the "Israel is an apartheid state" rhetoric are playing with fire. The writer, former director-general of the Israel Foreign Ministry and former ambassador to the UN, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.