|
Trending Topics
|
There's Apartheid in the Holy Land, but Not in Israel
(Wall Street Journal) Prof. Eugene Kontorovich - There are reasons to be concerned about the emergence of apartheid in the Holy Land but not the ones Amnesty cites. The defining characteristic of apartheid - what distinguishes it from generic racial discrimination - is the rigid separation of groups in public spaces and positions of power. Thus, a sign of apartheid could be a government policy that bans real-estate sales or transactions to the disfavored group. Apartheid is suggested by policies that carve out massive zones where the disfavored group cannot live or work, create ethnically homogenous zones, and restrict the disfavored group to ghettos. One might consider it apartheid if a government enforced a policy of extrajudicial execution of members of a disfavored group. All these policies are practiced in the West Bank and Gaza by the Palestinian Authority government against Jews. The "Israel apartheid" meme is not just a lie, it is an inversion of the truth. In all areas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix openly. Yet all the areas under PA jurisdiction are Jew-free. Palestinian law makes selling land to Jews a crime punishable by death, often without trial. The South African government used death squads against blacks. The Palestinian government pays terrorists for killing Jews. In all the territories controlled by the Palestinian government, Jews are prevented from worshipping at their holy sites, despite explicit provisions in the Oslo Accords requiring the Palestinian Authority to protect such worship. The writer is a professor at George Mason University Law School and a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem.