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Israel Has Its Faults, But Apartheid Isn't One of Them

(Washington Post) Richard Cohen - Google "Israel and apartheid" and you will see that the two are linked in cyberspace. Yet the Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset. Whatever this is - and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy - it cannot be apartheid. The West Bank is a different matter, but it is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan almost all of it will become a Palestinian state. Yet Israel's critics continue to hurl the apartheid epithet when they ought to know that it is a calumny. Interestingly, they do not use it for Saudi Arabia, which maintains as perfect a system of gender apartheid as can be imagined, or elsewhere in the Arab world, where Palestinians sometimes have fewer rights than they do in Israel.
2010-03-02 11:07:28
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