Israeli Apartheid Week/Information and Resources Posted: February 27, 2009

The fifth annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is scheduled to take place from March 1-8, 2009 in more than 40 cities around the world, including many U.S. cities. Events held as part of this year's IAW will focus on Israel's recent military action in Gaza to "further confirm the true nature of Israeli Apartheid" and the need for punitive measures against Israel, including boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), according to IAW's Web site.

Israeli Apartheid Week, which began at the University of Toronto in 2005, is an annual week-long series of events intended to increase awareness and discourse about Israel as an "apartheid regime" akin to that of South Africa. Past IAW events have taken place on college campus and at churches, community centers and elsewhere. Many have featured extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, including accusations of Israeli racism and apartheid; calls for a renewed BDS movement against Israel; and allegations that Israel is committing a 'Nakba' (catastrophe) against the Palestinian people.

The Apartheid Analogy

The allegation that Israel is an apartheid state has no basis in reality. In no way can the treatment of Arabs by the State of Israel be compared in any way to the treatment of the black majority in South Africa under apartheid. There is no Israeli ideology, policy or plan to segregate, persecute or mistreat the Arab population.

Apartheid was a uniquely repressive system, through which South Africa's white minority enforced its domination over the black and other non-white racial groups who made up more than 90 percent of the population. Apartheid – which means "separate development" in the Afrikaans language – was enabled through a host of laws such as the Group Areas Act, which banned blacks from "white areas," the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which prevented blacks and whites from marrying or even having sexual relations with each other, and the Bantu Education Act, which regulated the education of black children in accordance with their subservient social position. The regime imposed "Bantustans," impoverished autonomous homelands whose borders were designed to exclude economically viable land, upon 12 million black South Africans.

No such laws exist in Israel, which pledged itself to safeguard the equal rights of all citizens in its Declaration of Independence. Arab citizens of Israel have the full range of civil and political rights, including the right to organize politically, the right to vote and the right to speak and publish freely. Moreover, Israel has declared its acceptance, in principle, of a sovereign Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to be established as the result of bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. As Benjamin Pogrund, the prominent South African Jewish journalist who was imprisoned by the apartheid regime, has written: "Palestinians are not oppressed on racial grounds as Arabs but are, rather, the competitors in a national/religious conflict for land."

Ant-Israel divestment and boycott campaigns, launched by those who say Israel should be fought in the same manner as campaigns against apartheid South Africa, singularly demonize Israel and designate Israel for pariah status, while ignoring other states, including many in the Middle East, which systematically abuse human rights. If anti-Israel divestment and boycott activists were truly interested in aiding Palestinians and promoting Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, they would advocate constructive initiatives between Israelis, Palestinians and others. Unfortunately, most of these activists ignore such initiatives, and focus solely on bashing Israel and promoting punitive actions against the state.