Weaponizing Lies Like ‘Apartheid’ Against Israel Won’t Get You Peace - by Cade Spivey

To be clear, matters of Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty are not beyond debate. There are political, religious, and human rights issues that should be debated and considered very deliberately. But reducing one side or the other to terms that are the very embodiment of evil through ad hominem labels or inappropriately applied legal definitions is not helpful, and does not produce meaningful outcomes for people living these truths daily.

Cade Spivey..
Algemeiner..
17 August '20..

On a long drive from my native Indiana to to the state of Virginia, I listened to a podcast wherein the interview subject began with a fairly benign truism: “Words matter.”

The program, produced by Americans For Peace Now, began by stating that not every murder is a genocide and not all discrimination is apartheid. The interview then continued for another 30 minutes laying out a “legal” framework of apartheid, in order to shoehorn Israel into that definition, vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank.

I agree that words matter. The words we use to describe an issue directly influence the substance of a debate.

I further contend that facts matter, and that merely using legal terms to describe a legal framework does not establish facts independently. Law was not meant to be argued in the abstract.

The arguments made to establish Israel as an “apartheid state” on the podcast were irresponsible and unwarranted, and promoted key assertions that have become commonplace in the misinformed effort to establish Israel as an apartheid state.

The UN defines apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

The term was derived from the system of racial segregation imposed in South Africa from the late 1940s until 1994. Separation of the races was strictly enforced in public accommodation, trade, education, marriage, and even sexual acts. The purpose was to cement the power structures that existed at the end of the British colonization of the region.

The cynical invocation of the term is used in the hopes of eliciting a sympathetic response to the alleged victims — in this case, the Palestinian Arabs. When the term is used to describe Israel, it is as inappropriate an analogy as comparing apples to hand grenades.

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