Opinion
Arafat used the 'apartheid Israel' smear – but it goes back even further
The term has been used to delegitimise Israel for decades
February 24, 2022 17:00
2 min read
Published at the start of the month, Amnesty International’s report – Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination And Crime Against Humanity, to give it the full title – relaunches the political accusations levelled by “human rights” organisations B’tselem and Human Rights Watch last year.
Having claimed Israel has been an apartheid state since 1948, Amnesty is now suffering a fierce backlash. Even Amnesty’s Israel director, Molly Malekar, criticised the findings as “a punch to the gut”, “exaggerated”, “unhelpful”, as well as lacking context and being insensitive to antisemitism. Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid blasted the report.
Israeli Arab community leader Yoseph Haddad charged that it “erased” his Israeli Arab identity by telling lies and demonising a country it doesn’t like for “its own political gains”.
Amnesty’s conclusions are not new; the strategy of branding Israel as an apartheid state to deligitimise it goes back decades. The same slur has been used by Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to demonise, isolate, and destroy the Jewish state.
As early as 1961, Ahmed Shukairy, the PLO’s first chairman, and formerly the Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, declared to the UN General Assembly that Israel was practising “the apartheid of South Africa”. For good measure he added in the incendiary accusation that Israel embodied “Eichmann in a state”.
Shukeiry’s “apartheid” denunciation came six years before Israel controlled the West Bank. It targeted Israel even within the borders it held since its very founding as a modern state in 1948, never mind the territory it would go on to take from Jordan, Egypt and Syria after the surprise victory in the Six Day War in 1967.
Shukeiry’s successor Yasser Arafat continued the assault on the fragile Jewish State. In his infamous 1974 address to the UN, Arafat presented Zionism and Apartheid as the remaining evils of the 20th Century.
He and his Soviet sponsors successfully mobilised third world and non-aligned countries to pass UNGA Resolution 3379, “Zionism is Racism,” demonising as evil the notion of Jewish self-determination a mere three decades after the Nazi genocide of six million Jews.
Amnesty’s cancellation of Israel’s legitimacy mirrors the UN resolution, which constituted a key part of the PLO’s “long war” strategy. The Soviet-backed disinformation campaign sought to isolate and undermine Israel as a “colonialist and imperialist” implant in the Middle East. Arafat skilfully and deceptively branded Israel as a racist Western power in order to win the support of nonaligned countries.
Arafat had seeded the racialisation of Israel as a white supremacist entity. He successfully fused Israel with apartheid South Africa, whose condemnation and isolation coalesced the international community.
Fast forward to 2001. Arafat injected his strategy of the subversion of Israel into the mainstream at the first UN Sanctioned World Conference Against Racism hosted in Durban, South Africa.
He and his nephew, Palestinian Authority (PA) UN Ambassador Nasser al Qidwa guided the Durban NGO Forum to declare Israel a “racist” and “apartheid” state.
Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s deputy and PA Chairman, has continued the legacy of libelling Israel an apartheid state, as during his UN Address in September 2021.
The Palestinian leadership’s decades-old rejection of Jewish sovereignty fits neatly with the Amnesty report. It further echoes a January 2022 statement by BDS movement leader Omar Barghouti, who has led the international campaign to eliminate Israel from the region. Barghouti reiterated that, “Israel cannot be, as a settler-colonial apartheid state… (it) cannot be a normal part of this region.”
The Amnesty indictment of Israel reflects both in letter and spirit the 60-year-old PLO eliminationist strategy of criminalising and racialising Israel as having been colonialist entity since 1948.
Whether Amnesty realise it or not, their report is working towards a final outcome shared with the PLO: the cancellation of the one and only democratic Jewish majority nation state.
Dan Diker is research Fellow and Director of the Program to Counter Political Warfare and BDS at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs