While the rest of us were honouring the victims of the Holocaust last week, Amnesty International were drawing up plans to brand Israel an apartheid state.
What disgrace to slander the Middle East’s only democracy and open society as racist. It is an insult not just to Israel, but to black South Africans who suffered under apartheid’s brutal rule.
Is Israel perfect? No, of course not. What country is?
But does it practise systematic official discrimination, treating people as second-class citizens or separating the population on the basis of their background or ethnicity? Absolutely not.
As a student, I campaigned against apartheid in South Africa and I’ll never forget the live pictures of Nelson Mandela walking to freedom. It was a huge cause for my generation because apartheid was a brutal system of segregation based on race. Every area of government and people’s lives were based on the colour of their skin. Schools, colleges and universities, the civil service, police, military and judiciary all run under a strict system of segregation.
Think about this: black people in South Africa were not allowed even to vote. Out of almost 400 million Arab citizens across the Middle East, the only ones who can choose their government in what we would recognise as free and fair elections are those in Israel.
The South African legal system enforced discrimination. The Israeli system upholds equal rights for all with freedom of speech and assembly for everyone. The education system, health services, the police and armed forces are completely integrated. In South Africa, they were totally separate.
An Arab judge tried and jailed a Jewish former president of Israel. The Knesset is one of the most disputatious and diverse legislatures in the world representing all parts of Israel’s multi-ethnic society. An Arab party is part of the governing coalition - a government that has both Jews and Arabs serving together.
The campaign to brand Israel an apartheid state is not just an appalling smear on the region’s only democracy but a barrier to a peace process and solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well, because demonising Israel, singling it out for criticism and holding it to standards never applied to other countries, drives people apart and makes dialogue and discussion more remote. It also gives the Palestinian leadership the impression that pressure from organisations like Amnesty or the West might lead to a Palestinian state, when this will only in fact be achieved by building trust, by negotiation and compromise.
These campaigns lead to racism on the streets of Britain, too, because they fuel anti-Israel obsession and are used to justify attacks on people who are identified with or support the Jewish state.
But the biggest insult of all is smearing as racist a state set up as a safe haven for victims of racism. A country founded to provide a refuge from centuries of antisemitism a few years after the Nazis attempted to murder the entire race and the industrial slaughter of six million Jews is being slandered with this outrageous insult.
What could be worse than accusing Holocaust survivors and their descendants who helped build this great country of constructing a systemically racist society?
