The ‘Israeli apartheid’ libel has completely fallen apart

‘Palestinian parties will redraw Israel’s political landscape’, says a banner headline in the Guardian following yesterday’s Israeli General Election. How curious. Not long ago the Guardian was publishing headlines declaring that ‘Israel perpetrates apartheid’. Its columnists wanged on about Israel’s cruel ‘apartheid system’. Yet now you’re telling us that not only can Arabs in Israel vote but they can even become powerbrokers of the Jewish State’s future?

Overnight, the apartheid lie has completely collapsed. Some of us never believed it, clocking it as yet another Israelophobic libel designed to smear the Jewish State as nasty, barbarous and illegitimate. Yet surely others can see through this calumny now, too. Joe Public has heard for years that Israel is an apartheid state that treats Arabs as brutishly as the old South Africa treated blacks, yet then he wakes up this morning to the news that Israel’s ‘Arab parties’ have won ‘kingmaker status’. He must feel like he’s got moral whiplash. You know who never had kingmaker status over anything? Blacks in South Africa.

All the giddy talk of the Arab parties possibly becoming the dealmakers of Israel’s future follows a pretty indecisive election. At the time of writing, with 60 per cent of votes counted, neither of the two main blocs are on track for 61 Knesset seats – the number you need to form a government. Neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc nor Gadi Eisenkot’s ‘change bloc’ has crossed that line. Although early indicators suggest Netanyahu’s Likud will be the single largest party, so commiserations to all the Western libtards who hoped ‘genocidal Bibi’ would get a drubbing.

Arab parties, meanwhile, seem to be performing well. Polling data suggest there was a huge spike in turnout in Arab-majority areas of Israel. The Joint List and Ra’am – the two main Arab factions in Israeli politics – are projected to double their share of seats in the Knesset. The forging of a new government is likely to be a tortured, drawn-out process, not least because both the Netanyahu bloc and the Eisenkot bloc have ruled out making alliances with the Arab parties, on the basis that they have no ‘shared values’ politically.

Yet even through all the mess and uncertainty, one thing shines bright: Israel is not an apartheid state. What was staggering yesterday was the speed and ease with which the voluble defamers of the Jewish State switched from calling it an apartheid hellhole to giddily sharing clips of Arabs and Bedouin people riding their camels to the polling station to put pressure on Netanyahu. These people know they’re lying, don’t they? Or I guess they might just be thick.

The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is such a flagrant lie you almost have to admire the nerve of those who propagate it. There are 2.1million Arabs in Israel. They have the right to vote, the right to stand for office. They have the same rights as Israeli Jews to healthcare, welfare and labour representation. They serve as High Court judges, senior diplomats, commanders in the army. They play in Israel’s national sports teams.

Indeed, I had to chuckle last month when the digital army of emotionally incontinent Israel-haters started frothing over an evil Israeli footballer who simulated the firing of a gun to celebrate his goal against Austria. They backed off a little, doubtlessly bewildered, when they discovered his name: Saied Abu Farchi. They backed off a little more when it turned out he wasn’t pretending to fire a gun at all – he was mimicking a snooker cue. The Guardian published a retraction. It was a hilarious little implosion of the Israelophobic lie machine. Not an apartheid state. Not a gun-loving people.

Comparing Israel to South Africa is not only wrong – it is also a grotesque falsehood that both demonises the world’s only Jewish nation and minimises the true savagery of Apartheid-era South Africa. South African blacks were subjected to a totalitarian system of dehumanisation. They were forbidden from voting in national elections. They were even stripped of citizenship. Expressly racist laws granted them ‘citizenship’ only in Bantustans (various ‘homelands’ fashioned by the racist government). It was a legal framework engineered for one malicious purpose: to violently strip millions of human beings of every democratic right and every ounce of dignity.

It is a crime against the historical record to use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel. And to describe the West Bank, where of course things are more complicated given the interweaving strips of Palestinian land and Israeli land, but where there is nothing that remotely resembles the horror of South Africa-style Apartheid. What Israel’s critics do, time and again, is rummage through the barbarism of history in search of labels they might stick on the Jewish State. ‘Settler colony’, ‘apartheid’, ‘genocide’ – in the gobs of Israelophobes these are not substantiated accusations but demonising libels, their aim less to explain than to exterminate the Jewish State’s legitimacy.

Everyone agrees critical thinking is good. So let’s have some of it in response to all those headlines about how the Arabs in a supposedly anti-Arab apartheid state might soon have a whip hand over the future government. The keffiyeh mob are too drunk on their racist defamations to let the light of truth in, but everyone else should give it a whirl.