Push to boycott Israel only prolongs the Palestinian conflict

Israel is not an apartheid country. All citizens have equal rights,

ANY doubt about the baselessness of allegations that Israel is an apartheid country, as Greg Barns claims, should surely be dispelled by recent developments (“If Labor had gumption it would stand for Palestinian justice,” Talking Point, July 19).

As has always been the case, all Israeli citizens have equal rights, regardless of ethnicity, origin or religion. Israel’s Arab community is well represented in parliament, the army, the judiciary and all professions. Now, there’s an Arab party in Israel’s broad governing coalition, there are two Arab cabinet ministers as well as a deputy minister, and a member of the Arabicspeaking Druze community heads the country’s coronavirus response.

In the West Bank and Gaza, it’s less simple, but clearly not apartheid. While different laws govern Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, that is a requirement of international law. Were Israel to apply its laws to Palestinians in the West Bank, that would amount to annexation. Instead, it applies the law in effect before 1967, when Israel took control there as an interim transitional measure pending negotiations after it was forced to fight for its survival in the Six Day War.

In fact, all Palestinians in Gaza and the vast majority in the West Bank have their dayto-day lives governed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority respectively, under their own laws, in accordance with the 1994-1995 Oslo Accords. Gaza has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt due to frequent violence from ruling terrorist group Hamas, but all necessary humanitarian goods, such as food, water, fuel and medicine, are allowed in.

Similarly, West Bank Palestinians do face restrictions on their movement into Israelicontrolled areas, but only to prevent terrorism like that of the Second Intifada, when suicide bombers infiltrating Israel from the West Bank killed more than 1000 Israelis and maimed thousands more.

Palestinians could have been completely free from Israeli rule by now. Israel offered a Palestinian state in 2000, 2001 and 2008, including all of Gaza, almost the entire West Bank with land from within Israel in compensation for the remainder, a capital in east Jerusalem and compensation for refugees.

Sadly, the Palestinian Authority has not been prepared to reach the necessary compromise of accepting Israel’s right to exist in peace. It also continues to insist on the legally baseless “right of return” to Israel, not only of Palestinian refugees, but their millions of descendants, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, hoping the Palestinians would establish peaceful self-rule leading to further moves towards peace, has resulted in a terror enclave on Israel’s border, subjecting Israeli civilians to constant terrorism by rocket fire and arson attacks. This makes an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, adjacent to Israel’s population centres and industrial heartland, all the

more problematic.

Meanwhile, US and Israeli efforts to negotiate peace since 2008 have met with Palestinian rejectionism and recalcitrance, and a complete refusal to talk at all since 2014.

The Palestinian leadership has instead settled on a strategy of demonising Israel internationally in the hope of isolating it. In this, they are aided by groups like Human Rights Watch which issued a report distorting international law to falsely accuse Israel of apartheid, written by a veteran anti-Israel activist it had hired who had been making the same claims for years. Human Rights Watch has become so biased and extreme regarding Israel that its own founder wrote a newspaper opinion piece condemning it.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign doesn’t only target Israeli settlements, which haven’t expanded geographically for 20 years and, as even the Palestinian Authority has admitted, cover less than 2 per cent of the West Bank. It targets all Israeli companies, institutions and individuals. Such groups only prolong the conflict, because by convincing the PA that its demonisation strategy is working, they encourage Palestinian intransigence.

If Barns and others really want Palestinian justice, they should urge the Palestinian leadership to genuinely engage with Israel and work for a two-state peace that would benefit all Palestinians and Israelis.

Finally, contrary to Barns’ claims, no serious person or group says it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israel in the same way one would criticise any other country in the same circumstances. However, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, of which Australia and many other countries are members, has a working definition of anti-Semitism that makes clear that supposed criticism of Israel can sometimes cross over into anti-Semitism, especially when it aims to delegitimise Israel’s very existence. And when people obsessively and repeatedly use extreme terms to attack Israel while ignoring countries with genuinely bad human rights records, it inevitably does bring their motivations into question.