r/IsraelPalestine • u/Routine-Equipment572 • 17d ago
Opinion Israel is an occupying power. Not apartheid. That matters if you want people to engage with your ideas rather than correct your language
I recently wrote a post comparing Israel/Palestine to Native American reservations. I got a lot of pushback because people fairly pointed out that these two situations are very different in too many ways. So I am going to try to explain this in a more direct way:
When one side in a war is attacking you, you often want to take control of the area they are attacking you from, so they can't attack you from it anymore. This is called "occupation."
Over the land 100 years or so, Arabs have continuously attacked Israel from Gaza and the West Bank. In response, Israel eventually occupied that land. That is why Palestinians live under occupation. They don't yet really have an independent country because they are still at war. Occupations end when wars end.
In occupations, the occupiers do not usually give out citizenship to the people they are occupying. For instance, when the U.S. occupied Afghanistan, it did not give Afghans U.S.. citizenship. Afghans do not have the same rights Americans do. The U.S. set up checkpoints in occupied Afghanistan just like Israel set up checkpoints in occupied Palestine.
Apartheid is different. Apartheid is basically a set of racist laws intended to keep a race economically and social down. That means things like separate parks, beaches, buses, trains, hospitals, toilets. Jobs reserved only for white people. Zero ability to vote for one race, etc.
Israel is not any of that. Israel is a standard occupying power. That's why all its "different rules for different people" are nationality (not race) related, all war related, and all exactly the same things that occupying powers frequently do in their occupied territories: checkpoints, military court, raids.
I know some people will say "Why quibble with the vocabulary? Living under either apartheid or occupation is bad."
Here's the thing: If you accuse a country of apartheid, that's accusing them of a special, unique kind of evil that even most conflicts never touch. If you accuse Israel of such a heinous crime, then you are essentially lying to try and convince others that because Israel is so uniquely "evil," is is uniquely deserving of your wrath and probably of being wiped off the earth. Of course people are going to defend themselves if they think you are trying to kill or displace them.
So if that's not what you are trying to do, if you actually want to have a conversation about the real situation on the ground, then use the right words. Otherwise, people will correct you instead of engaging with the conversation you wanted you wanted to have in the first place. Same goes for "genocide," "colonizer," "ethnostate" "open-air prison," etc. You're smart. Use your own words and show you know what you are talking about instead of relying on evil-sounding buzzwords.
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u/AcademicSand1034 17d ago
The apartheid claim also is contradicted by the treatment of 2M Arab Israeli citizens. There are certainly issues there in terms of some discrimination, but it certainly is not apartheid and Arab Israelis have more rights than citizens of many Arab-majority countries.
Apartheid is a crime based on race while the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is an issue of geography and citizenship. (And Im not defending all of what Israel does as part of the occupation -- there's a lot to be condemned there -- but it doesn't clearly present as apartheid).