With Hanukkah as an inspiration, one might find some light in the ongoing, incredible images of what appears to be a continuance of the Arab uprising that started during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May. The fight at the entrance to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, the most important roads in Jerusalem being blocked for wedding celebrations, and the "standard" shouts aimed at Jews in mixed cities are all disturbing and cause real concern for what awaits us. But there is one ray of light, which is the end to the perception of Israel as an "apartheid state."
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For years, radical left-wing Israeli groups, with help from their friends overseas and MKs from the deluded Left, have claimed that the Jewish state is an apartheid regime. One would need an enormous amount of historical ignorance and blindness to look at the sights that happen over and over again and imagine using the term "apartheid" after "Israel." And if there is something like it, it is without a doubt the most failed attempt at apartheid in human history.
Here are two instances that illustrate how absurd the claim is. This week, police arrested a young Arab man after he was caught on camera blocking the Begin Highway in Jerusalem as part of a wedding celebration. The incident took place three months ago. He was known to the police and they fined him. Only after the footage was released on social media did the police remember to make arrests.
In the second incident, minors blocked off the entrance to Jerusalem during the Ahuvia Sandak protests and were beaten and arrested, led off to the court in handcuffs and with their feet bound. In South Africa, could the oppressed have been treated with kid gloves, while the oppressor was led in cuffs to a jail cell? The answer is clear. Were Black South Africans under the boot of apartheid allowed to riot, stab, and shoot at the entrance to a hospital, and find themselves at home a week later? It's doubtful.
Another option is that Israel is operating under a kind of "reverse apartheid," one that discriminates, but gently, and is soft on criminals when it comes to appointing doctors and judges and MKs, even if they support terrorism against citizens of the state. On the other hand, to cause the Arab minority to suffer and discriminate against them from north to south, the government that "oppresses" them allows them to express support for unchecked violence and promise that it will resurface during the next war.
Ironically, it was the violent Arab nationalists raising their heads that smashed the delusion that if we would ignore the danger, it would disappear, and also proved that claims that Israel is a racist, discriminatory country are some of the biggest lies told about it.
It's time to shelve the apartheid theory, even if it's not clear that will help. Anyone who tries to miscast Israel as a racist dystopia doesn't intend to stop. Claims about "apartheid" were just part of a long list of excuses. Once it was infiltrators, then settlers, then "processes identified with the 1930s." The name changes, but the goal stays the same – to find darkness within the light. They see Israel as an evil state going back to the Maccabees, the source of all trouble and ills. It's time to find a new campaign and drop the ridiculous "apartheid" claim.
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