Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer based in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.
Two letters recently published in the Concord Monitor, written from two different perspectives – my writing and my thoughts on apartheid and democracy – piqued my interest, so I decided to respond.
I am pleased that readers of the Concord Monitor have enjoyed my columns over the years. In fact, since 2011 I have had the great pleasure of writing more than 500 columns on culture, religion, sports, travel and politics, many of which have appeared in the Concord Monitor, more than the number of words in “Moby Dick” and “Crime and Punishment” combined.
I wish I could have continued doing what I was doing before, freely, and had so much more fun.
A letter I received recently asks me to discuss my consistent focus on the escalating war between Israelis and Palestinians in occupied Gaza, as well as in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
Although I regret that I can no longer write about anything other than war and genocide, I refuse to abandon my solidarity with the calls for justice and freedom.
I regret that some see my views on war and genocide as one-sided, but I have no choice. There are no two sides to genocide, ethnic cleansing, or starvation. There are no two sides to resisting apartheid, administrative detention, illegal land confiscation and annexation, torture and enforced starvation, and condemning racism and bigotry.
Opposing US complicity in war crimes against humanity is not two-sided.
Of course, I miss the nights that kept me up and not having to worry about waking up to find someone’s obituary. I also miss writing spontaneous letters to loved ones, anxious that I might inconvenience them.
In my opinion, this is an existential crisis. Palestinians are being targeted and attacked because for over 76 years they have resisted every attempt, including by their own leaders, to not only defeat them but to dehumanize, erase, marginalize, delegitimize and reduce them to an unread, dusty footnote in history.
Opposing genocide and ethnic cleansing is not unfair, it is required of us, and I will not stand by while the settler-colonial state of Israel occupies, oppresses, and wages a war of annihilation against many of the peoples I know and love.
What many of Israel’s apologists ignore is that while Israel has an obligation to protect its people, which it must fulfill, it also has international obligations with respect to those it occupies and oppresses. Those it occupies have the right to resist, and while they do not have the right to kill innocent civilians, they do have the right to resist using force.
Israel has the right to pursue Hamas for the war crimes it committed on October 7, but it has no right to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing or pogroms in the occupied territories.
The campus protests and camps taking place today, which I support, are not a target of “the only democracy in the Middle East” – there are no truly democratic states in the Middle East. The student protests and camps are a courageous statement in support of Palestine and the Palestinian people who have been fighting for decades against an undemocratic apartheid state.
If supporters of Israel want to argue (a really low bar) that Israel is more democratic, at least for Jews, than its neighbors, I am willing to accept that desperate justification.
But that is not enough, because 14 million people share the land between the river and the sea, half Israeli and half Arab, and what matters to one matters to the other.
If they want to claim that Israel is a fully functioning democracy for all its citizens, especially after the passage of the Nation-State Law in 2018, they are mistaken.
When Israel passed that law, it had no constitution, and the character of Israel changed further.
“The Nation-State Law is now once again the subject of public debate, but not because of its content,” Professor Susie Nabot wrote in the Israel Democracy Review. “Most of its provisions are important and deserve to be included in the Constitution of the State of Israel. The problem is what is missing from it: no reference to minorities, equality, democracy or the Declaration of Independence, upsetting the delicate balance between Israel’s dual character as a Jewish state and a democratic state.”
Don’t you believe Israel is an apartheid state? Listen to what the Israelis have to say.
In his memoir, Israeli journalist Hersh Goodman writes about returning home from the 1967 Six-Day War and hearing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion speak on the radio. “He said that Israel had better withdraw from the territory and Arab population as quickly as possible,” Goodman recalls. “Otherwise, Israel would quickly become an apartheid state.”
Listen to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who said in 2010, “If these millions of Palestinians cannot vote, it will be an apartheid state.”
Listen to what former Israeli ambassador to South Africa Alon Liel said in 2013: “As things stand now, we are effectively one state until a Palestinian state is established. This joint state … is an apartheid state.”
2020, Yesh Din – Volunteer for Human Rights, “The conclusion of this legal opinion is that a crime against humanity, namely apartheid, has been committed in the West Bank. The perpetrators are Israeli and the victims are Palestinian… This crime has been committed not only through the colonization of the occupied territories, but also because the occupying power has made great efforts to consolidate its control over the occupied population and ensure their inferior status,” the Israeli group said in a statement.
Israeli human rights group Btselem reported in 2022 that “millions of Palestinians in the West Bank live under effective Israeli control but cannot take part in the political process, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in annexed East Jerusalem are ‘residents’ rather than citizens and therefore cannot vote in national elections… In other words, the democracy currently ‘under attack’ by the Israeli government is a Jewish-only democracy.”
Amnesty International (2022) and Human Rights Watch (2021) reported similar findings.
The truth is that there cannot be both a democracy and an apartheid state.
As Joshua Leifer wrote in The Guardian:[many] They misrepresent Israel as a democratic state when in fact it is a liberal nation-state that has maintained a military dictatorship in the West Bank for over half a century.”
Any hateful statements coming from Hamas are true, dangerous, anti-Semitic and should be condemned in their entirety. Just because Hamas makes statements does not mean that they are sentiments shared by all Palestinians, or even the vast majority of its supporters.
Furthermore, I would like to believe that most supporters of Israel, once a staunch ally of South Africa during the apartheid era, would reject the hateful, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric made by current members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Israeli cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, as well as supporters of Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein.
Moreover, neither Israel nor anyone else has presented any evidence that UNRWA was complicit in the October 7 attacks, and all EU donors have resumed support for UNRWA. Neither Israel nor anyone else has presented any evidence that Gaza’s Ministry of Health is falsifying the numbers of Palestinians killed, wounded and missing in Gaza.
“Good will prevail in the end,” Archbishop Tutu wrote in Haaretz in 2014. “The pursuit of freedom for the Palestinian people from the humiliation and persecution caused by Israeli policies is a just cause. It is a cause that the people of Israel must support. Nelson Mandela famously said that South Africans will not feel free until the Palestinians are free. He might have added that the liberation of Palestine will also liberate Israel.”
