Response to recent column regarding apartheid in Israel

Samantha Lachman’s opinion piece, “My apartheid spiel,” criticizes Duke Students for Justice in Palestine’s upcoming week of events for the eighth annual, internationally-coordinated “Israeli Apartheid Week.”

Lachman writes that the Israel-Palestine conflict “will never be resolved if we can’t come to terms with each other’s language.” So let us come to terms. The UN’s 1973 International Convention on the Suppression of Apartheid reads: “the term ‘the crime of apartheid,’ which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them … ”

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights observes: “A dual system of law discriminates between Jewish Israelis and indigenous Palestinians based on a constructed status of ‘Jewish nationality.’ This prejudicial application of law is apparent in all processes of the legal system, from the rights to information and fair trial to detention and prison treatment.”

Just a few facts: of Israel’s 61 poorest towns, 48 are Arab. Arab homes are still being taken and demolished inside Israel (like 500 families recently in Jaffa). Since 1948, Arab numbers have increased 6.6 times, but they have lost 84 percent of their land; the largely landless Arabs now own about 3 percent of the land in Israel. While Jews receive Israeli citizenship for just being Jewish, even Palestinians who marry Israelis are denied citizenship and the basic right to live with their family in Israel under a 2003 law. Under a 1979 law almost exclusively applied to Palestinians, people in Israel may be arrested and held without charge for six months.

At every level, institutionalized racial prejudice and systemic inequality plagues Israel. Harsh realities on the ground supersede Lachman’s scattered personal anecdotes and reliance on historical specificity to erase these truths under semantic qualms.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Trinity ’14