Part 4
Then there are the domestic achievements of Israeli Arabs within Israeli society. Consider Mansour Abbas, who leads the United Arab List Party (a conservative Islamist party, no less). He sits in the Knesset as a member of the national governing coalition and was the kingmaker responsible for the current premierās ascension. There are Israeli Arab Supreme Court Justices Salim Joubran, George Karra, and now Khaled Kabub. Major General Ghassan Alian, the first Arab commander of the Israel Defense Forceās Golani Brigade, was embraced at the time of his appointment by now Prime Minister Naftali Bennet as āa brother.ā
Sometimes, familial relationships between high-profile Israeli Jews and Arabs go beyond the metaphorical. Tzachi Halevy, a Jewish actor on Israelās hit Netflix series
Fauda, married Israeli Arab TV news anchor Lucy Aharish in 2018. This is a strange expression of apartheid life if ever there was one. The couple had their first child last year.
Down at the level of ordinary, noncelebrity life, victims of South Africaās old system would be shocked to learn whatās being labeled āapartheidā in Israel. Unlike the Johannesburg General Hospital, where my father was head of the Department of Gastroenterology, Israeli hospitals (staffed by Jews and Arabs alike) admit all, including both terrorists and their victims. Israelis are familiar with stories of organ transplants traversing one side of the national divide to provide life to the other and cases such as the bone-marrow transplant provided to the niece of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh. She was treated in an Israeli hospital during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, even as Hamas rained down rockets on civilian targets. Haniyehās daughter has also reportedly benefited from treatment in an Israeli hospital.
Despite such inconvenient facts, Amnesty accuses Israel of āconsider[ing] and treat[ing] Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group,ā with āsegregation⦠conducted in a systematic and highly institutionalized manner through laws, policies and practices, all of which are intended to prevent Palestinians from claiming and enjoying equal rights to Jewish Israelis within the territory of Israel and within the OPT, and thus are intended to oppress and dominate the Palestinian people.ā
This is, as weāve seen, self-evidently false. As for Palestinians living āwithin the OPT,ā it is true they do not share the rights and privileges of Israeli citizenship because, well, they are not Israeli citizens. Furthermore, unlike Israeli citizens, those Palestinians are, generally speaking, ideologically committed to Israelās destruction with varying degrees of fervor. This, along with the Palestiniansā existence under an entirely different legal regime, means that Israel does, appropriately, treat those Palestinians differently than her own citizens. If this is apartheid, then so too is the United Statesā failure to extend citizenship to the Taliban.
In March, the human-rights organization Amnesty International engineered a publicity stunt. It wasnāt aimed at condemning Vladimir Putinās Russia, which had just sent roughly 150,000 troops into Ukraine to slaughter civilians
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