Paul R. Pillar: Apartheid, Then and Now

Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.  He is a contributing editor to The National Interest where he writes a daily blog.

The South African jurist Richard Goldstone endured much unjustified abuse when he prepared a report that cataloged Israeli excesses during the brutal military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 known as Operation Cast Lead. The abuse was heaped on him despite the truth of what he described, despite the balanced nature of a report that also described excesses committed by Israel's adversary Hamas, and despite Goldstone subsequently going out of his way to refute other accusations against Israel, relevant to the Gaza operation, that he believed were unjustified. Goldstone gives every indication of being a decent and fair man.

Given that experience, it is understandable that Goldstone would seize additional opportunities to visibly defend Israel, especially at a time when the Arab Spring and the heightened sensibilities regarding popular sovereignty or its absence have sharpened the regional focus on Israel's continued subjugation of Palestinians. It is also understandable that Goldstone, as a South African, would pick up on use of a term that played such a large role in his own country's history. And so he writes that applying the word apartheid to that subjugation of Palestinians is a “slander” against Israel.

Goldstone's op-ed includes a couple of important and valid observations. One is that “Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the West Bank cannot be simplified to a narrative of Jewish discrimination. There is hostility and suspicion on both sides.” The other is that Arab citizens of Israel—i.e., the Israel of the 1967 boundaries—enjoy political and civil rights and are not subject to anything that could be described as apartheid...