Dredging up the Israel/apartheid question

Tuesday, Mar 2, 2010 06:03 EST

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

In addition to everything else they are, the scribblings on The Washington Post Op-Ed Page are often wildly out of touch. They often have the feel of having been written a decade ago, stuffed under a mattress somewhere, and then arbitrarily hauled out and dusted off for publication. With seemingly no trigger, Richard Cohen woke up today and decided to write about a long-standing though not particularly relevant (and largely semantic) controversy: whether the word "apartheid" is properly applied to Israel due to its control of the West Bank and Gaza, whose non-Jewish residents have no democratic rights in the country that rules over their land. Cohen, for whatever reasons, focuses on Jimmy Carter's use of the word in his book from four years ago, and takes the standard, predictable position: the term is false, deliberately inflammatory, and often the by-product of anti-semitism, etc. etc. But in dredging up this debate, Cohen completely omits a very recent, highly significant event: the use of the term by Israel's own hawkish Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, just four weeks ago:

Israel's defense minister warned Tuesday that if Israel does not achieve a peace deal with the Palestinians, it will be either a binational state or an undemocratic apartheid state. . . .

"The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic. . . . if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Writing about the Israel/apartheid controversy without mentioning Barak's recent statement would be like writing a column about the Senate reconciliation process without mentioning health care, or writing about the U.S. military's counter-insurgency doctrine without mentioning Afghanistan. But Cohen's glaring omission is understandable: there has been an intense campaign to demonize those who analogize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid (as Carter did, in the same way as Barak). That demonization campaign becomes impossible if Israel's own Defense Minister makes exactly the same point. So Cohen just shuts his eyes tightly and pretends the whole thing never happened. Beyond that, Barak's willingness to explicitly raise the comparison that is all but off-limits in American political discussion once again illustrates the bizarre fact that debates over Israeli policies are far more permissive and open in Israel than they are in the United States.

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http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/02/israel/

Because referring to Israel's actions by any other label should somehow make the policies and actions of their government less repugnant.

The implicature from what Barak and and from what Olmert said is that they're asserting it's not currently an apartheid state. This would be a conventional implicature. This is also precisely Cohen's point. Odd that Greenwald would buttress his opponent's argument. Then again, I assume that Greenwald had a modicum of cooperativeness and is a native speaker of English, and that Barak and Olmert were not being hostile when they said it but trying to communicate the information they appear to be trying to communicate.

The HaAretz article points out an important similarity, but the similarity follows not from the nature of the State of Israel but from the nature of the relation between the state and the non-state portions of territory that it controls. Since it says that this is the basis for the similarity, the conventional implicature from the preceding paragraph holds here as well. But at least this reference shows, again, that Greenwald has a staffer who can use LexisNexis.

Greenwald's point can only be that residents of occupied territories are, by virtue of being occupied, to be considered full citizens and have unfettered rights of movement and political participation. I'd call that de facto annexation. Perhaps Greenwald set up his discourse in such a way that we make the inference that this is the solution he prefers. But only perhaps, since this is a much weaker implicature.

Note that "implicature" is distinct from "implication," resting not on the rules of formal logic but on discourse-pragmatic principles that underly most non-hostile English-language discourse. Exactly whose explication of those principles you prefer--Grice's, Stalnaker's, Robert's, or some others--is not very much at issue. They all say about the same thing but posit different "deep" reasons for them.

Jimmy Carter's position is the same as Ehud Barak's; mainly that Israel is only on its way to apartheid if 2-states fail and there is just one state with Palestinians who do not have equal rights, which will never happen BTW as the situation can remain the exact same the next 100 years as the last 20 years. And that makes 'apartheid' a moot point. It's a cool term to use for demonization and dehumanization purposes, however.