Yes apartheid, no apartheid

The attorney-general has recently been preoccupied with a Defense Ministry directive barring Palestinians from riding the same buses as settlers in Judea and Samaria. This matter also made it to the Knesset's House Committee. The settlers who support this new measure have a point: The buses are usually packed with Palestinians and the settlers have to wait for the next bus; Palestinians sexually harass the Jewish women on the buses; Palestinian drivers discriminate in favor of their own people, and most importantly, sharing the same buses poses a security risk and puts everyone in harm's way.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni dismissed those concerns and said they smacked of apartheid. A senior officer at the Central Command said there was no real danger in having desegregated buses. But I tend to believe the settlers are genuinely concerned.

The security threats they have listed are not totally divorced from reality. The problem is reality itself, where Arabs and Jews are constantly pitted one against the other. There is mutual hatred. That is not what the early Zionist settlers had in mind. In the 1970s, Foreign Minister Yigal Allon considered the new Jewish residents in Hebron as natural heirs to the pioneers who founded Hanita in the Galilee. But he never thought things would become so testy with the Arab locals.

He, and many others in the Labor party and in settler community, saw the new Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as the harbinger for an era of coexistence. Only a handful of people predicted that relations with the Arabs would deteriorate so much and only they saw that Hebron and Hanita were not one and the same.

It is true that in both cases the settlers gave up their personal convenience for the sake of patriotism. This was complemented by their willingness to leave their home in favor of a new community. But the two are different. Those who founded Hanita and similar kibbutzim wanted their fledgling enterprise to serve as the foundation for a new Jewish state, where Jews and Arabs enjoy equal rights, as stated in the Declaration of Independence. These goals are diametrically opposed to the vision articulated by the settler leaders in Judea and Samaria (and until 2005, in the Gaza Strip): Jews would get special status, their Palestinian neighbors were to be governed by a separate legal system, and the vast majority of funds would go toward improving Jewish communities.

Thus the two settlement enterprises are a world apart.

The present-day settlers cite two reasons to justify their cause: the first, that they are carrying out the Return to Zion, the land of their biblical forefathers, where our prophets and kings walked. Even though I am secular in every fiber of my being, I cannot ignore the emotional impact of this claim. The second point they raise is that their settlement helps Israel's security. By supporting the Greater Israel ideology, they say, they are protecting "Smaller Israel." Some would dispute this claim, but for the sake of this piece I will consider it valid. The fact that the Gaza Strip has become a Hamas-governed terror hotbed in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal lends this argument even more credence.

There is one counterargument to offset both of the above-mentioned claims. Segregated busing may result in a threat to Israel's character as a Jewish democracy. This is not the only form of segregation in Judea and Samaria: There are separate access roads, separate public services and separate school systems. This is the essence of the Jewish-Arab separation.

The Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria are full-fledged Israeli citizens; the Arabs are denied rights and tried by military tribunals. Does this amount to apartheid? Accusing Israel of apartheid is malicious and deceiving. But would the word apartheid properly describe Judea and Samaria? Is there a basis to establish this claim? Yes and no.

No, because apartheid, in its original meaning, had to do with the color of one's skin; it implied race-based discrimination. That is not the case in Judea and Samaria. An Ethiopian Jew can board any bus in Judea and Samaria. A Palestinian with fair skin cannot.

Yes, because separation that is based on someone's ethnicity flouts every possible convention on human rights, and has no place in any democracy. Diaspora Jews view such a policy with disgust.

However justified, the world is not going to accept a situation in which a Jewish state enforces permanent segregation along ethnic lines, regardless of whether the term apartheid applies. Of course, some would allege this world is hypocritical because it does not lift a finger whenever dictatorial regimes brutally crack down on their citizens violate their rights. But Israel, unlike the non-democratic regimes in the Arab world, needs international support to survive in this hostile environment.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was fully aware of Israel's unique predicament. It is Israel, not the dictatorships in the Middle East, that needs economic and scientific cooperation with Europe; it is Israel that needs the U.S.'s political and military support, and it is Israel that needs to maintain a dialogue with the Jewish Diaspora. Maintaining discriminatory practices undermines the very foundations of Zionism, which has always had a bifurcated goal: an ingathering of the exiles in the Land of Israel and making a Jewish home that would be part of the family of nations. Ben-Gurion's calculus was somehow lost on those cabinet ministers who have been gripped by nationalistic fervor.

So what do we do? If we annex Judea and Samaria, we would have to let the Palestinians participate in Israel's parliamentary elections. This would threaten the Jewish majority and result in a binational state. Some on the Right would endorse annexation. But as historian Alexander Yakobson has warned, a binational state would have to accept the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Moreover, there has never been a binational state where one of the peoples is Arab-Muslim. The creation of a binational state would bring to an end the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty and trigger an economic meltdown in Israel (because of the heavy toll of extending the state's services to the new Palestinian citizenry). Israel would be an outcast in the West.

The supporters of annexation say the Jewish majority could be preserved if Israel allowed Israeli expatriates to vote by absentee ballot. Indeed, the Israeli authorities are never going to let the Arabs become the majority of the electorate, and this could eventually result in granting voting rights to the Diaspora Jews.

Any way you look at it, a binational state is a nightmare scenario: a non-democratic Israel would lose its ties with the liberal Jewish communities overseas and much of its talent would move offshore. The brain drain would turn Israel into an impoverished nation.

This all sounds like an apocalyptic vision. Purely fictional, right? Well, imagine what Yigal Allon's reaction would have been if, in 1968, we told him that in 50 years time the attorney-general would review the legality of segregated public transportation in Judea and Samaria. He would have said that we were delusional and outright mad. We would never reach such a situation, he would have told us.

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