The Raw Deal Podcasts # 3: Occupation and Apartheid

Michael Lumish



The Raw Deal:

Heya guys,
this is Michael Lumish coming at you from Oakland California in the san francisco bay area, the land of crack whores, dungeness crab, and pretty much everything else that is non-kosher.
Y'know, I recently received a letter from an old and dear and Jewish college friend of mine who I was endeavoring to coax into a friendly conversation about the never-ending, entirely unjust, koranically-based, Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews in the Middle East, if not the Jews more generally.
She seems a bit reluctant to get into that conversation and I certainly understand why. She's an attorney and this is an exceedingly sensitive topic and she can certainly not afford to put herself into a position wherein she loses clients through running her mouth off about it.
I understand, believe me.
Yet in her letter, which was 95 percent concerned with old college days, she concludes as follows:
Quote I know that Israel is an occupying country and that apartheid is unsustainable. I can't imagine how they develop the trust they need to put everything at risk by opening their borders. I can't imagine how much longer American Jews will support the current untenable situation.
I believe that Israel is probably the smartest country in the world. I know that they can figure out the right answer. They just have to want it badly enough. And they have to do so soon. Unquote
I would like to say that I was shocked to read the words quote occupying country unqote and quote apartheid unqote coming out of the keyboard of that proud progressive Zionist friend of mine from back in the day, but I am not.
The Arabs, with a little earlier Soviet help, have done an absolutely terrific job of advancing the Big Lie and I have no idea how I will respond to this old friend’s letter. 
If I take her to task she’ll get defensive and back off, but I need to let her know that these notions that she’s carrying around like luggage are not only false, but entirely counterproductive to the well-being of the Jewish state of Israel as well as the Jewish people.
If Israel is illegally or illegitimately quote unquote occupying Israel or Judea and Samaria or what, at the behest of Jordan, westerners insist upon calling the West Bank, than the Jews have no case.
If what my old college buddy thinks is true, that Israel is an apartheid power occupying someone else’s land, than we have no case.
How is it possible from a moral or ethical perspective to defend such a thing?
If what my old friend thinks is true than all Israeli Jews can do is hang it up and get lost.
It wouldn’t matter if every single Israeli from the garbage men to the Knesset members had the IQ of Albert Einstein because if what my friend says is true then there is no escaping from the deep immorality of the very existence of the Jewish state of Israel on someone else’s land.
The implication would have to be that Israel is, in fact, a racist colonial settler state that must be dismantled whether anyone likes it or not – which is, of course, the very goal of the people who have managed over the course of many decades to convince my friend of the truthfulness of these outrageously false and, in fact, highly immoral claims.
Israel – which is to say, the Jews of the Middle East - illegally occupy nothing.
There are no people on the planet with a better case for consolidating their national homeland then the Jewish people. We’ve lived on that land for over 3,500 years for chrissake.
Long, long, long before there was any such place as London or Paris or Berlin or Washington DC, there was Jerusalem and it was crawling with crazed Jews. 
Unless a troop of Jebusites come marching out of the desert, there are no other people on the planet who can make a case for indigeneity other than the Jewish people.
The Arabs are not indigenous to Judea. The Arabs are indigenous to the Arabian peninsula and, in fact, represent the most brutally successful imperial project in world history, even surpassing that of the Romans, yet they deceitfully pass themselves off as perfectly innocent victims.
They aren’t.
Furthermore, of course, Israel is emphatically NOT an apartheid state.
Arabs vote and hold seats in the Knesset. Arabs and Jews share hospitals and universities and hotels and restaurants and all manner of public spaces within Israel.
So how the hell can this possibly be apartheid?
Anyone familiar with the conflict knows that the apartheid slander came out of the 2001 Durban Conference in which enemies of the Jewish people suggested in the documentation coming out of that thing that Israel is an apartheid, racist state.
It isn’t and my friend needs to know that.
In fact, Israel is the only country in that part of the world that is NOT apartheid.
All the Arab-Muslim states, each and every one, practice both gender and ethnic apartheid. 
They make no apologies for it and never get called on it to begin with.
Yet I cannot even live in Jordan or Saudi Arabia as a Jew… not that I would want to, of course, but nonetheless.
And this, ultimately, is the problem with progressive-left Zionism whether coming out of J Street or Meretz. 
They begin their end of the conversation from a position of unjustified guilt.
They honestly believe that the Jews stole Judea from its rightful owner, the Palestinian-Arabs.
This may be consistent with the so-called Palestinian Narrative, but the Palestinian narrative is grounded in fiction.
Israel has actual history on its side, at least 3,500 years of it.