A Beginner’s Guide to Ben White’s false apartheid analogy

Ben Cohen introduces Jonathan Hoffman’s fantastic essay ‘Lies, Damned Lies and the Apartheid Analogy‘ at Z-Word:

What follows is an in-depth article by Jonathan Hoffman unraveling the tissue of lies that is “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide,” by the anti-Zionist propagandist Ben White. Z Word readers should note that Jonathan has been banned from attending a launch for White’s screed hosted by sham British “charity” War on Want.

Hoffman introduces us to Ben White and his false analogy:

And maybe something else – this is the fellow who said “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are” and who tried to contextualise comments of Ahmadinejad denote a disbelief in the Holocaust.

Of course the whole book is a Big Lie. Far from being a racist state, Israel was born from centuries of racism committed AGAINST  Jews. Had Israel existed ten years sooner than 1948, hundreds of thousands of lives of those murdered in the Nazi death camps might have been saved.

Israel’s 20 percent non-Jewish minority has always had equal voting and other political rights. Arab Israelis were elected to the first Knesset in 1949 and have won as many as 12 Knesset seats in a single election. Some hold important positions in the government, court system, Ministries and the IDF. There has been an Arab Vice Consul (in San Francisco) and an Arab Minister.  Contrast that with the position of blacks in South Africa under apartheid.

Hoffman notes:

White’s book comes from the same genus as Walt and Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby”. Like that book, everything is meticulously referenced but that enables the reader to see the circularity in the sources. Many are from known Israel bashers: Pappe, Uri Davis, Charles D Smith, Tom Segev, Tanya Reinhart, Jeff Halper, Hussein and McKay, and Maxime Rodinson. Colin Chapman features three times: He is the author of “Whose Promised Land” which revives the ancient Christian canard of ‘supercessionism’ – the belief that because the Jews denied the divinity of Christ, God transferred His favours to the Christians while the Jews were cast out as the party of the Devil. This doctrine lay behind centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred until the Holocaust drove it underground.

Hoffman concludes:

In April 2000 Nelson Mandela came to London and spoke to the Board of Deputies of British Jews. He spoke of the need for Israel to leave the lands taken in 1967 but not unless there was first recognition of the Jewish State by the Arab States: “I added a second position, that Israel cannot be expected to withdraw from the Arab territories which she legitimately conquered when the Arab States wanted to whip her out of the map of the world.” No mention of ‘apartheid’ in Israel – from a man who spent 27 years as a prisoner of the loathsome apartheid regime in South Africa.

There can be no better answer to Ben White than that.

This artless, crude piece of Israel-bashing will no doubt be welcomed in all the usual circles but anyone with a modicum of independent critical faculty will soon see it for the tired piece of intellectually bankrupt propaganda that it is. What a waste of a Cambridge English degree.

Stephen Sizer said , “If you really care about peace in the Middle East, read this book.”

This reviewer says “don’t bother”.

Read the whole piece.