The media has legitimately focused on the plight of women in the theocratic state of Iran and the aggressive nature of Russia in the tragic Russian-Ukrainian War over the last few months.

I was on staff with Amnesty International in the 1980s (before I was hired at Fraser Valley College) and was the point person for a variety of states in the Middle East that were known as violators (in various ways and means) of elementary and fundamental human rights.

I had previously worked on a PhD thesis on Martin Buber and the political implications of his classic philosophic book I and Thou and its political implications for Jews in Germany and Palestine-Israel from the 1920-1960s. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have stated in recent publications, in an unequivocal way, that Israel now constitutes an “Apartheid State.”

We do know that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney eventually convinced President Ronald Reagan that South Africa was an apartheid state, and the acted on it. The West acted decisively on the apartheid nature of South Africa; why not Israel?

I recently received an email from Israel from a student who graduated from UFV in the Adult Education program more than a decade ago. He was on his 3^rd trip to Israel and spent time in Nablus in Balata Refugee Camp—such a sad and painful place to see and, for those who live there, where apartheid is most obvious. Those who have visited and lingered long in Palestinian refugee camps cannot but sense the suffering of decades.

This past Spring season, one of our finest POLSC students finished his M.A. and Ph.D. at Exeter University (probably at the higher end of Middle Eastern Studies in the UK).

Colter Louwerse worked closely with Ilya Pappe—at the forefront of Jewish revisionist thinking on the demolition of multiple Palestinian villages that brought into being Israel in 1948. Much of Colter’s work was on the UN, Israel, and the Palestinians—he is now doing more work on Canada, Israel, and the Palestinians.

It is somewhat significant that it has been historic Tories in Canada (see Heath Macquarrie’s Red Tory Blues and “The Stanfield Report”) that have questioned the structural nature of Israeli politics in regard to the Palestinians and the living conditions of many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, refugee camps in nearby Muslim states, and the illegal proliferation of Jewish settlements.

Our present Prime Minister, in principle and rhetoric, often claims to be a human rights defender. But he does or says little to oppose the state of Israel, and when minimally inching in such a direction, the language of antisemitism is employed as a rhetorical way of silencing critical questions. It is important to note that Trudeau’s major fundraiser is from the wealthy pro-Israeli Bronfman family.               

We might ask why Iran and Ukraine receive so much attention while the ongoing structural injustices in Israel go consistently ignored (except, of course, when there is a momentary violent flare-up). The deeper reasons for such violence often ignore the immense disparity between how many Jews and Palestinians live. The historic underlying causes are often ignored by the media as they tend to focus on the immediacy of symptoms.  

Likewise, the death of the Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, by the “morality police” must be protested (and the way women have been treated in Iran). It is noteworthy, though, that the West conveniently ignored human rights violations when the Shah (who the West supported) was in power in Iran.

The West backed another human rights violator (Hussein in Iraq) to oppose the Iranian theocracy until Hussein foolishly attacked Kuwait in 1990. But, the attention given to Amini misses the fact that a significant Palestinian journalist (Shireen Abu Akleh) was killed in May in the West Bank while covering Israeli violence in the city of Jenin. Amini is a martyr of sorts, and her cause has been given ample media coverage, but we hear relatively little about the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.

There is, in short, not only the way the structural politics of apartheid play out in Israel but also the way western media panders to some martyrs and ignores others. Is this not yet another form of apartheid?

It is somewhat noticeable at the 2022 FIFA World Cup that although some issues of human rights have been raised, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is predictably absent. Media apartheid works at many levels, where the sacrificial lambs are often  Palestinians in the West and, to the East, their Sunni brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  

Dr. Colter Louwerse will be giving a lecture Tuesday November 29 (4:00-5:30: A225 Abbotsford Campus) on “The Struggle for Palestinian Rights at the United Nations.”

Ron Dart
POLSC