Calling Israel ‘Apartheid’ Doesn't Help Palestinians or Jews

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- On Tuesday, Amnesty International became the fourth major human-rights group to accuse Israel of creating and maintaining an "apartheid" system to control Palestinians. This provoked a torrent of outrage from Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides. Almost all of them accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism.

Yair Lapid, Israel's foreign minister, said that “if Israel wasn't a Jewish state, no one would dare make such a claim against it.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the report "denies Israel's right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

There's something worth noting here. The report's critics aren't offering any substantive refutation of the facts it cites. Instead they condemn its ideological framework. And they have a point. By using the apartheid label, Amnesty undercuts its mission, and helps ensure that there will be little constructive debate over Israel's policies and practices.

This is a problem not just for the Palestinians, but also for Jewish Israelis, who won't be able to extricate themselves from decades of conflict and occupation without an honest discussion of the various ways Arab citizens, and especially non-citizens under Israeli rule, are treated under the law.

Israel defines itself as belonging exclusively to the Jewish people. Yet it governs territories in which Palestinian Muslims and Christians make up nearly half the population. Legal realities are simple for Jewish Israelis: They are all citizens with equal rights and status no matter where they are considered to reside. For Palestinians, those same issues are extremely complicated: They are caught in a dizzying labyrinth of different legal and political statuses depending on where they live.

Thus human-rights groups, in a growing consensus, are turning to the fraught word "apartheid" to try to concisely convey a reality that is simultaneously very simple and extremely complex.

About 2 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, with the same basic rights as their Jewish compatriots, although they face housing discrimination, joblessness and a lack of government services in their neighborhoods. The rest of the Palestinians have no citizenship of any kind, a pervasive statelessness that is virtually unique in today's world.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have more options than most, but they cannot vote in national elections and have difficulty accessing Israeli civil law. The nearly 3 million Palestinians living in Areas A, B and C of the occupied West Bank have, in practice, three different relationships with the ruling Israeli authorities. The additional 2 million effectively trapped in Gaza have yet another de facto status.

The Amnesty report knits a coherent pattern from countless tidbits that are meticulously detailed and connected: the displacement of Palestinian refugee families in East Jerusalem and Bedouin communities in the Negev to make way for Jewish Israelis; routine abuse at West Bank checkpoints, highlighted by the recent death of an elderly Palestinian-American man, and the myriad policies that have turned Gaza into an open-air prison.

It demonstrates that Israel's Byzantine system of legal complexity toward Palestinians is central to its strategy. It's also been an effective obstacle to clear international understanding of Israel's policies. Criticism of the extreme lack of rights in the West Bank is routinely countered by citing the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, as if these were same people and places. Confusion is part of the point.

Yet the accusation of apartheid is deeply fraught. It invites an argument about the word itself, or the validity of analogies to the old South Africa, rather than about the conditions under which Palestinians live.

Critics accuse Amnesty of denying Israel's legitimacy or seeking its destruction because the organization attempts a holistic analysis, tying together all aspects of Israel's relations with the Palestinians going back to the formation of the state in 1948. That's another strategic fumble by the human-rights group, because it inevitably provokes debate about Israel's founding and legitimacy rather than the indefensible legal and administrative honeycomb in which Palestinians are fractured into multiple enclaves.

International criticism that makes Israelis defensive and angry isn't necessarily a bad thing. One reason there has been no progress for decades in ending the conflict is a lack of sufficient pressure on Israel to ease the occupation or slow the seemingly inexorable crawl toward annexation of the West Bank. No matter how much many resent it, Israelis need to hear justified and principled international criticism of the system they have constructed.

Clarity and unvarnished facts about lived realities can help all parties make better choices. That would look a lot like the Amnesty report, without the Ideological stridency. Rhetorical overreach lets Israel, and everyone else, off the hook, inviting a debate about a controversial word rather than the ground truths that keep the Israeli-Palestinian struggle a tinderbox.