Here’s a smart and sassy article scientifically proving that ‘Israel’ isn’t an apartheid state at all! Boom!

Here we have a Herzlian intellectual using all of his scholarly pretension in service of a crappy little neocolony, proving that not every Herzlian has to be a dullard. I can’t say that I am impressed, though: even the extreme right has its fair share of intellectuals, and oftentimes they exhibit their skills by lying in convincing ways. Let us see a few examples:

In relation to the legal status of the West Bank, two contradictory scenarios are simultaneously activated: on the one hand, the accusation of apartheid implies that Israel has a moral obligation to grant full citizenship rights to Palestinians living there; however, if that was to happen, it would amount to a legal annexation of the West Bank, an outcome intensely opposed by pro-Palestinian groups.

This is a fine example of troll logic: the author conveniently overlooks the fact that annexation can happen without granting any citizenship rights to the region’s inhabitants, which is exactly what we mean by annexation. Thus, he creates a false dilemma, erasing the possibility of peaceful integration.

Also, notice the slide: the very fact that Gazans and West Bank natives don’t have full citizenship rights should prove that the Herzlians have imposed a framework of apartheid on Palestine, but he distracts us from that by rambling like this:

This controversy is intensified by disputes over how “apartheid” itself should be defined: should it be reserved for direct references to the system of racialised “separation” in historical apartheid South Africa? Should it be generalised in legal terms, such as in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the results of which have been described as “ambiguous and inoperable” (Bultz 2013)? Or is “apartheid” now merely a slogan used to express strong moral condemnation of any form of suspected racial, ethnic or cultural discrimination (Pogrund 2014: xix)?

Blah, blah, blah.

I can already imagine myself trying to show him the evidence that the ‘State of Israel’ is antidemocratic, and him replying along the lines of ‘Well, what does “democratic” REALLY mean? [Insert five hundred more words here.]’

so too the apartheid analogy opens up a pathway for the legitimisation of denials of the right of Jewish self-determination.

Now this argument is just plain fucking senseless. He almost seems to be implying either that somebody has the right to impose apartheid, or that Jews somehow tend toward that policy. Whoah, does this mean Matthew Bolton is a super secret antisemite? Busted!

See? I don’t need substantial evidence to accuse others of antisemitism either!

There is also this phrase that he uses seven times in reference to Jews:

self-determination

Bolton needs to look up what ‘begging the question’ is, because he never establishes that Jews have self-determination under Zionism. You know why? Because there is no such fucking thing there! When did the Jewish people all come together to decide that thousands of them should be houseless? Was that a product of Jewish self-determination?

Israel is occasionally accused of spreading state racism across the globe, with police violence against Black Americans or extremist Hindu nationalism in India being spuriously explained via supposed connections to Israel or Zionism (Pomerantz 2020).

You can tell that a Herzlian wrote this since he implicitly questions easily verifiable facts. Don’t believe me? Here ya go!

https://priv.au/search?q=Israeli+trains+American+police

https://priv.au/search?q=Israel+India+nationalism

Whoooooah, did I just blow your mind or what‽

Here is my favourite part:

Accusations of structural racism within Israeli state or society should also not be automatically classed as antisemitic, as long as those accusations are similar in kind to those frequently aimed at other nation-states and societies.

Okay people, listen up: before you criticize the ‘State of Israel’, make you sure that you criticise all of the other 204 nation-states first! Make sure that your criticisms last for the exact same amount of time, make sure that you always use the exact same number of characters—you know what, just copy and paste everything that you say about ‘Israel’ and replace ‘Israel’ with another country, and do that 204 times. Enjoy!

I know that I am acting facetious right now, but my point is that this assumption that the ‘State of Israel’ is just like any other nation-state is fundamentally wrong. Most of the nation-states of the world are not settler-colonies, do not have apartheid polices, are not committing extermination, and do not claim that foreigners of a certain ethnoreligion ‘belong’ to them. What would the world be like if one day Italy suddenly proclaimed itself ‘the Catholic State’ and decided that Catholics from Guatemala, Mexico, Ireland, Poland, and elsewhere all belonged in Italy?