Edward Luttwak wrote a letter to the London Review of Books in June, rebutting a specious comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Among other points, Luttwak noted that the votes of Israeli Palestinians “elect the many Israeli-Palestinian mayors, town and regional councilors, and members of parliament” in Israel.
His letter produced a response last month from one Nick Cheel, who argued Luttwak ignored the “gerrymandering” of Palestinians in the “Occupied Territories,” proscriptions on “leasing ‘state’ lands,” restricted citizenship rights of “indigenous spouses of Palestinian Israelis” and “so on” — which he asserted constituted apartheid “according to the United Nations’ deliberations on supremacist regimes.”
In the September 1 issue of the Review, Luttwak has a classic letter responding to Cheel:
Cheel writes of the “gerrymandering that has deprived Palestinian refugees of their legal, political and human rights”. They were not “gerrymandered”, they were defeated, and if Cheel now wants to undo the consequences of all contemporary victories (and why only those?), he must want to return Ukrainian Lviv to the Poles, western Ruthenia to the Czechs (or to the Slovaks?), Koenigsberg to the Germans and so on. Or does Cheel have his own, no doubt excellent, reasons for confining his revisionism to just one country and just one people?
That Palestinians are deprived of their rights is not in doubt, but their deprivation is shared by the inhabitants of all Arab states except Lebanon, although even there special legislation was enacted to deny Palestinian refugees the right to work or to vote. Other Arab countries mistreat Palestinians in ways large and small, while Kuwait simply expelled them in 1991 because Arafat sided with Saddam.
Perhaps Cheel can find a cause for himself in that direction: he could demand that Palestinians living in Arab countries should enjoy the same rights as Israeli Arabs, which would be an exceedingly modest demand if they are as terribly deprived as he insists. . . .
I cannot ignore Cheel’s most powerful argument, that the situation in Israel is tantamount to apartheid when judged by the standards of the “United Nations’ deliberations on supremacist regimes”, the same human-rights committee that has never had the time to deliberate on the rights of some two billion Chinese, North Koreans and Saudis, among others, because it, like Cheel, was preoccupied by one very much less populous state.
Also, I forget: was the chairperson of that committee the representative of Libya? Or of Sudan, where I am told the price of decent house slaves has dropped in these Darfur days?
The agenda of the UN’s 2005 World Summit, which begins today, includes nothing relating to Darfur. The draft final outcome document does, however, contain ludicrously meaningless language about “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
(Hat tip: DB).