NONRACIAL IDEOLOGY
Israel may be an apartheid state, but so are most nation states today
Most countries are based on some kind of nationalism, ethnicity or ‘us-ism’ that cannot be willed away
Israel is a "volkstaat". It may have many of the hallmarks of a modern, secular democracy, but there’s no getting away from the fact that ethnicity is expressly privileged in its founding laws. Exclusivism — Jewish exclusivism — is central to its existence, and that is why the parallel with apartheid SA has some credence. Israel wears its noninclusivism unashamedly, and that’s why it’s become the bete noire of progressives around the world. This is partly a psychosocial matter, of course: a mix of sympathy, solidarity, guilt and self-righteousness. It’s also because nonracialism (and antichauvinism, generally) has supplanted anticapitalism as the main leftist preoccupation. The politics of identity, and indignation, is what’s now dominating academic discourse, and in terms of that framing, a white, western, wealthy and powerful collective arrayed against a less well-endowed underdog is the quintessence of loathsomeness. Actual conduct is all but irrelevant: Israel is detested not fo...
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