FEBRUARY 10 • 2022 | 7

expulsions, antisemitic decrees 
and riots. Prior to 1948, about 
800,000 Jews lived in Arab 
lands. Those communities 
have vanished, with a mere 
3,000 remaining in Morocco 
and Tunisia combined, fewer 
than 100 in Israel’s neighbors 
Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, 
and others such as Libya and 
Jordan with not a single Jewish 
resident. Lest we frame this as 
simply an historical policy, the 
Palestinian Authority today 
also insists that any land creat-
ed as an official state have no 
Jewish residents.
As progressive Jews, this 
assumption that Palestinian 
territory should be cleared of 
any Jewish population should 
alarm us. In any other contest-
ed area, a bedrock principle 
of our approach to human 
rights is that people born in a 
region should not be displaced. 
Somehow, however, when it 
comes to the disputed areas 
Israel controls, Jewish children 
born in a town to parents and 
even grandparents who have 
lived there for over half a cen-
tury are not deemed residents 
who have a stake in whatever 
compromise is reached. If we 
in the liberal community are 
critical of bad actors in the 
settler community, we ought to 
find equal fault in the repres-
sive notion that a Palestinian 
state has the right to evict 
generations of residents born 
in their very own towns and 
villages based on their religion. 
That ongoing push to con-
tinue clearing land of Jews, 
however, is the very definition 
of apartheid, and even beyond, 
of ethnic cleansing. For the 
Arab world, who completely 
displaced their 800,000 strong 
Jewish community and still 
insist they have the right to 
remove all Jewish residents 

from any future state, to 
level the charge of apartheid 
at Israel, home to nearly 2 
million non-Jewish Arabs, is 
beyond hypocritical.
There is a straight line 
running from our inability to 
immediately identify a radical 
gunman holding Jewish wor-
shippers hostage as antisemitic, 
to turning a blind eye to phys-
ical attacks on Orthodox Jews, 
to dismissing decades of Arab 
wars and terrorism against the 
Jewish State, to actually label-
ling Israel — a country with a 
non-white majority — as an 
oppressive white institution. 
In this emerging moral 
norm, antisemitism is only 
real if it comes from white 
supremacists while Israeli Jews 
of color defending themselves 
from wars of extermination 
can be labeled as apartheid. 
As Purim approaches, all of 
us can draw inspiration from 
Esther and Mordechai who 
pushed back at the highest lev-
els to defend the Jewish nation 
from upside down lies and 
oppression. Distorting facts 
and history to single out the 
one Jewish state as illegitimate 
or apartheid is as vile as it is 
false. We, who are allies to so 
many in the progressive camp, 
should demand some allyship 
in return — or at the very least 
hold Amnesty International 
and other key organizations 
accountable when they 
become the latest purveyors of 
this oldest hatred. 

Cantor Michael Smolash sits in the 

Stephen Gottlieb z”l Cantorial Chair 

at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, 

where he has served since 2004. 

His essay, “Left in Silence”, appears 

in the book “Fault Lines — Exploring 

the complicated place of Progressive 

American Jewish Zionism” edited 

by Rabbi Menachem Creditor and 

Amanda Berman.

APARTHEID from page 5

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