When people hear the word “apartheid,” it usually triggers thoughts that take them back several decades, all the way to South Africa. The names Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu come to mind, as they were both pillars of the anti-apartheid movement. What is apartheid anyway? Is it still in effect anywhere in the world and how?
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, apartheid is a “policy that governed relations between South Africa’s white minority and nonwhite majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites.” Apartheid ONLY existed in South Africa from 1948 to the mid-1990s as a policy of racial segregation and superiority, and it was wrong on so many levels. It does not apply to any other parts of the world, never has and never will, and yet, Israel is constantly being accused of apartheid because of the wall that has been built in Judea & Samaria. To be fair, when it comes to walls, Israel can now join Egypt and the Vatican.
Did you know that the Vatican had a 39-foot-high wall all around Vatican City? It was built in the mid-9th century for protection against pirates and other looters. It protected the papal city for centuries. Today, while the Vatican wall is not serving in a protective manner, it remains around the city as a symbol, and it officially delineates its borders.
What about Egypt? In 2009, just four years after Israel left the Gaza Strip to Palestinian self-rule, Egypt started to build an underground wall aimed at preventing the use of tunnels for arms-smuggling between Egypt and Southern Gaza. Then, by 2020, Egypt started to erect an above-ground wall from the Kerem Shalom crossing to the Rafah border crossing in that same area. By early 2024, within months after Hamas invaded southern Israel and massacred 1,200 innocent people, as the IDF was working its way into the Gaza Strip to incapacitate the remaining terrorists, as a precautionary effort, Egypt started to construct a 16ft-high concrete wall to keep Gazans out of Egypt! Where is the outrage? Does this constitute apartheid?
The same wall built to keep the same people away from murdering people within the boundaries of Israel is getting the whole world in an uproar and singing the same song over and over, “Israel is guilty of apartheid against Palestinians.” If it is built on the Gaza border with Egypt, there is nothing to talk about because, as always, “No Jews…No News!” If it is in Judea/Samaria, the outrage is out of control. The three Ds of Natan Sharansky are in effect, as it uses Double Standards to Delegitimize, and Demonize Israel in the eyes of the increasingly gullible global village.
The Israeli border/fence/wall is not there because of apartheid. It is not a racial barrier. If it was a racial barrier against Arabs, how would you explain the 2,000.000 Israeli/Arabs who live inside Israel and who have jobs, healthcare, property, and even representatives at the Knesset? How could I explain or justify the young arab woman who served as a triage nurse at the Jerusalem Hadassah hospital when I brought one of our travelers in after she fell by Damascus Gate? Could I trust her? Of course I could, and I did! She was one of the two million Arabs who live freely inside Israel (about 25% of all Israelis). How’s that for apartheid?
The wall isn’t a wall all the way through. For miles, it is simply a metal fence, but it serves the same purpose: keeping attackers outside of Jewish areas and keeping Israeli Jews safe. Does it really make a difference?
There were more than 3,000 attacks that originated from Judea and Samaria from September 2000 until the end of 2006 that resulted in the deaths of 1,622 people killed inside the Green Line in terrorist attacks. From 2007, when most of the existing fence was up, until 2022, there have been 141 attacks from Judea and Samaria inside Israel that led to the killing of about 100 people. That is a 97% decrease in Israeli Jewish death toll. So, yes, it makes a big difference.
The wall is not a choice made for racial segregation; it is a security separation to protect Jewish citizens. Biblically, there is an obligation to protect our own people, as we read Ezekiel 33:6: “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet and the people are not warned, and a sword comes and takes a person from them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require from the watchman’s hand.”
There is also a case to be made for biblical self-defense as we read in the story of Queen Esther, Esther 8:11: “In them the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil.”
Esther 9:5 continues, “Thus the Jews struck all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying; and they did what they pleased to those who hated them.“
If the attackers were from any other countries, people groups, or ideologies, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; the wall would stay, the protection would be enforced, and self-defense would still apply. Terrorism is an equal-opportunity demon, but for some odd reason, in the last several decades, it has been performed solely by Islamists, which makes it easier for antisemites to play the racial card against Israel since all their efforts at the wall seem to be against “Palestinians.”
South-African apartheid was a terrible thing. It was evil, racist, discriminatory, and even lethal. The Israel wall/fence exists to protect people inside, not to reject people outside. The wall could come down today if terrorism ceased to exist, and Israeli Jews would be the first ones to rejoice about that!
