Ruth Dudley Edwards: Idiots screaming that Israel is an apartheid state should get their facts right
I got used to hatred when I began to cover Northern Ireland as a journalist. What I found most distressing was the mindless chanting from small children careering down the Falls Road screaming insults like “SS RUC” that they didn’t understand.
These days I hear the same level of ignorance and stupidity in the Jew-hating chants coming from university students, for whom ignorance is no excuse.
At least in olden days it required some work and resources to find out basic facts.
You might need access to an Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Nowadays, it takes just a few clicks on even a primitive computer to find answers to innumerable questions you might reasonably ask about what’s going on in the Middle East.
So, being increasingly cross at the number of idiots chanting that Israel is an apartheid state, I am readying myself to share simple facts with the next intellectually-challenged banner-waver I come across.
Here, for instance, is something to say when they scream “apartheid state”.
Apartheid was a legal system of racial segregation and white minority rule in South Africa from 1948 to 1994 that involved the separation of racial groups, the denial of basic civil rights to the non-white majority and the establishment of dominance by white citizens.
In Israel, Arab citizens - who are 20% of the population - have equal voting rights, parliamentary representation and access to the independent courts, a free press and all professions.
Indeed Israeli Arab leaders refuse to describe their country as an apartheid state.
Various idiots will shout that Jews are white settlers and Arabs are brown and indigenous.
Er, no.
Although they have been periodically expelled by anti-semites who were envious of them for being successful through hard work and talent, Jews originated in the ancient Levant and have a mix of Arab and European ancestry.
Incidentally, they were around over a thousand years before Islam was invented.
Many Israelis are visually indistinguishable from Palestinians or other Middle Easterners.
Far from being white they include a mix of colours from fair-skinned through olive-skinned darker Yemenite and Iraqi Jews to Black Ethiopian.
And there are these days almost no Jews left in Arab countries, yet their populations have risen in Israel.
They will then start chanting about illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Yes, but that follows on war initiated by Arab states who refused to accept the 1947 settlement.
The West Bank remains occupied pending a final-status agreement.
And in an unprecedented goodwill gesture Israel withdrew in 2005 from prospering Gaza.
The response was to elect Hamas, which has spent the billions provided by the well-meaning on waging war on Jews and destroying wrecking the place.
In Northern Ireland, still there are people who welcome Arab immigrants but attack Protestants who have been around for centuries, call them planters and tell them to go home.
It’s fantasy.
Like unionists in Northern Ireland, who won the military battle, Jews are legitimately in Israel.
They are there to stay.
Hate-filled ignoramuses should get over it.
l Ruth Dudley Edwards’ books include The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice