Venichka was responding to the comparison with Belfast, and argued the opposite of what you’re claiming.

You seem intent on arguing the part of this that is not controversial. The West Bank barrier is not identical to the Belfast walls, which are different to the US/Mexican border structure, and the Iranian fence, and the Saudi one and the Kashmir one and….

What all these fences, wall, barriers and whatnot do have in common is that they were all created to serve the justified need of one party, they are all to greater or lesser extent disruptive to people who didn’t ask for and derive no benefit from them, and they are all greeted by the world beyond the affected nations with a yawn — except in one, single, solitary, unique, special case.

Ben’s was trying to emphasise the point that only in Israel’s case was there a lying — but quite successful — campaign to delegitimise a security measure as “apartheid” and only in Israel’s case was there such an outgassing of self-righteous outrage by people with no stake in the matter. To keep doggedly hammering away at what are (in this context only) irrelevant differences — as if to say that the world would rise in indignation if only Iran’s fence caused more difficulty for Afghanis or the Belfast walls were built on disputed land — is to deny what should by now be obvious to you. Norm Geras, I think, wrote an allegorical piece about people whose argument is that they’re not prejudiced against Israel: they hate all countries that start with “I” and end with “L” equally. I’m not accusing you of thinking that way, because I don’t believe you do, but that’s what your argument in this thread sounds like.

Yeah, I’d love to see them come down, but (like the Israeli wall) there is something like a sort of unfortunate necessity for their existence.

But again it’s not a parallel case. The key difference is the disputed territory aspect (and I am aware of the difficulties with that) and the “imposition” of that wall. The parallels you might look to would be that in Western Sahara or Kashmir.

Must try harder.

But…when someone pointing out that people whose lives are inconvenienced by the wall might perhaps have good reasons to object to its construction, while acknowleging that, by definition, by being built on disputed territory its location is contentious in the way that a state-state boundary wall is not (regardless of whatever moral questions the latter may raise), is effectively presumed to be a sympathiser with “smug European liberals who go onononononoononon etc about Israel” or who are anti-Zionist or worse or whatever….it’s clear that things are out of hand and rational or reasonable debate is lost. If only temporarily.

Still, I admit that in truth I probably overreacted a bit, paying insufficient attention to the final paragraph of the original post

(having been so infuriated with the other parts that seemed to pander of blatant one-sided populism that I am, generally more accustomed to monitoring from such great organs of the media as “Russia Today”- which loves to present hypocricy in a kind of amoral “everyone else is doing it so why can’t we” ; the whole “you say we have human rights abuses in Russia! But look what you have in America!” kind, that I would hope to read and/or engage with here)

And as for the use of the word “apartheid” with regard to the Israeli wall – obviously that is contentious, provocative, and propagandistic, rather than a statement of fact.

But unfortunately a lot of popular political debate (domestically as much as internationally) is carried out at that level; facile comparisions, the drawing of inappropriate or only partially appropriate allusions; as such the designation of said wall as such by those who so do doesn’t strike me as being a unique or unusual case of “making easy, if essentially false, comparisons”. And it initially looked as though you were doing exactly that with regard to the Iranian wall

I think the real problem with this piece though is best exemplified by a quote from Chekhov, something to the effect that the first step towards solving a problem is stating what the problem is correctly.

Anyway, I get your point and I say this as an admirer of your writing, but in this case, perhaps next time it needs to be framed differently at the outset or else the argument is in danger of being hijacked by antagonists, let alone by people here who mostly agree with you.

PetraMb very interesting link. As the writer points out, at least the NYT corrected its article after his submission, whereas he has never succeeded in getting the Guardian to retract anything.

Greg: You mean like what it’s been doing in Iraq?

No Greg, I mean like what Israel’s been doing in the West Bank.

Our discussion has evolved in a direction which has very little to do with my original point – the misuse of the term apartheid and its selective application to Israel. I agree that there is no exact comparison between Israel’s security fence and Iran’s proposed wall, but my purpose was to say that in both cases, the use of the term apartheid would be absurd. However, you would never hear the word in the Iranian case because it’s reserved for Israel. And even if one accepts, as Tim clearly and reasonably does, that the fence has had an adverse impact on Palestinian daily life, it doesn’t justify comparison with an ideology and a legal system based on racial supremacy. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the closest parallel to South African apartheid that I can think of was Nazi Germany post Nuremburg Laws and pre mass extermination.

Now, Tim says:

I have absolutely no interest discussing other walls, so walled-out am I. If you want to compare other walls to the security barrier, you’ll have to make the case that this or that wall has similarly nefarious effects on this or that group, and if nobody’s protesting it, then maybe you can make a meaningful charge of hypocrisy.

That reluctance to compare exposes the flaws in Tim’s argument. If he wilfully remains blind to the other security barriers in the world, then how can he properly evaluate Israel’s structure? Why does he refuse to examine the Ceuta and Melilla barriers and the abysmal hypocrisy of the European left in remaining largely silent on this?

Amie, all states have the right to determine who enters their territory. But there is, as I’m sure you’d agree, a massive difference between a border which consists of a checkpoint and a couple of uniformed guards and a bloody great wall composed of concrete and barbed wire! The Berlin Wall ran along the border of two sovereign states – the FDR and the DDR – but it can hardly be categorised as a standard, unremarkable border. Its purpose was to keep the citizens of the DDR in the Stasi’s prison-cum-state. But by the logic that you and Tim have employed here, Israel’s security fence is worse because much of it is built upon land that can be classified as disputed, rather than sovereign. And it is precisely here that I find the sovereignty argument to be, at best, a red herring, at worst, morally compromised.

Finally, amie is absolutely right that HP should eject Empress Trudy. We blocked her on Z Word after he/she refused to listen to repeated entreaties to stop posting what can only be classed as psychotic racist filth.

Anyway, Tim and amie, hope you see this comment. Apologies I took a while to reply – had a bit of crazy day.