The idea that Israel is an “apartheid state” is the shaky intellectual foundation of the global movement to boycott, divest from and sanction the Jewish homeland (BDS). In The Apartheid Smear, a new pamphlet out today, I try to show that the comparison of Israel with racist apartheid-era South Africa is a malicious lie that does huge damage to the central goal of the peace process: the creation through negotiation of two states for two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian.

Readers can judge my argument by reading the pamphlet. In brief, I claim Israel within the Green Line is a multi-ethnic democracy in which every citizen is guaranteed equal rights under the law; while beyond the Green Line, Israel’s security policies are best understood as the tragic and temporary response to the failure of repeated peace negotiations and the terrible reality of terrorism, and not as an Israeli intent to rule over the Palestinians as superiors holding down inferior helots, apartheid style.

Here, I want to say something about the revealing historical background to the apartheid smear. There have been three key moments. Each – whatever the sincere hopes of many of its supporters – was a cynical attempt to demonise Israel as a pariah state in order to prepare the ground for its eventual destruction.

Read the article in full in the Daily Telegraph.