Ignorance of history is an invitation to relive it. But the glib invocation of history may be equally dangerous. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel sees Chamberlain, Munich and 1938 at every turn. He did in the 1990s when he opposed Yitzhak Rabin’s attempt to make peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo accords, and he does now in opposing a nuclear deal with Iran. He is wrong on both counts.

Opponents of Israel, by contrast, see apartheid everywhere in the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians. They, too, are wrong. I knew apartheid in South Africa. I saw how its implacable persecution was codified and applied. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians does not constitute apartheid reborn in the Holy Land, whatever the echoes of it in the West Bank.

Of late, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd founders, have been vociferous in invoking Israeli “apartheid,” criticizing a concert date in Tel Aviv for Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the other Rolling Stones lads. “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid,” they wrote.

Waters calls Israel a “racist apartheid” regime and has more than once compared the situation of the Palestinians to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. “This is not a new scenario,” he told Counterpunch magazine last year, alluding to Berlin after 1933, “except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”

Jagger is right to play Tel Aviv, if for nothing else than as a powerful protest against such charges. Jews suffered systematic, industrialized Nazi annihilation. There is no parallel to this in Israel, period.

To suggest there is amounts to something much worse than intellectual sloppiness; it is a form of moral calumny.

Read the article in full at the New York Times.