Ori Nir, spokesman for the anti-settler group Americans for Peace Now, thinks Munayyer's apartheid labeling is both wrong and unhelpful:
Bringing the 2002 Rome Statute into the mix further confuses and distracts. The Rome Statute talks about a system of racial domination. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, is not racially-based. It is a struggle between two national liberation movements who claim the same piece of land. Luckily, both movements have shown a readiness to compromise. Most Israelis and Palestinians support a resolution to their conflict that would leave each national group with its own independent state. And ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would give Israeli society the breathing space necessary to address, much belatedly, the discrimination against Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin.
The real problem, though, is not the Apartheid analogy per-se. The problems is that many people who define the problem as Apartheid, as Munayyer does, do so not because they truly believe it is such, but because the solution they seek for the problem is one that is similar to post-Apartheid South Africa.
I see no readiness to compromise on the part of the current Israeli government or from the growing sections of Israel's increasingly hardline Jewish population, especially the young. You think the last few years have shown compromise? A settlement "freeze" that meant basically the same pace of building and occupation in the years before and after? A foreign minister who lives in the occupied territory and is, even in the words of Israel's most fanatical supporters, a "neo-fascist" and racist? A brutal bombardment of Gaza with a casualty rate of 100-1 between Arab and Jew? A threat to bomb Iran without even warning the US? A total end-run around a newly elected president who actually, conceivably might have helped bring about a two-state solution?
When you have existed for 60 years and for 40 of them you have controlled the West Bank, you're not kidding anyone. Greater Israel is Israel. Controlling another people in strictly demarcated areas, while Jews can travel with relative freedom anywhere in Greater Israel, is now closer to a formalized apartheid system than a by-product of a temporary occupation and its security demands. And the longer it continues, and the greater the number of settlers entrenched, the harder it will become for Palestinian Arabs to have any semblance of a hope for self-determination.
The Dish 