Drawing Fire Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel [Paperback]

If you want an informed opinion about whether Israel is an apartheid state. . . .Benjamin Pogrund is worth reading.[Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel] . . . will be valuable to anyone who genuinely seeks an understanding of the real situation on the ground, behind the political rhetoric.At its best this book succeeds in providing valuable empirical resources that will enable its readers to question the totalising and distorted representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict that the apartheid analogy requires. . . .Drawing Fire is . . . most illuminating when it provides its readers with the information and argument that helps us understand the current conflict and the injustices to ordinary people that accompany it. . . .[In] spite of the authors own best intentions, he is clearly worried that the occupation and settlement of Palestine is leading toward a situation in which the apartheid analogy looks more persuasive. The growth of a militant and loud anti-Arab racism within both the Israeli polity and society is a product of occupation that does not justify the apartheid analogy but may feed it if we are not careful. There is plenty to chew on in this worthy book.[T]he book succeeds in his primary goal of showing that although there are some broad similarities between apartheid and Israeli reality, including the OPT, the term apartheid is simply not applicable to the latter. . . .Pogrunds book is an eloquent statement of what some call 'liberal Zionism,' a humanistically based philosophy that advocates a sovereign state for Palestinians and equal rights for those with Israeli citizenship. . . .[T]he book is valuable as a statement of both hope and reality: that Israel retains the basis of a humanistically inclined country, that it is not an 'apartheid state,' and as an explication of what both Zionism and Israeli reality are and are not.This is an essential read for everyone who wants to persuasively confront the BDS movement.Whl³&