Earlier this month, hundreds of American Jewish personalities published an open letter accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians under occupation.

The statement, anchored on the months-long pro-democracy protests in Israel against a judicial overhaul by its right-wing government, proclaimed that democracy for Jews cannot exist as long as Palestinians live under a system of apartheid.

Calling out Israel’s impunity, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its Jewish supremacy, the open letter titled “The Elephant in the Room” is centred around the Israeli Occupation of Palestine that it says “has yielded a regime of apartheid”.

While the language of the letter speaks for American Jews and addresses the “leaders” of North American Jewry, its growing list of signatories, 1,904 up until Tuesday 22 August, has called international attention to its message, which has acquired weight and importance by the names attached to it.

The impressive roster includes famous Israeli historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, Israeli-British Oxford University professor of Iraqi origin Avi Schlaim, former speaker of the Israeli parliament Avrum Burg, anti-colonialist intellectual and University of London professor Haim Bresheeth, Director of the Centre for Research on Antisemitism Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, famed Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer, Jewish intellectuals Christopher Browning, Timothy Snyder, and Derek Panslar, and prominent rabbis and former Israeli ambassadors.

Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Israeli Holocaust historian, signed the petition on 18 August before withdrawing from it later the same day.

A brief statement called on the leaders of North American Jewry to support both the Israeli protest movement and human rights groups that defend Palestinians and commit to overhaul Jewish educational norms for Jewish children “to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present” and to influence elected US leaders to help end the occupation, restrict US military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organisations.

Lior Sternfeld, an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Penn State University in the US and one of the letter’s organisers and signatories, said the letter’s primary addressee was the American Jewish community.

“The political leadership will change their attitude towards Israel only when they’ll be sure no political cost will be charged. We want to change the way Israel and the alliance with Israel is perceived in the American public conversation,” he said in an email.

Sternfeld described the response to the letter as “stunning”, adding that it includes prominent figures “who are not the usual suspects for condemning Israel’s crimes.”

While acknowledging that these individuals do not represent the mainstream of Israeli society, Sternfield also said the call “made some inroads into that mainstream” owing to the names associated with it.

“This is the call of public intellectuals, not to follow the mainstream, but to shape it as much as we can. And this is what I hope we are doing here. We want to have a serious conversation started, and I think we’re getting there,” he said.

The recent Israeli judicial overhaul that restricts the country’s Supreme Court from oversight of the government has been met with a wave of protests unprecedented in Israel’s history.

Largely viewed as an attempt to curb the court’s interruption, but not banning, of the Israeli government’s decades-long policy of annexing Palestinian territory and further entrenching settler colonialism, the judicial overhaul has provoked uncomfortable, if not existential, questions about the very foundations of Israel.

If Israeli democracy and its occupation of Palestinian territory cannot co-exist, as some pro-democracy Israeli voices insist, then which occupied territory is in question? The Palestinian land and homes occupied by Zionist militias in 1948 to create Israel? Or the 1967 Palestinian territory occupied 19 years later and the subject of the failed two-state solution peace talks that have stretched over two decades?

Salman Abu Sitta, a leading Palestinian historian and foremost advocate of the Palestinian Right of Return (ROR), said he was “not impressed” by the letter, which “has nothing to say about the core issue, which is the Nakba, or the Palestinian Catastrophe and the creation of Israel in 1948, or the ROR.”

On the other hand, the letter’s impressively long list of signatories meant that “these are hibernating Israeli or Jewish academics who were afraid to speak, and now they have found a way to speak in this petition, having strength in numbers,” he said in a telephone interview.

Abu Sitta, whose family was forcibly expelled from their land and property in the Negev in 1948, described the letter as “a luxurious statement by Jewish and Israeli professors saying they’re on a good path.”

Their message and the letter’s wording, he said, reflected their endorsement of Israel’s structure, while appealing for it to maintain the veneer of democracy.

“They are basically saying that Israel is right in all that its doing, but sometimes it goes to excesses and should not go to that extent. They want less apartheid, less colonialism, but not to remove it.”

This was also evident, Abu Sitta observed, in some of the demands included in the letter, such as the call to protect human-rights groups.

“Defend rights groups to do what?” he asked. “To report in real time on the reality of the Israeli occupation and apartheid, but to offer no remedy? There are 2,000 professors of politics and history here, and none of them has proposed a solution? Nothing about taking these crimes to the International Court of Justice, for example?”

By calling out Israel for apartheid, the letter highlights the extent to which consensus on the term is growing across the world and beyond the reports of human rights groups.

The term’s international usage in connection with Israel can be traced back to the 2000s by the then UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) published a full report on Israeli apartheid by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, which was withdrawn on the same day from the ESCWA website.

In 2021, the international rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) was the first such group to issue a report on Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on the Palestinians.

“When you say apartheid, you are denoting that there is a fundamental system of rule on the ground engineered to privilege one people over another,” said Omar Shakir, director of Israel and Palestine for HRW.

“And the first step towards dismantling apartheid is to recognise it,” he said in a telephone interview.

Even if the petition does not explicitly mention the Nakba, Shakir explained, it is important to recognise that apartheid at its core is a legal term that comes out of efforts by South Africa and the Global South to criminalise and prohibit the worst excesses of colonial rule.

“When you use these terms, there is no way to understand that without understanding the centrality of the Nakba and Palestinian dispossession. Such statements are also about trying to make an advocacy call to a certain audience,” he said.

“And the first step to dismantling apartheid is to recognise it,” he said in a telephone interview.

Even for critics like Abu Sitta who would don’t think the petition addresses the elephant in the room because of its shortcomings on the Nakba, the open letter still contained important messages.

The call to overhaul Jewish curricula to provide more honest appraisal for Israel’s past and present, he said, is especially important in light of European and US pressure on UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, to omit Nakba references in the Palestinian curriculum taught in UNRWA-run schools.

While the letter is primarily addressed to US policy makers, HRW’s Shakir believes its message resonated in Israel, where “the conversation on apartheid is a lot more transparent and honest than it is in some places in the US and Europe.”

The conversation now includes leading Israeli government officials, former attorney generals, deputy attorney generals, director generals, and in recent weeks former army commanders. “Of course, many are not willing to have the conversation, but I think there’s a significant sea-change within Israel,” Shakir said.

“It’s incumbent that governments in Europe and the US to get their head out of the sand and to realise that there is this shared understanding of the reality on the ground.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 August, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly