About That Word Apartheid

by Mahoney, John; Adas, Jane; Norberg, Robert

April - May 2007
The Link - Volume 40, Issue 2

June 1917: London. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, future first president of Israel, and Gen. Jan Christian Smuts, future prime minister of South Africa, meet to exploit British imperial interests for their own purposes. Weizmann argues that a Palestine opened for Jewish settlement will help England safeguard its Middle East interests. Smuts sees the wisdom of supporting the Zionist enterprise, as Jews in South Africa, by the end of World War I, constitute per capita the wealthiest Jewish community in the world. Later, he will tell the Anglo American Committee of Inquiry that he was “one of those who in 1917 took an active part in the planning of the Balfour Declaration.” Two years following his death in 1950, Israel will dedicate the Smuts Forest in the Judean Hills, overlooking the Weizmann Forest.

May 1948: Prime Minister Jan Smuts extends de facto recognition to the newly established state of Israel. Days later, Smuts’s party loses to the apartheid Nationalist party, many of whose members had backed Adolph Hitler.

1949: Daniel F. Malan, the new South African prime minister, who in 1938 had led the opposition to Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany to South Africa, extends de jure recognition to the Jewish state.

July 5, 1950: West Jerusalem. Israel enacts the Law of Return by which Jews anywhere in the world, that is, by virtue of being born of a Jewish mother or being a convert, have a “right” to immigrate to Israel on the grounds that they are returning to their own state, even if they have never been there before.

1951: Pretoria. Prime Minister Daniel Malan introduces the Bantu Authorities Act, which sets aside 13% of South Africa’s poorest land to establish “homelands” for the different black ethnic groups. The remaining 87% is reserved for the white population. The idea is to co-opt local black tribal leaders to run the Bantustans, thereby creating a ruling black elite with personal and financial interests in maintaining the separateness.

July 14, 1952: By putting into effect the Citizenship/Jewish Nationality Law, Israel becomes the only state in the world to grant a particular national-religious group—the Jews—the right to settle in it and gain automatic citizenship.

1953: West Jerusalem. South Africa’s Prime Minister Daniel Malan becomes the first foreign head of government to visit Israel. He returns home with the message that Israel can be a source of inspiration for white South Africans.

1955: Military cooperation begins with Israel’s delivery of Uzi submachine guns to South Africa. By 1971, South Africa will be manufacturing the Uzi under a license arranged with Israel through Belgium.

1958: South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of the virulent anti-Semitic newspaper Die Transvaler, becomes prime minister. During his tenure, Nelson Mandela is tried for treason, the African National Congress banned, the Sharpeville massacre perpetrated, and the “grand apartheid” plan introduced.

1959: Pretoria. The Self-Government Act is passed granting the homelands self-governing, quasi-independent status. Ten “homelands” will eventually be created, each comprising broken tracts of eroded land incapable of supporting their large designated populations. Only two will be totally coterminous, the others will be scattered blocks, some widely dispersed.

November 6, 1962: New York. When Israel supports a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning South Africa’s policy of apartheid, South African prime minister Verwoerd declares that Jews “took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” Despite its U.N. vote, Israel remains one of South Africa’s chief trading partners. Reflecting on this contradiction, the former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria Alon Liel will later acknowledge, “At the U.N. we kept saying we are against apartheid … but our security establishment kept cooperating.”

1963: Israel sells Centurion tanks to South Africa, while South Africa, which has the fourth largest uranium reserves in the world, ships ten tons of the material to Israel for use in its Dimona nuclear reactor. On August 7, the U.N. Security Council imposes its first arms embargo on South Africa and calls on all states to comply. Later, Israel provides South Africa with technological training, anti-tank rounds, and natural uranium rods. . In August, the U.N. Security Council imposes its first embargo on arms to South Africa and calls on all states to comply. Later, Israel will provide South Africa with technological training, anti-tank rounds, and natural uranium rods.

September 1966: Cape Town. Following Prime Minister Verwoerd’s assassination, the Senior Rabbi of the Progressive Jewish Congregation, Rabbi Arthur Super, eulogizes him as a man who, like Moses of old, led his people to the Promised Land after 60 years of wandering. Chief Rabbi Professor Abrahams calls Verwoerd “the first man to give apartheid a moral ground.”

June 1967: Pretoria. When Israel launches the Six Day War, the South African government releases over $28 million to Israel from Zionist groups and permits South African volunteers to work and fight in Israel. Israel occupies the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Sinai Peninsula. The first Jewish settlements begin.

August 1, 1967: Israel enacts the Agricultural Settlement Law, which bans Israeli citizens of non-Jewish nationality, e.g., Palestinian Arabs, from working on Jewish National Fund lands, i.e., on well over 80% of the land in Israel. Knesset member Uri Avnery states: “This law is going to expel Arab cultivators from the land that was formerly theirs and was handed over to the Jews.”

1968: Israel and South Africa refuse to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and bar inspection of their nuclear plants by the International Atomic Energy Commission. In June, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir rejects U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers’ Peace Plan that would require Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, and calls upon Jews everywhere to denounce it.

April 4, 1969: Haifa. Reflecting on Israel’s 20th anniversary, General Moshe Dayan is quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz telling students at Israel’s Technion Institute that “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either… There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

March 26, 1970: Pretoria. South Africa passes the Homelands Citizenship Act that defines blacks living throughout South Africa as legal citizens of the homelands, even if they have never stepped foot in their “homeland,” thereby stripping them of their South African citizenship and whatever civil and political rights they had.

April 28, 1971: C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times, quotes South African Prime Minister John Vorster as saying that Israel is faced with an apartheid problem, namely how to handle its Arab inhabitants. Sulzberger writes: “Both South Africa and Israel are in a sense intruder states. They were built by pioneers originating abroad and settling in partially inhabited areas… For diplomatic reasons, neither overstresses their bond in public."

April 1976: Prime Minister Vorster, who had been interned during World War II for being a Nazi sympathizer and commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler, visits Israel and concludes a comprehensive bilateral agreement whereby the two nations pledge themselves to each other’s survival and freedom from foreign interference. Within the space of a year, South Africa will become Israel’s single largest customer for weaponry.

October 26, 1976: South Africa. Transkei becomes the first of the “homelands” to be granted “independence.” Its assembly controls many internal matters, such as law enforcement, health and education, but all of its decisions are subject to the control of the South African government. Bophuthatswana will be granted “independence” the following year, then Venda in 1975, and Ciskei in 1981. Not one of the “states” will be recognized by any foreign government.

November 1977: The U. N. Security Council imposes a Mandatory Arms Embargo on South Africa. Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan says Israel will simply ignore the resolution. South Africa trades 50 metric tons of yellowcake uranium for 30 grams of Israeli tritium, a radioactive isotope used as a component in triggering thermonuclear reactions. Three major Israeli electronics companies, Tadiran, Elbit, and Israeli Aircraft Industries, help South Africa design and build its own electronics manufacturing capability, and sell it a variety of electronic and infra-red equipment for sealing its borders to prevent passage in and out of insurgents.

February 7, 1978: Pretoria. South Africa Minister of Plural Relations and Development Connie Mulder tells the House Assembly: “If our policy is taken to its logical conclusion as far as the black people are concerned, there will be not one black man with South African citizenship.” By the early 1980s, some 3.5 million blacks (or 55% of the total black population) will be expelled from their homes and resettled in the bantustans.

September 13, 1978: Washington, D.C. The Camp David Accords are signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The Accords reaffirm U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which prohibit acquisition of land by force, call for Israel’s withdrawal of military and civilian forces from the West Bank and Gaza, and prescribe “full autonomy” for the inhabitants of the territories. Begin orally promises Carter to freeze all settlement activity during the subsequent peace talks. Once back in Israel, however, the Israeli prime minister continues to confiscate, settle, and fortify the occupied territories.

May 14, 1979: Tel Aviv Radio announces that South Africa has become the first government to establish a tourist office in Israel. El Al and South African Airways, the two national airways, already have signed reciprocal agreements. By the end of 1981 the Israeli press will report a rise of 50 percent in Israeli tourism to the apartheid state.

September 14, 1979: Johannesburg. The Financial Mail, in an article entitled “Policies of Apartheid of the Government of South Africa,” reports that when arms and diamonds are taken into account, “Israel is already one of South Africa’s biggest trading partners.” Israel supplies South Africa with the Jericho missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and a joint naval project is developed for nuclear submarines, to be built in South Africa with assistance from Israeli engineers and designers. Israel also provides South Africa with Dabur patrol boats, Reshef missile boats, Gabriel ship-to-ship missiles, state-of-the-art night vision helicopter equipment, and training in Israel for South African navy personnel. Israeli professor Benjamin Beit-Hallachmi will later conclude that for decades Israel played a “crucial role in the survival of the apartheid regime, breaking the international arms boycott to become South Africa’s main foreign arms supplier.”

September 22, 1979: Aboard a ship in the South Atlantic. Israel and South Africa test a nuclear device. Details of the test and the nuclear cooperation between the two countries are closely guarded secrets.

March 20, 1980: The Los Angeles Times, citing an Israeli state radio announcement, reports that Israeli defense minister Ezer Weizman has gone on a “routine secret mission” to South Africa to discuss joint production of the Lavi aircraft. .

1980: South Africa achieves nuclear status with the firing of a weapon from the 155mm howitzer that Israel helps South Africa obtain from the U.S.

February 10, 1981: Israel. The newspaper Ha’aretz reports that Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon has just spent ten days with South African troops along the Angolan border in Namibia. Uri Dan, a close associate of Sharon, who accompanies him on the trip, quotes a senior South African officer, who tells him: “Don’t underestimate the influence the example of the Israeli army as a fighting army has on us.” Four hundred U.S-made 113AI armed personnel carriers and U.S.-made 106mm recoilless rifles are sent to South Africa via Israel.

March 4, 1983: Israeli radio reports that “close ties will be established between Israel and Ciskei, one of the puppet states set up in South Africa for the blacks.” The radio also quotes South African reports that Israel will supply weapons to Ciskei.

October, 1984: The Israeli West Bank settlement of Ariel is twinned with Ciskei’s “capital” Bisho. Ciskei’s Israeli representative Yosef Schneider observes: “It is symbolic that no country in the world (except South Africa) recognizes Ciskei, just as there is no country in the world that recognizes the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.”

December 13, 1984: New York. The U.N. General Assembly passes resolution 39/72C, entitled “Relations between Israel and South Africa,” which declares: “… that the increasing collaboration by Israel with the racist regime of South Africa, especially in the military and nuclear fields, in defiance of resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council, is a serious hindrance to international action for the eradication of apartheid … and constitutes a threat to international peace and security.”

February 23, 1985: Israeli journalist Yossi Melman reports in Jane’s Defense Weekly that a South African delegation has concluded a visit to Israel by secretly signing contracts with Tel Aviv worth $5-million for cooperation in joint ventures in high science technology. The agreement is negotiated by the Israeli ministries of finance and trade and industry and approved by the Israeli cabinet.

March 1985: Denis Goldberg, a Jewish South African sentenced in 1964 to life in prison for “conspiring to overthrow the apartheid regime,” is released through the intercession of his daughter, an Israeli, and top Israeli officials, including Israel’s president. Arriving in Israel, Goldberg says that he sees “many similarities in the oppression of blacks in South Africa and of Palestinians,” and he calls for a total economic boycott of South Africa, singling out Israel as a major ally of the apartheid regime. Pledging never to stay in a country that is a major supporter of apartheid, Goldberg moves to London.

September 1985: New York. Israel’s foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir announces his country will not institute sanctions against South Africa, and will retain “normal” relations with Pretoria. Two years later, as prime minister, he will say: “We have no reason to highlight our relations with South Africa, but we have no wish to join sanctions either, the like of which have often been employed against Israel.”

September 13, 1985: Rep. George Crockett (D-MI), after visiting the Israeli-occupied West Bank, compares the living conditions there with those of South African blacks and concludes that the West Bank is an instance of apartheid that no one in the U.S. is talking about.

November 5, 1985: Israel. A South African purchasing mission visits Israel to procure a “sophisticated Israeli-made electronic border fence.” According to Knesset member Mattiyahu Peled, Israeli Defense Forces soldiers show the delegation how the electronic fence works in the Jordan Valley.

December 13, 1985: The Committee for International Trade Union Rights announces that 12 major U.S. corporations have joined a boycott of South African goods: Safeway Stores, Mervyn’s, Montgomery Ward, F.W. Woolworth, Carter Hawley Hale, Thrifty Drug, Nordstrom, Sprouse Reitz, Macy’s California, Sears Roebuck, J.C. Penney and K Mart.

1986: South Africa unveils its jet fighter, the Cheetah, which is virtually identical to the Israeli Kfir-TC2 jet. The following year the Jerusalem Post reports that South Africa was recruiting Israeli engineers who worked on the Lavi aircraft. The United States voices concern because it has heavily subsidized the Lavi project and worries that the technology is being transferred to South Africa.

September 1987: Washington D.C. The Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Churches and a leader of the struggle in South Africa, tells a Palestinian human rights group: “What is it that makes Israel take into its bosom a government that in spirit, philosophy, and actions reminds us more of Hitler than any other government today? There is something wrong here… We must remember because, you see, your struggle and our struggle is not only against apartheid either here or there. It is not only against injustice, exploitation; it is not only against the dehumanization of our peoples; it is also a struggle against forgetfulness… We must remember that this land, yours and ours, belongs to all of us and not simply to a small elitist clique who now has claimed the land simply because they have more guns, more deadly weapons, and more friends in high places.”

March 16, 1988: Washington, D.C. The Congressional Black Caucus raises the Lavi issue with Israel’s Prime Minister Shamir, calling it an “unconscionable” use of U.S. aid. Rep. George Crockett also questions the prime minister on “his government’s brutal response to the Palestinian uprising,” and asks when “the curfews, the closed military zones, the beatings, the house raids, the gunshots, the rubber bullets, the tear-gassing and mass deportations would end.” The Black Caucus then tells Shamir: “Recalling the inhumanities of slavery in this country, having suffered the indignities of racial discrimination, Black Americans recognize and identify with those who are oppressed throughout the world. We, thus, feel a growing kinship with the Palestinians.” The Caucus also complains that all of the federal programs geared toward helping low-income Americans received only $491 per capita for fiscal year 1987, while aid to Israel in 1987 was $686 per capita.

September 13, 1993: Washington, D.C. Following secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway, Israel and the P.L.O. sign the “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self Government” (DOP). It will be followed by the 1995 Oslo II Agreement which will divide the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, into three zones: Area A, comprising disconnected districts, will include 17.2% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and will be under the security and civil control of the Palestinian Authority (PA); Area B, 23.8%, will be under Israeli security control, with the PA responsible for some social and civil services; Area C, approximately 59%, will remain under full Israeli occupation. In time, Area C, on the West Bank, will be subdivided into smaller population reserves by a Jewish-only road bypass system and four major Jewish-only settlement blocs. Oslo will also institutionalize a permit and closure system whereby Palestinians will face conditions similar to those faced by blacks under the pass laws.

May 10, 1994: South Africa. Watching Nelson Mandela take the oath of office as president of the new, desegregated South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, the out-going president of the apartheid regime, reflects on his Afrikaner ancestors: “The dream they had dreamt of being free and separate people, with their own right to national self-determination in their own national state in southern Africa was the ideal to which I myself had clung until I finally concluded, after a long process of deep introspection, that, if pursued, it would bring disaster to all the peoples of our country, including my own.”

July 2000: Maryland. President Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David II Peace Summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Clinton—not Barak—offers Arafat the withdrawal of some 40,000 Jewish settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, all of which are interconnected by roads that cover approximately 10% of the occupied land. Effectively, this divides the West Bank into at least two non-contiguous areas and multiple fragments. Palestinians would have no control over the borders around them, the air space above them, or the water reserves under them. Barak calls it a generous offer. Arafat refuses to sign.

August 31, 2001: Durban, South Africa. Up to 50,000 South Africans march in support of the Palestinian people. In their “Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid and the Struggle for Palestine” they proclaim: “We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with a colonial mentality, see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of colonialism in the 21st century. Only in Israel do we hear of ‘settlements’ and ‘settlers.’ Only in Israel do soldiers and armed civilian groups take over hilltops, demolish homes, uproot trees and destroy crops, shell schools, churches and mosques, plunder water reserves, and block access to an indigenous population’s freedom of movement and right to earn a living. These human rights violations were unacceptable in apartheid South Africa and are an affront to us in apartheid Israel. “

October 23, 2001: Ronnie Kasrils, a Jew and a minister in the South African government, co-authors a petition "Not in My Name," signed by some 200 members of South Africa's Jewish community, reads: "It becomes difficult, from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression expressed by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule." Three years later, Kasrils will go to the Occupied Territories and conclude: "This is much worse than apartheid. Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armored vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."

February 2002: An out-of-court settlement is reached with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, which is accused of spying on U.S. citizens in order to neutralize critics of Israel's military and economic ties to South Africa at the height of its apartheid. For the plaintiffs, former U.S. Rep. Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey declares: "With this settlement, it can be confirmed that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith sold and gave its illegally collected information ... to foreign intelligence services—the Israeli Mossad, and the South African intelligence services, during the period of the apartheid government."

April 29, 2002: Boston, MA. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says he is “very deeply distressed” by what he observed in his recent visit to the Holy Land, adding, “It reminded me so much of what happened in South Africa.” The Nobel peace laureate said he saw “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. Referring to Americans, he adds, “People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so what? The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.”

May 2002: Israel. A major study of Israeli settlement practices by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem concludes: “Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

May 16, 2003: Former prime minister F. W. deKlerk says that the U.S.-sponsored Roadmap, which is supposed to lead to a Palestinian state, looks exactly like South Africa’s “grand apartheid” that prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd set in motion in the mid-1950s.

June 16, 2003: Washington, D.C. At a forum co-sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Americans for Peace Now, Akiva Eldar, senior political correspondent for Israel’s leading daily Ha’aretz, warns that Ariel Sharon’s model for a Palestinian state is not that of a nation-state, but rather the South African bantustan model of apartheid. He quotes Sharon as telling the former prime minister of Italy Massimo D’Alema that “the best solution for the Palestinian problem is bantustans.”

July 3, 2003: Writing in American Prospect, Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg concludes that it is no accident that Ariel Sharon’s plan for the West Bank “bears a striking resemblance to the ‘grand apartheid’ promoted by the old South African regime,” and he also quotes Sharon as saying “the bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.”

July 29, 2003: Prime Minister Sharon rejects President Bush’s appeal to halt construction of a separation barrier that Israel is building on occupied Palestinian land. When completed, the barrier will form a complex system of electronic fences and concrete walls, up to 24-feet high in population areas, and ultimately stretching for 420 miles. Hundreds of acres of West Bank land will be confiscated for the barrier’s construction, and the route will incorporate into Israel all of East Jerusalem and major Jewish settlement blocks on the West Bank. A year later, the World Court will advise that the barrier is illegal and must be dismantled.

April 26, 2004: Former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti writes in The Guardian: “The bantustan model for Gaza … is a model that Sharon plans to copy on the West Bank. His announcement that he will not start to disengage before construction of the fence is completed along a route that will include all settlement blocs (in keeping with Binyamin Netanyahu’s demand), underscores the continuity of the bantustan concept. The fence creates three bantustans on the West Bank—Jenin-Nablus, Bethlehem-Hebron, and Ramallah.”

August, 2004: A report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem concludes that the for-Jews-only road system Israel has established in the West Bank “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime,” and “entails a greater degree of arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa.”

September 11, 2006: Israel. The editorial board of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, observes that “the apartheid regime in the territories remains intact; millions of Palestinians are living without rights, freedom of movement or a livelihood, under the yoke of ongoing Israeli occupation.”

October 27, 2006: Tel Aviv. Spiritual leaders from America’s historic African-American churches arrive in Israel to see the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the lens of their faith and their experience of the civil rights movement in the United States. On their return, Dr. Belletech Deressa of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America observes: “This crisis is different to me than any other one. I always thought that yes, there is a difference between the Palestinians and the Jews; yes, there is animosity. But now I realize that it is worse than racism and worse than apartheid. I don’t really have a word for it.”

November 2006: Former president Jimmy Carter brings out his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” In it the Nobel Peace Prize laureate calls the Israeli policy in the West Bank “a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights.”

Israel’s defenders react: Michael Kinsley, in a Washington Post article “It’s Not Apartheid,” calls Carter’s book “foolish and unfair;” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, declares that Carter “is engaging in anti-Semitism;” Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz calls the apartheid analogy “outrageous” and judges the book is “shallow and superficial;” and David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, calls the analogy “inflammatory” and the book “a crude polemic that compromises any pretense to objectivity and fairness.”

Supporters of Carter’s contentions respond as well: In The Nation, Henry Siegman, former national director of the American Jewish Congress, observes that even more extreme criticisms of Israel’s policies are found regularly in the Israeli media, and Yossi Beilin, a Knesset member and leader of the Israeli team in the Oslo negotiations, agrees, noting, “There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.” Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Dugard, considered the father of human rights in South Africa and Special U.N. Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, accepts the apartheid analogy, saying, “Many aspects of Israel’s occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel’s large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa.”

The president’s book quickly makes the best-seller list.

December 4, 2006: Former national security advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writes in the Financial Times: “President Carter, in my judgment, is correct in fearing that the absence of a fair and mutually acceptable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to produce a situation which de facto will resemble apartheid, i.e., two communities living side by side but repressively separated, with one enjoying prosperity and seizing the lands of the other, and the other living in poverty and desperation.”

December 11, 2006: Israel. Speaking on Israel Radio, President Carter comments: “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

December 26, 2006: In violation of the terms of the American-backed “Road Map” to peace, Israel’s Defense Ministry and settler groups announce plans for the construction of a new Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, the first in ten years. Not counting the 190,000-plus settlers in East Jerusalem, over 260,000 Jewish settlers now live in the West Bank among 2.5 million Palestinians. These indigenous Palestinians, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, are confronted with: 54 permanent military checkpoints; 29 “Green Line” checkpoints; 38 locked gates in the separation barrier for Palestinians, with keys kept by the Israel Defense Forces; 160 flying checkpoints per week; 12 internal checkpoints in Hebron; plus various permanent physical obstructions, such as concrete blocks, 219 dirt piles, 20 miles of trenches, and 69 locked gates at entrances to villages with keys held by the IDF; and 445 miles of forbidden roads.

January 19, 2007: A new military order goes into effect that, with a few exceptions, forbids Israelis or foreigners from transporting Palestinians in the West Bank. Israelis have yellow license plates and can travel on Jewish-only bypass roads in the West Bank. Violators of the ban can be punished with five years’ imprisonment.

Full Writing on the Wall

Monday, January 29, 2007

Writing on the wall

The manufactured row over Jimmy Carter's criticism of Israel risks obscuring a real chance for peace.

Ian Williams


January 26, 2007 04:01 PM

The fuss over Jimmy Carter and his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, gained new momentum this week as the former president spoke at Brandeis University, near Boston.

Carter's critics - of whom there are many - demanded that he use his speaking engagement to debate Alan Dershowitz, the prominent defender of torture and Israel. I look forward to similar demands that every time Dershowitz speaks, he give space to one of his opponents - Noam Chomsky, say, or Al Sharpton - and lets them counter his arguments.

Dershowitz, writing in the Jerusalem Post, claimed he just wanted "a real dialogue." But when overtly racist Israeli minister for strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, who has advocated mass killings of Arabs, let alone apartheid, came to the US to speak at the Brookings Institute's Saban Center, did Dershowitz call for his remarks to be balanced by a riposte from a speaker from Peace Now, let alone Palestinian Envoy Afif Safieh?

This manufactured furor against Carter's book could not happen in any other country except the USA - and it has certainly not happened in Israel, where many clear-sighted Israelis would agree entirely with the book's message. More to the point, those with intimate experience of apartheid in South Africa, ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in this space, to 200 prominent South African Jews in a letter last year, make much more explicit comparisons.

Carter has been called bigoted and anti-Semitic. In his book, however, he comes across as rather mealy-mouthed. In his speech at Brandeis he re-emphasized what he says in his book: that his warnings are against Apartheid to the territories, when the discrimination faced by Bedouin and Arab citizens in Israel on, for example land ownership, or access to social services, bears some very critical examination.

"I realize that this has caused great concern in the Jewish community," he said. "The title makes it clear that the book is about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel."

In fact, the word apartheid appears only three times in the entire text of his book - and always in the context of the Occupied Territories. The one time that he mentions it most explicitly, he is quoting an Israeli who feared that "we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship," in the context of describing future options for the Occupied Territories.

This is doubly interesting; because of course the Israeli press often makes the comparison with apartheid, since Israelis have to live with the consequences of their policies. It is only in the US that the legions of front-line fund-raiser banqueteers brandish their silverware in horror at the description.

Another time, Carter uses the word is in his description of the effect of the Separation Wall, "imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories." But he adds: "The driving force of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa - not racism but the acquisition of land." This is somewhat inaccurate, since apartheid in South Africa involved massive confiscations of the best land and corralling the dispossessed into small areas.

His third use of the A-word is the most interesting. Rabin had just returned from the apartheid state, and described to Carter "the close relationship Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade ... but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive."

Israel's sanctions-busting trade with the racist state helped it to survive longer than it would otherwise have done. And Israeli collaboration on arms programs may have gone beyond missiles and planes as far a joint nuclear test, with a pariah regime whose antecedents were Nazi sympathizers. If apartheid is such dreadful concept that we can't use it about Israeli polices, where were Carter's critics when Israel was the mainstay of the apartheid regime in South Africa?

I cannot recall that one of the shrill denouncers of President Carter's book ever taking exception to this conspiracy. Did one of them ever protest Israeli support for South Africa, or the hobnobbing of Israeli leaders with men who had been interned as Nazi sympathizers during the second world war? In contrast, the State Department told Carter not to talk to Hamas during his visits.

Apartheid is both understandable and abhorrent; it is the truth of the analogy that hurts. Clearly, the row about Carter's use of the word is a cynically contrived effort to detract from the book's plain and irrefutable message, accepted by the whole world community and much of Israel, and indeed by many American Jews: that the road to peace involves implementation of the UN resolutions, and a return to the 1967 borders, with some adjustments mutually agreed.

Dershowitz himself admits this, but still looks for straws to beat at Carter. After Brandeis he depicted one sentence, which Carter himself admits was sloppily phrased, as an endorsement of suicide bombing. Carter wrote that the Arabs "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Dershowitz knows that Carter does not support terrorism. This is a manifestation of an intellectual pogrom of the most distasteful kind.

As the engineer of the most successful peace agreement in the region - the settlement between Egypt and Israel, for which he was vilified for decades across the Arab world - Carter's claim that obstruction from expansionists in Israel, and their friends in the US, is the main obstacle to a peace has particular authority.

That, of course, is why the settlers and their American supporters would prefer you not to read his book or hear from him. Still, we should push the comparison further: the architects of South Africa's apartheid saw the writing on the wall, and came to a settlement before it was too late. It has left their country the most successful and prosperous on the continent.

We already have the wall; Carter has now provided some of the writing. Will Israel have the courage to follow his advice? jimmy carter apartheid south africa israel united states alan dershowitz

How Israel Enforces "Demographic Separation"

January 19, 2007

Carter Doesn't Tell the Half of It

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth

When I published my book Blood and Religion last year, I sought not only to explain what lay behind Israeli policies since the failed Camp David negotiations nearly seven years ago, including the disengagement from Gaza and the building of a wall across the West Bank, but I also offered a few suggestions about where Israel might head next.

Making predictions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be considered a particularly dangerous form of hubris, but I could hardly have guessed how soon my fears would be realized.

One of the main forecasts of the book was that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line -- those who currently enjoy Israeli citizenship and those who live as oppressed subjects of Israel’s occupation -- would soon find common cause as Israel tries to seal itself off from what it calls the Palestinian “demographic threat”: that is, the moment when Palestinians outnumber Jews in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

I suggested that Israel’s greatest fear was ruling over a majority of Palestinians and being compared to apartheid South Africa, a fate that has possibly befallen it faster than I expected with the recent publication of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. To avoid such a comparison, I argued, Israel was creating a “Jewish fortress”, separating -- at least demographically -- from Palestinians in the occupied territories by sealing off Gaza through a disengagement of its settler population and by building a 750km wall to annex large areas of the West Bank.

It was also closing off the last remaining avenue of a Right of Return for Palestinians by changing the law to make it all but impossible for Palestinians living in Israel to marry Palestinians in the occupied territories and thereby gain them citizenship.

The corollary of this Jewish fortress, I suggested, would be a sham Palestinian state, a series of disconnected ghettos that would prevent Palestinians from organizing effective resistance, non-violent or otherwise, but which would give the Israeli army an excuse to attack or invade whenever they chose, claiming that they were facing an “enemy state” in a conventional war.

Another benefit for Israel in imposing this arrangement would be that it could say all Palestinians who identified themselves as such -- whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel -- must now exercise their sovereign rights in the Palestinian state and renounce any claim on the Jewish state. The apartheid threat would be nullified.

I sketched out possible routes by which Israel could achieve this end:
* by redrawing the borders, using the wall, so that an area densely populated with Palestinian citizens of Israel known as the Little Triangle, which hugs the northern West Bank, would be sealed into the new pseudo-state;
* by continuing the process of corralling the Negev’s Bedouin farmers into urban reservations and then treating them as guest workers;
* by forcing Palestinian citizens living in the Galilee to pledge an oath of loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” or have their citizenship revoked;
* and by stripping Arab Knesset members of their right to stand for election.

When I made these forecasts, I suspected that many observers, even in the Palestinian solidarity movement, would find my ideas improbable. I could not have realized how fast events would overtake prediction.

The first sign came in October with the addition to the cabinet of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of a party that espouses the ethnic cleansing not only of Palestinians in the occupied territories (an unremarkable platform for an Israeli party) but of Palestinian citizens too, through land swaps that would exchange their areas for the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Lieberman is not just any cabinet minister; he has been appointed deputy prime minister with responsibility for the “strategic threats” that face Israel. In that role, he will be able to determine what issues are to be considered threats and thereby shape the public agenda for next few years. The “problem” of Israel’s Palestinian citizens is certain to be high on his list.

Lieberman has been widely presented as a political maverick, akin to the notorious racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in the late 1980s. That is a gross misunderstanding: Lieberman is at the very heart of the country’s rightwing establishment and will almost certainly be a candidate for prime minister in future elections, as Israelis drift ever further to the right.

Unlike Kahane, Lieberman has cleverly remained within the Israeli political mainstream while pushing its agenda to the very limits of what it is currently possible to say. Kadima and Labor urgently want unilateral separation from the Palestinians but are shy to spell out, both to their own domestic constituency and the international community, what separation will entail.

Lieberman has no such qualms. He is unequivocal: if Israel is separating from the Palestinians in parts of the occupied territories, why not also separate from the 1.2 million Palestinians who through oversight rather than design ended up as citizens of a Jewish state in 1948? If Israel is to be a Jewish fortress, then, as he points out, it is illogical to leave Palestinians within the fortifications.

These arguments express the common mood among the Israeli public, one that has been cultivated since the eruption of the intifada in 2000 by endless talk among Israel’s political and military elites about “demographic separation”. Regular opinion polls show that about two-thirds of Israelis support transfer, either voluntary or forced, of Palestinian citizens from the state.

Recent polls also reveal how fashionable racism has become in Israel. A survey conducted last year showed that 68 per cent of Israeli Jews do not want to live next to a Palestinian citizen (and rarely have to, as segregation is largely enforced by the authorities), and 46 per cent would not want an Arab to visit their home.

A poll of students that was published last week suggests that racism is even stronger among young Jews. Three-quarters believed Palestinian citizens are uneducated, uncivilized and unclean, and a third are frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz of Haifa University, who conducted the survey more than two years ago, believes the responses would be even more extreme today.

Lieberman is simply riding the wave of such racism and pointing out the inevitable path separation must follow if it is to satisfy these kinds of prejudices. He may speak his mind more than his cabinet colleagues, but they too share his vision of the future. That is why only one minister, the dovish and principled Ophir Pines Paz of Labor, resigned over Ehud Olmert’s inclusion of Lieberman in the cabinet.

Contrast that response with the uproar caused by the Labor leader Amir Peretz’s appointment of the first Arab cabinet minister in Israel’s history. (A member of the small Druze community, which serves in the Israeli army, Salah Tarif, was briefly a minister without portfolio in Sharon’s first government.)

Raleb Majadele, a Muslim, is a senior member of the Labor party and a Zionist (what might be termed, in different circumstances, a self-hating Arab or an Uncle Tom), and yet his apppointment has broken an Israeli taboo: Arabs are not supposed to get too close to the centers of power.

Peretz’s decision was entirely cynical. He is under threat on all fronts -- from his coalition partners in Kadima and in Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and from within his own party -- and desperately needs the backing of Labor’s Arab party members. Majadele is the key, and that is why Peretz gave him a cabinet post, even if a marginal one: Minister of Science, Culture and Sport.

But the right is deeply unhappy at Majadele’s inclusion in the cabinet. Lieberman called Peretz unfit to be defense minister for making the appointment and demanded that Majadele pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Lieberman’s party colleagues referred to the appointment as a “lethal blow to Zionism”.

A few Labor and Meretz MKs denounced these comments as racist. But more telling was the silence of Olmert and his Kadima party, as well as Binyamin Netanyhu’s Likud, at Lieberman’s outburst. The centre and right understand that Lieberman’s views about Majadele, and Palestinian citizens more generally, mirror those of most Israeli Jews and that it would be foolhardy to criticise him for expressing them -- let alone sack him.

In this game of “who is the truer Zionist”, Lieberman can only grow stronger against his former colleagues in Kadima and Likud. Because he is free to speak his and their minds, while they must keep quiet for appearance’s sake, he, not they, will win ever greater respect from the Israeli public.

Meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that Olmert and the current government will implement the policies being promoted by Lieberman, even if they are too timid to openly admit that is what they are doing.

Some of those policies are of the by-now familiar variety, such as the destruction of 21 Bedouin homes, half the village of Twayil, in the northern Negev last week. It was the second time in a month that the village had been razed by the Israeli security forces.

These kind of official attacks against the indigenous Bedouin -- who have been classified by the government as “squatters” on state lands -- are a regular occurrence, an attempt to force 70,000 Bedouin to leave their ancestral homes and relocate to deprived townships.

A more revealing development came this month, however, when it was reported in the Israeli media that the government is for the first time backing “loyalty” legislation that has been introduced privately by a Likud MK. Gilad Erdan’s bill would revoke the citizenship of Israelis who take part in “an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty to the state”, the latest in a string of proposals by Jewish MKs conditioning citizenship on loyalty to the Israeli state, defined in all these schemes very narrowly as a “Jewish and democratic” state.

Arab MKs, who reject an ethnic definition of Israel and demand instead that the country be reformed into a “state of all its citizens”, or a liberal democracy, are typically denounced as traitors.

Lieberman himself suggested just such a loyalty scheme for Palestinian citizens last month during a trip to Washington. He told American Jewish leaders: “He who is not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state cannot be a citizen in the country.”

Erdan’s bill specifies acts of disloyalty that include visiting an “enemy state” -- which, in practice, means just about any Arab state. Most observers believe that, after Erdan’s bill has been redrafted by the Justice Ministry, it will be used primarily against the Arab MKs, who are looking increasingly beleaguered. Most have been repeatedly investigated by the Attorney-General for any comment in support of the Palestinians in the occupied territories or for visiting neighbouring Arab states. One, Azmi Bishara, has been put on trial twice for these offences.

Meanwhile, Jewish MKs have been allowed to make the most outrageous racist statements against Palestinian citizens, mostly unchallenged.

Former cabinet minister Effi Eitam, for example, said back in September: “The vast majority of West Bank Arabs must be deported ... We will have to make an additional decision, banning Israeli Arabs from the political system … We have cultivated a fifth column, a group of traitors of the first degree.” He was “warned” by the Attorney-General over his comments (though he has expressed similar views several times before), but remained unrepentant, calling the warning an attempt to “silence” him.

The leader of the opposition and former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel according to polls, gave voice to equally racist sentiments this month when he stated that child allowance cuts he imposed as finance minister in 2002 had had a “positive” demographic effect by reducing the birth rate of Palestinian citizens.

Arab MKs, of course, do not enjoy such indulgence when they speak out, much more legitimately, in supporting their kin, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, who are suffering under Israel’s illegal occupation. Arab MK Ahmed Tibi, for example, was roundly condemned last week by the Jewish parties, including the most leftwing, Meretz, when he called on Fatah to “continue the struggle” to establish a Palestinian state.

However, the campaign of intimidation by the government and Jewish members of the Knesset has failed to silence the Arab MKs or stop them visiting neighboring states, which is why the pressure is being ramped up. If Erdan’s bill becomes law -- which seems possible with government backing -- then the Arab MKs and the minority they represent will either be cut off from the rest of the Arab world once again (as they were for the first two decades of Israel’s existence, when a military government was imposed on them) or threatened with the revocation of their citizenship for disloyalty (a move, it should be noted, that is illegal under international law).

It may not be too fanciful to see the current legislation eventually being extended to cover other “breaches of loyalty”, such as demanding democratic reforms of Israel or denying that a Jewish state is democratic. Technically, this is already the position as Israel’s election law makes it illegal for political parties, including Arab ones, to promote a platform that denies Israel’s existence as a “Jewish and democratic” state.

Soon Arab MKs and their constituents may also be liable to having their citizenship revoked for campaigning, as many currently do, for a state of all its citizens. That certainly is the view of the eminent Israeli historian Tom Segev, who argued in the wake of the government’s adoption of the bill: “In practice, the proposed law is liable to turn all Arabs into conditional citizens, after they have already become, in many respects, second-class citizens. Any attempt to formulate an alternative to the Zionist reality is liable to be interpreted as a ‘breach of faith’ and a pretext for stripping them of their citizenship.”

But it is unlikely to end there. I hesitate to make another prediction but, given the rapidity with which the others have been realized, it may be time to hazard yet another guess about where Israel is going next.

The other day I was at a checkpoint near Nablus, one of several that are being converted by Israel into what look suspiciously like international border crossings, even though they fall deep inside Palestinian territory.

I had heard that Palestinian citizens of Israel were being allowed to pass these checkpoints unhindered to enter cities like Nablus to see relatives. (These familial connections are a legacy of the 1948 war, when separated Palestinian refugees ended up on different sides of the Green Line, and also of marriages that were possible after 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, making social and business contacts possible again.) But, when Palestinian citizens try to leave these cities via the checkpoints, they are invariably detained and issued letters by the Israeli authorities warning them that they will be tried if caught again visiting “enemy” areas.

In April last year, at a cabinet meeting at which the Israeli government agreed to expel Hamas MPs from Jerusalem to the West Bank, ministers discussed changing the classification of the Palestinian Authority from a “hostile entity” to the harsher category of an “enemy entity”. The move was rejected for the time being because, as one official told the Israeli media: “There are international legal implications in such a declaration, including closing off the border crossings, that we don't want to do yet.”

Is it too much to suspect that before long, after Israel has completed the West Bank wall and its “border” terminals, the Jewish state will classify visits by Palestinian citizens to relatives as “visiting an enemy state”? And will such visits be grounds for revoking citizenship, as they could be under Erdan’s bill if Palestinian citizens visit relatives in Syria or Lebanon?

Lieberman doubtless knows the answer already.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Robert Fisk: Banality and barefaced lies

Robert Fisk

Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise

Published: 23 December 2006

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".

But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freedman of The New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!

Yes Virginia, It Is Apartheid

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Jeff Halper

Beliefnet asked God's Politics to dialogue with a recent post by one of their Virtual Talmud bloggers, Rabbi Eliyahu Stern, which compared Jimmy Carter with Orthodox Jews who attended Iran's Holocaust deniers summit:

While Carter's new book is not half as despicable as these Jews' recent trip to Tehran, where they joined hands with Iranian President Ahmadinejad at his Holocaust denial conference, it is pathetic if for no reason other than its title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Israeli Jewish peace activist Jeff Halper responds:

Jimmy Carter's use of the term "apartheid" to describe what is developing in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel these last 40 years is both accurate and useful. Accurate because apartheid is emerging in Israel/Palestine.

What is apartheid? It is the forced separation of populations in which one people establishes a regime of permanent and structured domination over another (whether on racial lines as in South Africa or on national/religious lines as imposed by Israel). This is exactly what Israel is doing, from annexing its huge settlement blocs to imprisoning the Palestinians behind 26' concrete walls and electrified fences. I don't even see what the "controversy" is about. Just go to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and open your eyes.

Carter's use of the term is useful because it names the thing: apartheid is the only term that gets at the systemic qualities of the regime of domination Israel is establishing. Its not just a policy or a response to terrorism or occupation - it is a full-blown, thought-out, intentional system of control and domination. Indeed, Israel itself calls its policy hafrada, separation, apartheid.

Let's thank Carter for giving us a handle on this thing. Let's stop arguing about the semantics and get on with the job of stopping it. Jews as the new Afrikaners. What a chilling thought!

Jeff Halper is the coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), based in Jerusalem.

Supporters Call for the Recall of South African Ambassador From Tel Aviv and Sanctions Against Israel

Monday, December 18, 2006

Palestine Solidarity Committee (South Africa) and Supporters Call for the Recall of South African Ambassador From Tel Aviv and Sanctions Against Israel

At a press conference held today in South Africa the Palestine Solidarity Committee, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions representing 1.2 million workers) and the South African Council of Churches called on the South African government to recall the ambassador to Israel and to implement sanctions against Israel.

Speakers at the conference included Willie Madisha (president of COSATU) Eddie Makue (general secretary of the South African Council of Churches), Ali Halimeh (Palestinian Ambassador to South Africa), Virginia Tilley (academic and author), Na’eem Jeenah (chair), Salim Vally (Palestine Solidarity Committee and Patrick Craven (spokesperson for COSATU).

They released the following joint statement:

We, delegates of organisations and movements that represent and have the support of the majority of South Africans, oppose and condemn the Israeli atrocities in Palestine and we make the following call:

• We call on the South African government to immediately recall the South African ambassador from Tel Aviv and to begin the process of ending diplomatic relations with Israel.
• We call on all South Africans to establish a strong, forceful and determined boycott and sanctions campaign against the Israeli apartheid state until the end of the occupation.
• We call on South Africans to identify a national day of action in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to observe it with rolling mass action around the country.
• We call on the South African government to ensure that no South African serves – in any capacity – in the Israeli Occupation Forces and that any South African citizen doing so will be prosecuted under the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act.
• We demand that Israel immediately withdraws all Israeli Occupation Forces from Gaza and ends the occupation of Palestinian lands.
• We demand that Israel abides by the provisions of international humanitarian law and human rights law, and refrains from imposing collective punishment on Palestinian civilians (as per the UN Human Rights Council declaration issued on 6 July 2006).
• Call on Israel to release all detained Palestinian ministers and legislators and to release all political prisoners – including hundreds of women and children.
• We call on the EU to stop the severe sanctions imposed by Europe on the Palestinian Authority as a penalty for exercising their democratic right and electing a government of their choice. This by itself is a brutal intervention on behalf of the occupation.
• We call on the United Nations to implement the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s Apartheid wall.
• We call on the United Nations to ensure that Israel fulfils its obligations in terms of international law.
  

Professor William Fletcher on Apartheid in South Africa and Israel

William Fletcher on Apartheid in South Africa and Israel

09:35


William Fletcher discusses Apartheid-era South Africa and compares it with Apartheid-like conditons in Israel today. He is a Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College, in NYC, an ex-CEO of the TransAfrica Forum, and a former assistant to the AFL-CIO's John Sweeney. Professor Fletcher spoke at "The Palestine Center," located in our nation's capital.

JOHN DUGARD, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 'APARTHEID -- Israelis adopt what South Africa dropped'

ajc.com > Opinion

APARTHEID

Israelis adopt what South Africa dropped

By JOHN DUGARD
Published on: 11/29/06

Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid.

As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me.

(ENLARGE)

John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security.

The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free movement of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role.

The Palestinian territories — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.

In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts — the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley — and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land.

Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas — north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) — which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa.

Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks resemble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.

Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.

Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.

In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans — rightly — complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2006/11/29/1129edcarter.html

S. African Investigation Commissioner, who also heads Interpol, is under suspicion of corruption

South Africa's police chief, his friend the murder suspect, and the crime syndicate
Commissioner, who also heads Interpol, is under suspicion of corruption

Chris McGreal in Johannesburg

Monday November 27, 2006
The Guardian


South Africa's police chief has been accused of protecting criminal interests. He vigorously denies the allegations and accuses a former British military intelligence agent of a smear campaign.


South Africa's national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, is under investigation after it was revealed that he maintained a close friendship with an organised crime boss recently arrested over the murder of a corrupt mining magnate.

The revelation follows a damning series of accusations against the national police commissioner, who is also president of the international police organisation, Interpol. They include a 144-page dossier submitted to detectives by a former British military intelligence agent who accuses Mr Selebi of "wining and dining the mafia set" and of protecting criminal interests.

South African officials have hinted at a plot by British intelligence against the police chief, but Mr Selebi is also under investigation by the Scorpions, the South African agency that investigates organised crime.

The latest controversy centres on the murder of Brett Kebble, a corrupt South African mining magnate who was shot six times in his Mercedes last year by a team of assassins. The motive is not yet known but Kebble stole millions of pounds from his mining companies and had close ties to criminal syndicates.

Murder arrest

On November 16 the Scorpions arrested Glen Agliotti, a man described in police files as the head of a multimillion pound drug syndicate and other organised crime rackets, for allegedly organising the murder. Mr Agliotti not only worked for Kebble but is a longstanding friend of Mr Selebi. They were so close that within minutes of Kebble's death Mr Agliotti called the police commissioner on his mobile phone. Both men say there was nothing sinister about their conversation.

Mr Selebi said Mr Agliotti had driven to the site of the killing while Kebble was still slumped behind the wheel of his car and then called the police commissioner to request an investigation.

Mr Agliotti has been described in court by the Scorpions as one of "the syndicate bosses who tend not to get their hands dirty, but manage their enterprises from a distance".

For months, Mr Selebi denied anything more than a casual acquaintance with the crime boss. But days before Mr Agliotti's arrest, the Johannesburg newspaper the Sunday Times reported that the Scorpions had seized a diary in which Mr Agliotti detailed regular meetings with the police commissioner.

Mr Selebi said his meetings with Mr Agliotti proved nothing.

"Does that mean anyone who has an appointment with him is a criminal?" he said. "I have never been in discussion with him about criminality. I do not know if he is involved ... He would never be involved in any sort of crime in my presence."

But Mr Selebi's claims not to have known that Mr Agliotti was a leading figure in the criminal underworld have met with incredulity since his rackets were the subject of police investigations.

Questions about the handling of the Kebble murder investigation had already been raised after it was revealed that the police handed over the dead man's car to the head of his security firm, Clint Nassif, immediately after the murder and before forensic tests could be done. The car was then cleaned, destroying crucial evidence. Mr Nassif is a close friend of Mr Agliotti and was recently arrested on fraud charges.

The Scorpions have for months quietly pursued an investigation that has included scrutiny of Mr Selebi's alleged ties to underworld figures, and many of the accusations against him would not have been made public if it were not for an embittered former British military intelligence agent, Paul O'Sullivan, who has lived in South Africa for 16 years.

He spent three years gathering the material submitted to the Scorpions this month that he claims is "evidence of a massive criminal syndicate, with tentacles into and out of Selebi's office".

Mr O'Sullivan accuses the police commissioner of "wining and dining the mafia set of Johannesburg", including Mr Agliotti. "That Selebi is a personal friend of the leader of that syndicate, which appears to have trafficked over 1bn rand in three years, says a lot about who he keeps company with," he said.

Infiltration

Mr O'Sullivan said he provided some of the information used by the Scorpions to arrest Mr Agliotti. "This Kebble fellow gets murdered at a time when I happen to be infiltrating the Agliotti mafia empire. I was infiltrating because I wanted to find out the links between this mafia and Selebi and along the way I found out who murdered Kebble and I took it to the Scorpions," he said.

Mr O'Sullivan began his pursuit of the police commissioner because he says Mr Selebi was responsible for his sacking as head of security for South Africa's airports in 2003. The former British spy says that he incurred the police chief's wrath by cancelling the contract of an airport security firm, Khuselani, because it was corruptly awarded and the company was risking the lives of passengers through incompetence.

Mr O'Sullivan claimed he uncovered fraud by the security company but was instructed by Mr Selebi's office and his superiors at the airports company to keep quiet about it. Instead he went to the Scorpions and Khuselani's chief executive was jailed. A few months later, Mr O'Sullivan was sacked. He accuses Mr Selebi of conspiring with airport officials to get rid of him.

South African officials have said that Mr O'Sullivan worked for M16 or MI5, and that he may still do so. The former agent, who was born in Ireland but has taken British and South African citizenship, denies he was ever employed by either organisation but is evasive about his past. He says only that he served in British military intelligence in the 1970s.

"I was in the British military, in military intelligence, but all of that is covered by the Official Secrets Act. You can appreciate my position as an Irish citizen working for the British. Someone might want to put a bullet in me so I don't want to discuss it," he said.

Mr Selebi has vigorously denied the allegations against him and accused Mr O'Sullivan of a "smear campaign". For a while the police commissioner fought back against the accusations, calling a press conference to deny a report in a Johannesburg newspaper that he had accepted a 50,000 rand (about £3,600) bribe from Mr Nassif. "Fifty thousand rand is a small amount for me. I would not be so cheap," he said.

But as further accusations were levelled, including allegations that he indeed did not come so cheap, Mr Selebi went to ground and said he would not respond any more.

Call for inquiry

Tony Leon, leader of the opposition in the South African parliament, has called for Mr Selebi to be suspended and for an official inquiry because of the "thickening cloud of suspicion" over his links to Mr Agliotti. He said that this "tawdry" scandal was eating away at confidence in the criminal justice system at home and abroad because Mr Selebi heads Interpol. "A number of senior police officials are reportedly desperate for Selebi to stand down, given the damage allegations against him are doing to the image of the police," he said.

But the safety and security minister, Charles Nqakula, said he had no plans to take action against Mr Selebi. "It will only be on the basis of concrete evidence that we will be able to do anything ... in the absence of that we are not going to do witch-hunting," he said.

President Thabo Mbeki told a group of religious leaders who expressed concern to trust him to take action if there had been wrongdoing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1957731,00.html

Apartheid. Ancient, Past and Present. Systematic Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa and Israel/Palestine

By Anthony Lowstedt

October 18, 2006


This is an investigation into apartheid as a system of gross human rights violations. Although it is primarily a well-documented indictment of the ethnic minority elites in apartheid societies, it also contains substantial criticism of gross human rights violations committed by members of the indigenous ethnic majorities. Among these is victimization of indigenous women, including femicide, as well as sacrifice and targeting of civilians on both sides of the apartheid divide.


Abstract

Apartheid against the indigenous majority in Graeco-Roman Egypt lasted 976 years (332 BCE-642 CE), in South Africa 342 years (1652-1994), and in modern Israel/Palestine 58 years so far. There are others, but according to the author, who defines apartheid in political-sociological terms, these three are the most clear-cut examples of this notorious crime against humanity. An apartheid society can never be stable. It is in a perpetual state of war. If the invading ethnic minority elites and their descendants hold on to power, apartheid can easily slip into either colonialism or into genocide. Liberation from apartheid is a gradual process, which in South Africa may still have decades to go. Although it might hold sway for centuries, apartheid is very expensive and difficult to uphold. The apartheid experiences of the past hold warning signs as well as strong reasons for hope, for South Africa as well as for Palestine/Israel.

http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/ApartheidR2.pdf