Twilight Zone: 'Worse than South African Apartheid'

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Nov 9, 2009



I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel.

Among them were members of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit. For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel - without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go - places that are also shunned by most Israelis.

On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph's Tomb to the monastery of Jacob's Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the "roads for the natives," which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.

Read on...
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1000976.html

[thunder rising]

1. It is tragic. It is an international crime.

[UndertheOcean]

2. Wish I can recommend this , the reality of the situation is finally getting out

to the rest of the World

[tabatha]

3. However, one comment is not true:

"Talk about the 'promised land' and the 'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have."

There was a belief among some Afrikaner Whites that they were chosen people to settle and manage the country.

"Thus, the 16 of December is celebrated by Afrikaners/Boers as a public holiday, colloquially called "Dingane's Day". After 1952, the holiday was officially known as Day of the Covenant, changed in 1980 to Day of the Vow (Mackenzie 1999:69). The outcome of the Battle of Blood River functioned to support the notion of divine favor for the Boer exodus from under the British rule. Dingane's power was broken and he abdicated his throne, the Boers later brought homage to the new king of the Zulus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner

"The Afrikaners, whose Dutch ancestors first established a trading and refueling stop at Cape Town in the 17th century to service ships moving between Holland and Java, and whose ranks were augmented by Huguenot and other northern European immigrants, considered themselves the "New Israelites". They found in the Old Testament verification for their belief that God favored their conquest of the new land. Their strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible supported them through the Great Trek of the 19th century; battles against Zulu and other Bantu tribes, who also laid claim to lands to the north; the Anglo-Boer War (when small guerrilla bands of a few hundred Afrikaner farmers were able to hold off tens of thousands of British regulars); and their institution of Apartheid in the 20th century, when they insisted on racial purity, separatism, and white supremacy, per the moral expectations of the God of Israel in the Old Testament and their own determination to keep political power in the hands of Whites of European descent."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Covenant_(novel)