I grew up in South Carolina. Never heard the word apartheid
but I lived in an apartheid system. We simply
referred to it as “our way of life.” We defined
it as “separate, but equal.” In reality, we were far more committed to keeping
things separate than equal. I went to the better school while the black
citizens in my community went to that ol’ fire trap on the south side of town. No
matter what we called it, it was an evil system and it took years of external
pressure (from the federal government,) and a lot of education to grow out of
it. Thank God, the people of conscience rejected apartheid and our “right to
exist as a white state.”
Now, look at South Africa. Apartheid, which means
“apart-ness” was sustained by all kinds of legal and emotional
justifications. Keeping blacks in Bantustans
was “good for everybody.” They were
inferior human beings that just could not take care of themselves and as long
as they provided a supply of cheap labor for the Afrikaners, apartheid worked
until the world woke up to the pain inflicted upon millions of weak human
beings and its conscience took over. The United Nations regards apartheid as a
crime against humanity. Apartheid is now rejected by every civilized nation with
the exception of Israel.
Today, Israel is an apartheid state. Of course, Israel
rejects the title and prefers to call itself a “democracy” but changing the
vocabulary does not change the fact of Israel’s brutal dominance of the
occupied territories. Oren Ben-Dor explains:
Israel never officially annexed those areas to Israel (i.e., to ‘pre-1967
Israel’); on the other hand, instead of calling them ‘occupied, it insist on defining them as ‘held’ territories. Israel created this legalistic subterfuge to
enable it to claim that articles 47 to 78 of the Geneva Convention that pertain
to ‘territories occupied in war’ are not relevant there and to ensure that the
state can be selective in the way it applies official Israeli law.[1]
It is amazing that so many people who openly opposed the
apartheid system in South Carolina and South Africa are willing to give a pass
to Israel.
It’s even called a separation (apartheid) wall. Add to that,
hundreds of checkpoints, illegal settlements, home demolitions, curfews, bombardment of unarmed
Gazans, thousands of political prisoners and you have the face of Apartheid Israel.
Thomas Are
January 30, 2017
[1]
Ilan Peppe, Israel and South Africa, The
Many Faces od Apartheid, (Zed Books,
London, 2015.) p. 78.
Israel has 'friends' in the corridors of power of the western world. If these 'friends' tell the authorities jump, they respond: how high? Besides, it has also penetrated the western churches and I have yet to come across a priest or a pastor who can dare openly to declare that Biblical Israel is the Kingdom of God and not that ungodly earthly entity deceptively called by that name.
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