Monday, January 30, 2017

Israeli Apartheid

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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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