Note: Today I am publishing an opinion piece even though I have strong reservations about its key thesis. Basically, while I do agree that the self-confessed racist (“Jewish”) State of Israel’s policies are, in some ways, similar to Apartheid, I do not think that Israeli Jews are in any way similar to Afrikaners, nor do I think Israel is susceptible to the same kind pressures which, eventually, brought about the end of visible Apartheid in South Africa. Still, the piece is, I think, worthy if consideration and this is why I have decided to go ahead and publish it (with the kind authorization of the IMEU).
A discussion on how to end racism is very much needed and any proposal aimed at achieving this deserves to be widely publicized and discussed.
The Saker
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Tactics that ended apartheid in S. Africa can end it in Israel
By Bill Fletcher Jr.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict often inspires a sense of powerlessness. What can average Americans do to bring an end to this decades-old conflict when our leaders have failed so miserably?
And what good is speaking out about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land as the primary obstacle to peace when even former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu are condemned for their criticism of Israeli policies?
This month in San Jose, average Americans will have the opportunity to take a stand for peace and justice in the Middle East. The Presbyterian Church U.S.A.’s General Assembly began Saturday and runs through Sunday at the San Jose Convention Center. At the meeting, which takes place once every two years, delegates will make policy decisions for the 2.3 million-member denomination.
They will consider corporate engagement, up to divestment, with companies that profit from the obstacles to a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The church is considering approaches to Caterpillar, ITT Industries, Motorola and United Technologies.
The TransAfrica Forum, an organization which I was honored to head, played a leading role in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa. Corporate engagement was one of the most powerful tools in our non-violent arsenal. It was the right moral decision then and it is the right moral decision now. Just as it worked in South Africa, it can work in Palestine and Israel.
Yet Presbyterian delegates are being pressured to vote against similar measures. Some say the tactic unfairly singles out Israel for condemnation. But it is not the country we condemn; it’s a system of segregation and inequality.
The Israeli government has established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories a regime of systematic discrimination. It maintains two systems of laws, and a person’s rights are based on national origin. Palestinian land is confiscated to build Israeli-only settlements and roads. Palestinians wait hours in line at more than 500 Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank, while Jewish settlers speed by on modern, well-lit highways.
As Carter, and many Israelis have said, as long as this dual system exists, any peace agreement between Israel and Palestine will be impossible. Palestinians compare Israeli policies to those of apartheid in South Africa. Former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair wrote in 2002, “In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That regime exists to this day.”
South Africans who led the fight against apartheid, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former United Nations envoy John Dugard, make similar comparisons.
To the detriment of both Israelis and Palestinians, we provide financial and diplomatic support to maintain these separate and unequal policies. Israel is the No. 1 recipient of U.S. foreign aid: roughly $2.5 billion last year alone. Our government has cast more than 40 vetoes in the United Nations Security Council to shield Israel from international condemnation.
Divestment from companies that benefit from the occupation is an opportunity for American citizens to do what our government leaders have refused to do: say that our money will not fund human rights abuses any longer.
With humbleness, with love, with compassion for Palestinians and Israelis, I believe in the possibility that both can live as neighbors with security, dignity and respect. As it did in South Africa, corporate engagement, including divestment, can help make that possibility a reality.
BILL FLETCHER JR. is executive editor of www.blackcommentator.com and former president of the TransAfrica Forum, which led the U.S. movement to overthrow apartheid in South Africa during the 1980s.
can you spell out your reservations in more detail?
Sure. I believe that the Zionist ideology of Jewish racial supremacy is far more formidable than the Afrikaner’s much more modest Apartheid separate development plan. While the latter does have some roots in the South African Reformed Church, Zionism is built upon the much more all-encompassing racial hatred and self-worshipping of the Rabbinical Judaism of the Pharisees (the Talmud being only one expression thereof). The Israelis will, therefore, have no problem at all heaping a volume and quality of atrocities upon the Palestinians (and the rest of the Middle-East) which the South Africans would have never dared to even dream about.
Second, considering the total control which the Israel lobby has over the USA there is, in my opinion, no chance whatsoever to get US corporations to boycott Israel. In fact, I would guess that if, say, a European company decided to openly boycott Israel it would rapidly itself the object of a US boycott.
Third, Apartheid never was essential to the existence of the South African state. In contrast, there could be no Israel without racism and violence, these are the essential, foundational, components of the “Jewish state of Israel”. No amount of boycotts, even if theoretically possible, will ever make the Israeli Jews give up their sick dream of an ethnically “pure” state.
No, Israel will have to be defeated. Militarily. Then the racist regime in power will have to be totally dismantled and a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and democratic state based on the “one man one vote” for ALL the inhabitants of Palestine will have to be set up. I simply see no other option.
My 2cts.
The Saker
thanks for laying it out like that.
your analysis is clear. but what do solidarity activists in north america do other than raise issues of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, boycott, divestment, etc.?
so far, this is the movement that has been the most successful to date in raising critical awareness of the issues you discuss.
as you say, there are contradictions and limits in the BDS campaign, but around what else can people _organize_?
You are really asking the tough questions here :-)
First, I do think that raising all these issues is important, very important in fact, as a long of Israel’s power comes from the carefully crafted mythology which most Americans have so fully come to accept (you know, the Leon Uris, Speilberg & Co. propaganda). So denouncing Israel for what it is is very important and while a campaign for boycott might not in itself succeed in doing what it did in South Africa, it definitely could play a role in weakening the USAIsrael connection. Provided such more modest objectives, a boycott & disinvestment campaign makes perfectly good sense, I think.
The second thing which I think activists here should try to achieve is to openly challenge the nonsense about Hamas and Hezbollah being “terrorists”. Sadly, Hamas did, in my opinion, commit terrorist acts in the past so in the case of Hamas we should not bother denying a fact, but trying to explain what caused it. Also, compared to the massive and systematic use of terrorist methods by Israel, Hamas looks like a pot-smoking hippe convention and that is something which we should *always* stress when admitting that Hamas did do some rather ugly things. In the case of Hezbollah, that is really a piece of cake as no terrorist action whatsoever can be pinned on them at all. So that is another field of political action open to US activists.
Third, US activists need to denounce nature of the regimes in the Middle-East the US currently supports. Whether these are Fascists dictators like Mubarak or the Turkish military (which really runs the country), or medieval theocracies like in Saudi Arabia, every single US ally in the Middle-East is a key part of the machine of Zionist oppression and needs to be denounced as such. This is also true for the US stooges such as Abbas, Siniora, Maliki, Hariri, Dahlan and the rest of them.
Last, but most definitely not least, the US activists should spend at least half of all their energy and ressources denouncing the Israel Lobby for hijacking the nation and the US political class for being essentially agents of a foreign power. Over the past 5 years, a lot has been done towards this goal, but that hot issue needs to be taken up over and over and over again, hammered in with as much visibility as possible as it is, fundamentally, the most obvious and least controversial at all. More than anything else here is what we should all do:
WE SHOULD MAKE THE ISRAEL LOBBY PAY FOR SINGLE HANDEDLY STARTING THE WAR ON IRAN (which will happen, trust me on that). I don’t think that most American people have the knowledge and intelligence to see this now, but *after* the war begins and the shit really hits the fan, there will be a lot of anger out there and when people will wonder why a gallon of gas costs 8 ro 10 bucks and why their kids are dead they will start looking hard for the guilty party and that will be the time to do two things:
a) denounce the Israel Lobby
b) denounce the real ONE party system in the USA (and not the fake two party system in which you get to choose between the kosher Republicrats and the kosher Democans).
So there is plenty, plenty to do over here. All of our actions can, and should, be totally legal and non-violent, our efforts should be strictly limited to political actions protected under the First Amendment but it should also openly denounce the “system” in the USA in all its Fascist, hyper-capitalist, corporatist, militarist and plutocratic aspects.
That should keep us all busy for a long, long while, ain’t it so?!
Good luck!
The Saker
VS,
You know that anyone taking up this fight against the Israeli Lobby in America and pointing them out as the prime movers of the Iraq war and the coming Iran war is…well….FUCKED!
He is going to be on every Homeland Security watch list, no fly list, and have every ADL branch office provide local law enforcement officials his name as a potential “terror suspect”, and every SPL center lawyers looking for any dirt in his professional or social or marital life, and likely lose his job if he works in an institution large enough to house a human resource office or “diversity office.” (Am I alone in seeing the similarity between the USSR’s political commissars and the “diversity officers” here in the US?)
Basically, VS, anyone attempting this now will be dead economically before they get any kind of following. Not to mention that most Americans are not willing to believe that their govt is run by a shadowy bunch with no loyalty whatsoever to this country. If a 1,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 Americans die, they will not lose a minute’s sleep. Just a bunch of dead goyim after all. Everyone knows they don’t have souls anyway.
I mostly disagree. I do think that a person can loose a career over this, but I don’t believe that this will end up putting you on the DHS’ “no fly” list, nor do I believe that the ADL has any kind of influence on law enforcement. Remember the words of Christ who said “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16). Don’t do anything stupid or illegal, be wise about how and were you speak the truth. Choose your audience carefully, unveil the issues one by one, use examples and let your audience come to their own conclusions, etc.
I absolutely do not believe that the choice is either silence or martyrdom: there is a third, cautious but effective path. Mostly, simply raising the issue of the Israel lobby, with a smile on your face and no hyperbole, will get you a long way. It only takes one person to break a taboo, and long before you know it you will end up with a large number of people thinking and speaking up. It just takes one person to break the social taboo, that’s all.
Hope you are right.
As long as those defending Palestine can be written off as unpatriotic lefties or Islamist sympathisers there’s not a hope. We must attack Zion from the right.as well as the left.
A former CIA agent and devotee of Ronald Reagan called Michael Scheuer has just published a book, “Marching Towards Hell, America and Islam after Iraq” in which he takes on the taboo against criticizing Israel as a threat both to America’s security and the First Amendment. Advertising this book and boosting its readership even by little things like attaching an American link in Internet forums might have a significant effect on perceptions of Israel in the long run.
http://www.amazon.com/Marching-Toward-Hell-America-Islam/dp/0743299698/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214785194&sr=8-1
I particularly like this extract, which is worth quoting in full:
“The one thing that both sides [Democrat and Republican] agreed on was that I was indisputably a rank anti Semite who wanted to abandon Israel… What [his critics]clearly say is that their fellow Americans cannot be patriots if they use their right to free speech to question any aspect of the US-Israeli relationship, that US citizens should not be allowed to work at the CIA – or presumably elsewhere in the US government – if they are not Israel firsters and a pogrom is needed to remove critics of Israel from federal employment, and that any American who claims that the unqualified US support for Israel in the Muslim world is unreservedly damaging to US interests is a “snivelling weasel” an “idiot” etc.
“The list of US citizens acting as Israel’s thought police was impressive: James Carroll, Max Boot, Steven Simon, Alan Dershowitz, David Gergen, Christopher Hitchens, Marvin Kalb, and Eliot Cohen. These authors claim or imply that criticism of Israel by US citizens is anti Semitism, and some have such contempt for their fellow citizens that they practice the Big Lie by asserting definitively that there is no such thing as an Israeli lobby. Among those writers are found the takfiris of contemporary American politics, men who, with delicious irony, mirror Muslim takfiris in taking it upon themselves to decide who is and who is not a good American, then mete out punishment to those of their countrymen who do not make the grade.
“These are all dangerous men who in my judgment are seeking to place de facto limitations on the First Amendment to protect the nation of their primary attachment. They are the type of individuals about whom General Washington warned his countrymen, noting that the success of such men in limiting free speech would cause disaster for America “For if men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of mankin,” General Washington told his officers in 1783 “reason is of no use to us, the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led like Sheep to the Slaughter.”
Damn, the Amazon link didn’t come through properly, but just type in Michael Secheuer on amazon.com and the book’ll show up. Key passages are at pp 219-222. There’s also a chapter where Scheuer writes a fictional report from Al Qaida’s chief of intelligence in the US “and we can be sure there is one” in which American support for Israel is listed as one of the key issues boosting support for Bin Laden.