Who Said Nearly 50 Years Ago that
Israel was an Apartheid State?
Ronnie Kasrils is South Africa’s Minister of Intelligence.
This article was based on Mr. Kasrils’ address at “Israel
Apartheid Week”, South Africa, delivered on Feb. 28, 2009
Palestine Chronicle
Mandela: 'We South Africans cannot feel free until the
Palestinians are free.'
At the onset of international 'Israel Apartheid Week' in
solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I want to
start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as
far back as 1963 that "Israel is an apartheid state." Those
were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or
Joe Slovo, but were uttered by none other than the
architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr.
Hendrik Verwoerd.
He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and
Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech , in contrast
to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.
To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both states preached and
implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole
claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to
exclusive citizenship; monopolized rights in law regarding
the ownership of land, property, business; superior access
to education, health, social, sporting and cultural
amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense
of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly
membership of military and security forces, and privileged
development along their own racial supremacist lines - even
both countries marriage laws designed to safeguard racial
“purity”.
The so-called “non-whites” in apartheid South Africa,
indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of Indian
origin - like second or third class non-Jews in Israel -
were consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque
existence, subject to bureaucratic whims and the laws
prohibiting their free movement, access to work and trade,
dictating where they could reside and so forth.
Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s
dispossession of indigenous Palestinian in 1948 - the year
his apartheid party similarly came to power - of the
unfolding destruction of their villages, the premeditated
massacres and the systematic ethnic cleansing.
Within a few short years the apartheid regime was
ruthlessly clearing South Africa’s cities and towns of
so-called “black spots” - where the “non-whites” lived,
socialized, studied and traded - bulldozing homes, loading
families onto military trucks, and forcibly relocating them
to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” - soon
to be reconstituted as Bantustans - not too far away from
industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of
cheap black labor.
Whilst he did not live to see the division of Palestinian
territory after the Six Day War, and the subsequent
creation of miniscule Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza,
he would have greatly admired and approved of the
machinations that enclosed the Palestinians in their own
ghettoized prisons. This after all was the Verwoerdian
grand plan, and the reason why Jimmy Carter could so
readily identify the Occupied Palestinian Territories as
being akin to apartheid. In fact the Bantustans consisted
of 13% of apartheid South Africa, uncannily comparable to
the derisory, ever shrinking pieces of ground Israel is
consigning to the Palestinians.
A further comment about the Bantustans. When I visited
Yasser Arafat in his virtually demolished headquarters in
Ramallah as part of a South African delegation in 2004, he
pointed around him and said “See this is nothing but a
Bantustan!” No, we responded, pointing out that no
Bantustan, in fact not even our townships, had been bombed
by warplanes, pulverized by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we
pointed out that Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed
impressive administration buildings, even allowed for
Bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in
order to impress the world that they were serious about
so-called “separate development.”
What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with which
Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way,
without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key
among them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to
admire in Israel, and seek to emulate in the southern
African region, was the way the Western powers permitted an
imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with
impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the
rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighborhood.
After the Six Day War, Verwoerd’s successor John Vorster,
infamously stated: “The Israelis have beaten the Arabs
before lunchtime. We will eat the African states for
breakfast.”
But it was not only the racial doctrine of Israel that
excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of the biblical
narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its
vision, aims and methods.
The early Dutch pioneers, the Afrikaners, had used Bible
and gun as colonizers elsewhere, to carve out their
exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland.
Like the biblical Israelites they claimed to be “God’s
chosen people” with a mission to tame and civilize the
wilderness; disregarding the productivity and
industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and
traded for centuries - claiming it was only they who would
make the land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a
covenant with God to deliver their enemies into their hands
and to bless their deeds. Until the advent of South
Africa’s democracy, the racial history books generally
taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or
less as the so-called “Bantu tribes” from the north were
wandering across the Limpopo - South Africa’s border with
Zimbabwe - and that they the were pioneer settlers in a
land without people.
Such a colonial racist mentality which rationalized the
genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and
elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in Palestine.
What is so shameless about this anachronistic colonial
barbarism is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the
West to aspire to such a goal even into the 21st Century.
It is by no means difficult to recognize from afar, as
Verwoerd had been able to do, that Israel is indeed an
apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John
Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when
Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and Sinai
from Israel. After that Israel and South Africa were
virtually twinned as military allies for Pretoria helped
supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of its 1973
setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa
at the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology -
from naval ships and the conversion of supersonic fighter
planes to assistance in building six nuclear bombs and the
creation of an arms industry.
For the liberation movements of southern Africa, Israel and
apartheid South Africa represented a racist, colonial axis.
It was noted that people like Vorster had been Nazi
sympathizers, interned during World War II - yet feted as
heroes in Israel and incidentally never again referred to
by South African Zionists as an anti-Semite!. This did not
surprise those that came to understand the true racist
nature and character of Zionist Israel.
Time and space does not allow further elaboration, but it
is instructive to add that in its conduct and methods of
repression, Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid
South Africa at its zenith - even surpassing its brutality,
house demolitions, removal of communities, targeted
assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and torture of its
opponents, collective punishment and the aggression against
neighboring states.
Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological
cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military
elite and public in general. Neither is this difficult for
anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the
way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a
justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions
against even defenseless civilians - women, children, the
elderly amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological
racist ideology that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and
implementation of the Holocaust?
I will state clearly, without exaggeration, that any South
African, whether involved in the freedom struggle, or
motivated by basic human decency, who visits the Occupied
Palestinian Territories are shocked to the core at the
situation they encounter and agree with Archbishop Tutu’s
comment that what the Palestinians are experiencing is far
worse than what happened in South Africa, where the
Sharpeville massacre of 69 civilians in 1960 became
international symbol of apartheid cruelty.
I want to recall here the words of an Israeli Cabinet
Minister, Aharon Cizling in 1948, after the savagery of the
Deir Yassin massacre of 240 villagers became known. He
said: “Now we too have behaved like the Nazis and my whole
being is shaken.”
Recently the veteran British MP, Gerald Kaufman, long time
friend of Israel, was reported as remarking that a
spokeswoman of the Israeli Defence Force, talked like a
Nazi, when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenseless
civilians in Gaza - many women and children amongst them.
It needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the
Holocaust are at the top end of the scale of human
barbarity in modern times, where do we place the human cost
of what has so recently occurred in Gaza and against the
Palestinians since 1948 in the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) they
have endured?
How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and
blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning
people alive, gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under
relentless siege with no place to run or hide. For 22 days
relentless bombardment whole families vaporized before the
horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.
Guernica, Lidice, the Warsaw Ghetto, Deir Yassin, Mai Lei,
Sabra and Shatilla, Sharpeville are high on that scale -
and the perpetrators of the slaughter in Gaza are the
off-spring of holocaust victims yet again, in Cizling’s
words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be allowed to go
unpunished and the international community must demand they
be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For
the lesson is that if apartheid Israel is not stopped in
its tracks these crimes will get greater and spread not
only to engulf the entire Middle East and Iran, but indeed
anywhere that Israel is challenged . Like the apartheid
security forces the hand of Mossad stretches very far
indeed. And of course with Israel a key ally in the USA’s
“War on Terror” and all the motives for that onslaught, oil
resources included, there will be no end to this bloody
saga - with the Palestinians targeted to go the way of the
extinct peoples of the former colonial era.
But such a fate must not and will not happen, if together
with the unconquerable Palestinian people we share the
resolve and determination to halt this insidious Zionist
project, and its Great Power backing and encouragement.
Once more, let me turn to our South African experience.
There, as with other struggles such as Vietnam, Algeria,
the former Portuguese colonies, the just nature of the
struggle was the assurance for success.
With that moral advantage, on the basis of a just
liberation struggle, we learnt the secret of Vietnam’s
victory and strategies according to what we termed our Four
Pillars of Struggle:
Political mass struggle; reinforced by armed struggle;
clandestine underground struggle; and international
solidarity.
At times any one of these can become predominant and it is
not for outsiders to direct those at the frontline of
struggle what and how to choose but to modestly provide the
lessons of our experience pointing out that the unity of
the struggling people is as indispensable as the moral
high-ground they occupy. For the Vietnamese the military
element was generally primary but always resting on popular
mass support.
In South Africa the mass struggle became the primary way,
with sabotage actions and limited guerrilla operations
inspiring our people. It all depends on the conditions and
the situation.
But unquestioningly, what helped tip the balance, in
Vietnam and South Africa, was the force and power of
international solidarity action. It took some 30 years but
the worldwide Anti-Apartheid Movements campaigns - launched
in London in 1959 - for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -
not only provided international activists with a practical
role, but became an incalculable factor in (a) isolating
and weakening the apartheid regime (b) inspiring the
struggling people (c) undermining the resolve of those
states that supported and benefited from relations with
apartheid South Africa, (d) generated a change of attitude
amongst the South African white public generally, and
political, business, professional, academic, religious and
sporting associations in particular. Boycott made them feel
the pinch in their pocket and their polecat status
everywhere - whether on the sporting fields, at academic or
business conventions, in the world of theatre and the arts
they were totally shunned like biblical lepers. There was
literally no place to hide from universal condemnation
backed by decisive and relentless action which in time
became more and more creative.
To conclude: we must spare no effort in building a
world-wide solidarity movement to emulate the success of
the Anti-Apartheid Movement which played such a crucial
role in toppling the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela stated after South Africa attained
democratic rule that “we South Africans cannot feel free
until the Palestinians are free.” A slogan of South
Africa’s liberation struggle and our trade union movement
is “An injury to one is an injury to all!“ That goes for
the whole of humanity. Every act of solidarity demonstrates
to the Palestinians and those courageous Jews who stand by
them in Israel - that they are not alone.
Israel has lost in Gaza. Whilst many Palestinians have lost
their lives the Palestinians have not been conquered or
cowed. Repression generates resistance and that will grow.
Israeli aggression stands exposed. A turning point has been
reached in humanity‘s perception of this issue. The time is
ripe for us to drive home the advantage. When 150,000
Palestinians within Israel itself demonstrated against the
carnage in Gaza; when Jewish women staged a sit-in in at
the Israeli Consulate in Toronto; when Norwegian tram
drivers stopped their transport in sympathy; when
municipalities and colleges decide to divest like Hampshire
college in the USA (the first that took this step against
apartheid South Africa), when Durban dockworkers refused to
unload a ship with Israeli cargo; joining with the
countless thousands around the world, from Australia to
Britain to Belgium to Canada to Cairo, Jordan, Indonesia
and the USA we know the times are changing and Zionist
hegemony is fast losing control. BDS represents three words
that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and
victory for Palestine. Like South Africa this can mean,
must mean: freedom, peace, security, equality and justice
for all - Muslim, Christian and Jew. That is well worth
struggling for!
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