Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid Israel and the Struggle for a (Democratic Secular Palestine???)
The Palestinian rebellion has been a long time coming. Over three decades of
occupation is but one dimension of their tragedy. Driven from their original
homes, villages and land by sustained atrocities, condemned to miserable camps,
dispersed in a far-flung Diaspora, subjected to massacres like the Sabra and
Shatila slaughter of over 2000 refugees, and unending persecution.
The suffering in the West Bank and Gaza is the continuation of the
colonization of all of Palestine. Zionist militias seized 75% of the land
and drove out 800 000 Palestinians through a series of massacres between the
partition of Palestine in 1947 and the formation of Israel. With the
declaration of the state of Israel, 385 out of 475 Palestinian cities, towns
and villages were razed to the ground, disappearing from the map. The 90
remaining were denuded of land, confiscated without compensation.
We acknowledge the theft of the land and realize how today the Jewish National
Fund, a member of the World Zionist Organisation, administers 93% of the land
of Israel. To live on land, lease it, sharecrop or work on it, one must
establish four generations of maternal Jewish descent. In Israel, such a
lineage is necessary in order to enjoy elementary rights. We cannot mistake the
quintessentially racist character of such a state. Israel is an
apartheid state, founded on pillage and predicated on exclusivity. Rights flow
from ethnic and religious identity.
We, South Africans who have lived through apartheid cannot be silent as another
entire people are treated as non-human beings; people without rights or human
dignity and facing daily humiliation. We cannot permit a ruthless state to use
military jets, helicopter gun- ships and tanks on civilians. We cannot accept
state assassinations of activists, the torture of political prisoners, the
murder of children and collective punishment.
We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with a colonial mentality
see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of colonialism in the 21st
century. Only in Israel do we hear of `settlements' and `settlers'. Only in
Israel do soldiers and armed civilian groups take over hilltops, demolish homes,
uproot trees and destroy crops, shell schools, churches and mosques, plunder
water reserves, and block access to an indigenous population's freedom of
movement and right to earn a living.
These human rights violations were unacceptable in apartheid South Africa and
are an affront to us in apartheid Israel.
We South Africans faced apartheid and exploitation, bullets and prison, not
with bouquets of flowers, but with resistance. We are proud of this, our
history. This is the history of all oppressed people. Why should it be
different for Palestinians? Born in squalid refugee camps, living in poverty
and believing the world community does not care, more and more young
Palestinians see empty futures, aborted hopes and feel unbearable frustrations.
The great African- American poet, Langston Hughes, asked: "What happens to
a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun.or does it
explode?" The shocking suicide bombings answers this rhetorical question.
Apartheid Israel has created a situation in which people feel they have nothing
to lose. This dangerous situation could be
reversed, if the Israeli state and the one country that funds and supports it
unconditionally- the US, as well as the world community, act in a moral and
just manner.
It's Apartheid Again!
We note how the Israeli state rests on overt repression, a system of
structural violence and institutionalized discrimination that dehumanizes one
group to the advantage of another. Apartheid Israel has developed an elaborate
system of racial discrimination, embedded in its legal system-even surpassing
Apartheid South Africa's laws. These laws include the Law of Entry, the Law of
Return, Citizenship Law, legally sanctioned discriminatory rabbinical rulings
and the Military Service Law.
Palestinians are denied various welfare benefits, access to many jobs, and the
leasing of homes and land controlled by government bodies. We realize that
while Palestinians within the '48 borders may vote, they face these
discriminatory laws and are treated like third class citizens. Electricity,
sewerage, roads and water supplies are provided free to Israeli households
whereas many Palestinian communities in Israel, let alone the occupied
territories, have existed for decades without adequate services. The Israeli
education system is racist in practice and in content. Almost no
Arab history is covered and there are no Arab textbooks in the Israeli
curricula. Palestinians also face significant barriers in gaining access to
universities. In South Africa similar factors contributed to the Uprisings in
1976 and the 1980s.
Laws governing land ownership such as the Law of Acquisition of Absentee
Property and the Law for Acquisition of Land blatantly discriminate against
Palestinians. Although settlers constitute a tiny minority in the West Bank,
they own 60 percent of the land. Many of these settlers come from the US, the
ex-Soviet Union and South Africa. In Gaza, 6000 settlers live among a
population of one million Palestinians yet they own 42 percent of the land.
Land ownership in Palestine is more unjust than it ever was in South Africa. At
the height of apartheid black people nominally `controlled' 13 percent of the
land, in Israel the oppressed control only 2 percent. The Israeli government
also pursues a grossly discriminatory water policy. In
Gaza in 1985, for instance, settlers consume about 2000 cubic meters of water
per person; Palestinians are allowed to consume only about 120.
Despite the terminology, we recognize segregation when we see it. The policy of
`closures' is a policy of segregation. Blockades which allow settlers free
movement but restrict Palestinians have lost 100 000 workers their jobs. Some
roads are for settlers only. The Israeli government issues identification cards
and car number-plates, color coded, which restrict travel for non-Jews.
Palestinians in the West Bank are routinely prevented from traveling to the
Gaza Strip because they have to travel through `Israeli' territory. No
significant industry has been permitted to develop in the West Bank or Gaza.
Consequently, Palestinians are concentrated in the lowest paying jobs and form
a super-exploited labour force for Israeli capital. The occupied territories
import 93% of goods but export a mere 7%
of what they produce. Palestinian exports to Western Europe are banned so as
not to compete with Israeli exports. Ninety percent of Palestinian workers must
travel to Jewish towns for employment.
Israel is, simply, an Apartheid state. Apartheid laws, such as the pass
system and influx control, bantustans, job reservation; bantu education and
laws resulting in unequal resource allocation live on. As one South African
journalist wrote after visiting Israel: "In both countries [apartheid
South Africa and apartheid Israel] `subordinate races' were dispossessed of
their land and crowded into marginal, drought-stricken ghettoes; their movement
was restricted; access to education and skilled jobs limited so that they
inevitably sank into a pool of low wage labour. In both societies, bans on
inter-marriage and daily lives segregated by race did little to dispel the fear
and ignorance that feeds racial bigotry."
Globalisation's Watchdog
Israel is the highest recipient of US support. In return, it makes its own
contributions to maintaining the imperialist world order and stability for
transnational corporations, particularly oil companies. In the `70s it supplied
the military dictatorships of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua with more
military hardware than the US. It supports adventures and trains personnel of
unpopular regimes the US does not openly want to be identified with. The latest
regime is Turkey, which brutally suppresses its trade unions, workers'
organisations and the Kurds. In its illegal blockade of Cuba, the only support
for the US now comes from Israel. Of course, we will
never forget the support Israel provided to apartheid South Africa. While the
world condemned apartheid in South Africa as a crime against humanity, Israel
happily cemented trade, cultural, military and nuclear links with the white
minority regime.
A Bantustan or a Democratic Secular State?
We realise that the `peace plan' brokered by the US at Oslo, Camp David, and
the Wye River were recipes for continued misery and poverty for millions of
Palestinians. Rather than promise a future of peaceful co-existence they
virtually guaranteed a continuation of conflict and violence. They proposed a
Bantustan, a `state' with a dependent economy, no contiguous territory and no
substantial power, where Palestinians can be exploited, controlled, restricted
and confined in reservations. A dependent Bantustan alongside an apartheid
state is a mockery of self-determination-as it existed in apartheid South
Africa and now in apartheid Israel. In Israel, no less than in South Africa,
minimum justice requires dismantling the apartheid state and replacing it with
a democratic secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims,
live together with equal rights and opportunities.
We observe the stone throwing children of Jabaliya, the Beach Camp, Balata,
Khan Younis and Dheisheh and we see the response to over five decades of
outrageous tyranny and occupation. It is echoed in those Israeli Jews who
resist the oppression of others, like Mordechai Vanunu who, in 1986, was sentenced
by a secret security court to 18 years in prison for exposing Israel's nuclear
plans and indirectly Israel's nuclear collaboration with apartheid South
Africa.
We reject the calumny that to condemn Israeli apartheid or Zionism's
`ethnic cleansing' implies animus against Jews; or that it attempts to
diminish the Holocaust. The opposite is true. As the famed violinist Lord
Yehudi Menuhin told the French newspaper Le Figaro "It is extraordinary
how nothing ever dies completely. Even the evil which prevailed yesterday in
Nazi Germany is gaining ground in that country [Israel] today".
We, South Africans, extend our hands to the heroic people of Palestine.
Theirs is the struggle, slingshots in hand, of David against Goliath.
Theirs is the vision of a country shorn of racist dominion. Theirs is the
passion for life without oppression. Theirs is the struggle, Arab and Jews to
be free from discrimination and injustice. As South Africans we understand
these struggles, visions and passions. We support the demand to isolate
Apartheid Israel, the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees and
the dismantling of racist settlements. We pledge ourselves to be part of a new
International Anti-Apartheid movement against Israel.
Issued by the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
---
Please
feel free to distribute this article to all those you know, may Allah have
mercy upon you.