LETTER: ANC’s two-state solution backing is grand hypocrisy
I am surprised but pleased to be in agreement with Sara Gon that the ANC government is hypocritical in supporting the “two-state solution” in Israel-Palestine (“SA shows two faces on Israel”, November 16).
If apartheid was bad for SA it is even worse for Palestine. Within “Israel proper” more than 50 laws discriminate against Palestinian Israeli citizens on the basis of citizenship, land and language.
Reminiscent of the Group Areas Act, more than 90% of Israel is reserved for Jewish occupation. Such humiliations in SA were referred to as “petty apartheid”. Beyond the “green line”, the West Bank and Gaza are “grand apartheid” bantustans, but with even less autonomy than the puppet regimes in SA.
If apartheid in SA was rightly condemned by the international community as a “crime against humanity”, why should it be inflicted upon the Palestinians by way of the “two-state solution”? It is glaringly obvious that the two-state solution is simply a delaying tactic for Israel to steal and occupy more and more Palestinian land.
In 1948 Israel agreed to the right of return of Palestinian refugees, but more than 70 years later still refuses to allow them to return. True, their return would confirm a Palestinian majority and bring about the end of the Zionist/apartheid state of Israel. As it is, Palestinians are already the majority in the prospective “one democratic and secular state” ranging from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea. Yet even mention of “from the river to the sea” is smeared by Zionists as “anti-Semitic”.
Given our apartheid history all South Africans — but especially our Jewish community — have a moral obligation to speak out when Israeli government war crimes and genocide cross a line beyond even apartheid atrocities into Nazism, as regularly occurs during Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza. Gaza is a concentration camp with 2-million prisoners.
Why the silence? As Archbishop Tutu has often said: “Those who claim to be neutral in the face of oppression have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
The tragedy in Israel-Palestine is that the victims of the Nazi holocaust have become the current generation of perpetrators of not dissimilar atrocities against Palestinians. Even here there is parallel with SA — that Afrikaner victims of British concentration camps became the next generation’s perpetrators of apartheid.
Terry Crawford-Browne,World Beyond War SA
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