OPINION
So far in this series, we’ve debunked the revolting lie that Hamas are ‘resistance fighters’, and the obvious stupidity of the Marxist claim that Jews are ‘settler colonialists’ in their own homeland. As BFD readers are no doubt grimly aware, though, firmly believing the most obvious stupidities is an article of faith for the ‘pro-Palestine’ lobby.
As is parroting buzzwords they clearly don’t understand. The disgraceful “From the River to the Sea” chant, for example: these clowns not only have no idea they’re horking the Hamas war cry; they haven’t the first clue which river, or which sea.
It’s not the only idiotic buzzwords they don’t understand, no matter how many times they bleat them. ‘Apartheid’ is another.
There are two components to refuting this claim. The first one is easy, involving only a brief comparison between apartheid South Africa and Israel. The second part is more difficult, explaining the origin of the slanderous accusation.
Firstly, capital-A Apartheid was the former policy of South Africa, from an Afrikaans word meaning apartness. But, just as democracy no longer means, ‘rule by land-owning freemen in Athens’, the meaning of apartheid now means a system under which people of different races are kept separate by law, with one race typically given more political rights and educational and other advantages.
No such policy exists in Israel.
Arab citizens of Israel are not forced to live separately from Jewish citizens. Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens. Arab citizens of Israel can be anything they want in Israel – doctors, lawyers, soldiers, police officers, members of the Supreme Court, and politicians. Many Arab citizens of Israel join the IDF. Nearly 20 per cent of students at Israeli Universities are non-Jewish, Arab citizens, and Israel has devoted considerable efforts to increase that number.
Arab citizens of Israel are not forced to live separately from Jewish citizens. Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens.
On the other hand, in the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Israeli citizens are forced to live apart from Palestinian Arabs. Israelis in Gaza have two options: hostages or dead.
The only ‘apartheid’ regimes are those run by Palestinians.
It is true, of course, that Palestinians don’t have the same rights in Israel as Israelis – because they’re not Israeli citizens. US law doesn’t apply in Canada, either. Canadian citizens can’t vote in American elections. This isn’t ‘apartheid’: it’s the norm of international relations.
So, where did this ‘apartheid’ lie originate? From the original apartheid state: South Africa. More accurately, from the post-apartheid South Africa of the ANC.
The ANC was friendly from the start with the violent terrorist group, the PLO. In particular, Nelson Mandela was a great friend of the murderous Yasser Arafat. Which may seem odd, considering that the modern state of Israel rejected apartheid from its earliest days, and voted in the UN in 1962 to condemn South Africa’s policies. Then-foreign minister Golda Meir declared them a “shameful iniquity”.
But many Africans, like Arabs, were (and are) indelibly racist toward Jews. So, after the 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, nearly every nation in Africa cut ties with Israel. One of the few exclusions was South Africa. So Israel traded with it and maintained diplomatic ties.
Mandela, it seems, never forgave Israel. He explained in 1994 that his African National Congress (ANC) party, then ruling the country, was “extremely unhappy” about Israel’s relations with South Africa’s apartheid government.
Mandela never called Israel an apartheid state, but his wife Winnie did, and so too did his grandson, a convert to Islam. In 2004, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela mourned the death of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, telling a group called the Palestine Solidarity Alliance in Johannesburg that “Apartheid Israel can be defeated, just as apartheid in South Africa was defeated.” In 2017, Mandla Mandela, son of Nelson’s son Makgatho, called Israel “the worst apartheid regime” and exclaimed that “Palestinians are being subjected to the worst version of apartheid.”
But such slurs weren’t confined to the odious Winnie and her grave-robbing Muslim son.
Another famous South African combined his anti-apartheid credibility with his religious authority to the charge. Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa, or as Yishai Fleisher calls him, “the reverend father of Israel apartheid,” also called Israel an apartheid state. According to Fleisher, “with his credentials in fighting apartheid, Tutu worked to reframe Israel in the same category as South Africa: as white oppressors, interlopers, colonialists, a foreign entity in the Middle East.”
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt concurs, arguing that “Tutu was probably more responsible for introducing the slanderous accusations about Israel being an Apartheid state into the public discourse than anyone else.”
As Alan Dershowitz points out, Tutu “accused the Jews of Israel of doing ‘things that even Apartheid South Africa had not done.’”
Then, in 2001, the now-thoroughly-discredited UN (whose employees, we now know, participated in the 7 October atrocities) oversaw a conference, chaired by Iran, in South Africa. In the wake of the conference, another discredited organisation, Human Rights Watch, took up the apartheid slur, and devoted itself to strident anti-Israel activism.
Following the deaths of both Mandela in 2013 and Tutu in 2021, South Africa under the ANC increased its anti-Israel stance, including support for Hamas. After the October 7 pogrom in Israel, Hamas sent two of its top officials to Johannesburg – Bassem Naim and Khaled Qaddoumi, Hamas’s representative in Iran. On December 5, Naim took more Hamas officials to South Africa to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s death. They were warmly received in Pretoria.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
So, the ‘apartheid’ lie originates with the failing state of South Africa. The further the former ‘rainbow nation’ slides into typical African ‘strong-man’ thuggery, the grosser its antisemitism gets: a combination of childish revenge, projection and basic African racism.
This is what the ‘pro-Palestine’ lobby are slavishly bleating.