South African Apartheid & Israel Compared

[by Ben Heine /MWCNEWS]

Below is a set of comparisons between the racist Apartheid régime in South Africa of 14 years ago [with the Apartheid Israel comparison in square brackets].

Before reading this list you should remember that the racist, Apartheid South Africa régime had Anglo-American backing, its leadership had explicit Nazi connections and the Apartheid South African nuclear bomb (dispensed with after the fall of Apartheid) was developed with its great ally Israel.

Further you should consider that about half the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) are Children and about three quarters Women and Children. It should go without saying (but unfortunately needs to be said in a racist, violent Bush-ite world heavily informed  by Bush-ite and Racist Zionist-sympathetic Mainstream media) that anyone who knowingly ignores, denies, excuses, minimizes, obfuscates, supports, advocates or is otherwise complicit in gross abuse of Women and Children – or indeed of anyone, and whether by racism, colonial occupation, Apartheid-style laws, violation of International human rights convention, mass murder, wrongful imprisonment, mass murder, ethnic cleansing or genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention   – has crossed the line between decent humanity and proto-Nazi barbarism.

A brief list of Apartheid South Africa  and Apartheid Israel comparisons:   

1. ultimately deriving from Dutch and thence “Afrikaaner” colonialism (17th – 20 th century) and British colonialism (after formal “acquisition” in 1814 after the Napoleonic  Wars; the annexation of Natal, 1843; British importation of Indian and Chinese “5-year slavery” indentured  labour, from 1860; and the Boer War 1899-1902) [deriving from racist political Zionism in the 19th-21st centuries;  massive Zionist  colonialism after the 1916 Anglo-French betrayal of the Arabs, 1916 and the further British betrayal of the Arabs by the Balfour Declaration, 1917 – which nevertheless insisted on no detriment to the Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants];

2. the   race-based, Whites-only  ethnocracy [ditto Israel; e.g. the offensive and racist use of the name “Israel” rather than, for example, the racially and religiously neutral “West Palestine”; the identification of the Jewish name “Israel” with a racist Apartheid Racist Zionist State is profoundly offensive to decent, non-racist Jews; not even Apartheid South Africa went so far as to use a name  such as “New Europe” or “New Holland” (although the latter was applied initially to Australia before it was invaded and colonized by the racist British colonialists with attendant horrendous genocide of the indigenous Inhabitants];

3. Indigenous Africans and non-Europeans were excluded from democracy  [Jewish Israelis rule all of the Holy Land; OPT Palestinians have no say – indeed their own democratically-elected “local” government is rejected by the US, UK and Israel; Arab Israelis, perhaps 20% of the population of Israel, can vote but have virtually no participation in Government];

4. non-Europeans were forcibly expelled from their lands (subject to passive and active genocide, from dispossession and disease at the Cape in the 17th century to outright dispossession in the 19th century and Bantustan confinements in the 20th century) [Palestinians ditto; 6 million refugees; 4 million registered with the UN; 80,000 flee each year; 85% of Christian Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed] (see MWC News: 1 and 2 );

5. racist genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention (Article II sections a-d: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group) [ditto for Palestinians; ethnic cleansing variously through violence, expulsion, dispossession and appalling imposed “open concentration camp” conditions; 6 million refugees; 4 million refugees registered with the UN; 80,000 flee each year; 85% of Christian Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed] (see: 3 );

6.  non-Europeans forcibly confined to Bantustans or non-White urban areas [Palestinians ditto];

7. non-European movement highly constrained [ditto Israel in the OPT; race-based compulsory carriage ID as in the “pass system” of Apartheid South Africa and Nazi-occupied Europe; road blocks and road use constraints];

8. non-Europeans racially identified by ID [compulsory ID identifying non-Jewish Palestinians; akin to Nazi insistence on racial ID of Jews etc];

9. profoundly offensive constraints on inter-marriage [Israeli marriage to Palestinians effectively prohibited because co-habitation in Israel “proper” is prohibited - utterly disgusting and unforgivably offensive racist laws in both Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel);

10. horrendous differential deaths [post-invasion excess deaths - avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen - in the Occupied Palestinian Territory total 0.3 million – evidence of gross contravention of the Geneva Conventions that insist that Occupiers do everything in their power to preserve the lives of their conquered subjects].

11. horrendous differential infant deaths (the post-invasion under-5 infant deaths in the OPT total 0.2 million; "annual under-5 infant death rate" 0.47% in the OPT as compared to 0.1% in Israel- evidence of gross violation of Article 38, Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian persons in Time of War:  "5. Children under fifteen years, pregnant women and mothers of children under seven years shall benefit by any preferential treatment to the same extent as the nationals of the State concerned."; see Articles 38, 55 and 56: ] (see: 4 , 5 and 6 )

12. gross violation of the UN Charter and Geneva, Rights of the Child, Genocide and Universal Human Rights Conventions as outlined above [ditto Apartheid Israel] (e.g. see: 3);

13. possession of nuclear weapons (developed with Israeli help and Anglo-American complicity to back Apartheid obscenity ; discarded after non-racist democracy attained in 1993) [ditto Israel; non-racist democracy has yet to be attained in Apartheid Israel];