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 Rice Compares Israeli Occupation to Infamous US Segregation
By Lenni Brenner Can anyone be more defensive of Zionism's reputation than Israel's Prime Minister? Therefore many wondered why Ehud Olmert suddenly announced after Annapolis that "if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished." (news.bbc.co.uk - 11/29/07) Apparently he was reacting to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's blunt statements to him. Haaretz, Israel's most prestigious newspaper, says that "In private conversations -- and as she said in Annapolis -- Rice tends to compare the Israeli occupation in the territories to the racial segregation that used to be the norm in the American south. The Israel Defense Forces checkpoints where Palestinians are detained remind her of the buses she rode as a child in Alabama, which had separate seats for blacks and whites. This is an uncomfortable comparison, of course, for the Israelis, who view it as 'over-identification' on her part with Palestinian suffering." (Aluf Benn, "What's the hurry?" - www.haaretz.com - 12/27/07) Of course Olmert isn't abandoning Israel's 'right' to exist as a Jewish state within borders recognized by the Authority and the Arab world. Ditto Carter and Rice. But if a Jewish state is legitimate in principle, how and why did "the only democracy in the Middle East," as Israel proclaims itself, end up looking like apartheid South Africa and the segregated American south? We will never get honest answers from Olmert, much less from Rice, who shows no sign of in-depth knowledge of Zionist history. But there is indeed an intelligent explanation. We can find it in "The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)," written in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of the "Zionist -Revisionist" movement which Olmert grew up in. Jabotinsky was Russian-speaking and a gifted writer in that language and many others. Indeed his talents were so extraordinary that he soon became a leading international Zionist figure and was instrumental in getting London to establish a "Jewish Legion" in 1917 to help Britain take Palestine from the Ottoman empire. Early Zionism had many utopian writers who don't do anything to implement their idealistic notions. But volunteering in an imperial army molded Jabotinsky into a realist. Read him, below, and you will understand why Israel ended up as Rice's "segregation" and Olmert's "apartheid," and why Olmert doesn't dare invite the world at large to read his own political idol. Jabotinsky prided himself on his clear logic. But that's Olmert's problem. The Iron Wall is the ultimate handbook on pith-helmet Zionist "colonisation." Olmert, Rice and Carter all call for a "2-state solution," even if in different voices. Olmert wants as big a Zionist state as he can keep with minimal Israeli casualties, with the Palestinians confined in a 'Bantustine' no bigger than a broom-closet. Rice is prepared to be a tad more generous to the natives. But segregation or apartheid, religious or ethnic, has no right to exist on even one inch of today's planet. After long struggles, American legal segregation and South African apartheid are dead and gone and we all say good riddance to them. It is time, indeed it is past time for progressive Palestinians and Israelis get their act together, set up their equivalent of the American civil rights movement and the African National Congress, and call for a democratic secular bi-national Palestine/Israel. When they do, Zionism will join segregation and apartheid in the cemetery reserved for defeated colonial regimes. Lenni Brenner is the author of 4 books, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil, and a study of the Democratic Party. His books have been favorably reviewed in 11 languages by prominent publications, including the London Times, The London Review of Books, Moscow's Izvestia and the Jerusalem Post. He Blogs at www.smithbowen.net/linfame/brenner and can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
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