Apartheid's
Accidental Prophecy
by Susan Abulhawa
Dissident Voice
May 23, 2002
The
apartheid government of South Africa came to power in 1948, the same year that
the State of Israel was created in Palestine. Having lived and witnessed the
legacy of Zionism, I wonder sometimes if this shared birth year was not an
accidental prophecy.
Both
governments were born on the miserable premise of entitlement for a select
group of people. This entitlement, to land rights and resources, spawned laws
and societies that measured human worth by human irrelevancies. In the case of
South Africa, it was skin color. In the case of Israel, it is religion. In both
lands, the privilege accorded to the chosen group came at the expense and
detriment of the natives -- the “un-chosen.”
As
if we were children of a lesser God, we were uprooted from our ancestral homes
and piled like garbage into wretched refugee camps or exiled into drifting oblivion.
As if they were not quite human, black souls of South Africa were dumped in
abject ghettos. In the Holy Land, where religion has no physical features,
everyone carries color-coded ID cards and drives cars with color-coded plates.
That is how oppression discriminates there.
During
the gist of Apartheid's cruelty, Nobel Laureate and Archbishop Desmund Tutu
went to the land of my mothers. He stood in Jerusalem on Christmas Day of 1989
and said before an audience "I am a black South African, and if I were to
change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank could describe events in South Africa."
Last
month, Desmund Tutu gave a lecture in Boston, where he affirmed Israel's right
to security, but added "What is not so understandable, not justified, is
what it does to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very
distressed during my visits to the Holy Land; it reminds me so much of what
happened to us, black people, in South Africa during the apartheid rule."
Many
have long pointed to the tragic parallels between Israel and Apartheid South
Africa where one people cruelly control the lives and fate of another. In
Hebron, where 600 Uzi-toting Jewish settlers live among 240,000 Palestinians,
85% of the water is diverted to the few Jewish settlers. The remainder is
rationed among Palestinians. The reality is a cruel contrast between a people
with swimming pools amidst green lawns and a people who must share bathing
water.
The
shared values of Zionism and Apartheid spurred the nostalgic reflection in
Henry Katzew's book, South Africa: A Country Without Friends, in which he said:
"What is the difference between the way in which the Jewish people
struggles to remain what it is in the midst of a non-Jewish population, and the
way the Afrikaners try to stay what they are?" (Die Transvaler, quoted by
R. Stevens in Zionism, South Africa and Apartheid.)
Most
people no longer recall that Israel remained a close ally with South Africa
when the world embarked on a global boycott against it. Few remember that the
weapons used to mow down young boys in Soweto were supplied by the State of
Israel.
And
long after the injustice of Apartheid fell to its knees, Ehud Barak made an
offer for a Palestinian State in the style of apartheid's bantustans. He was
widely hailed as "brave" and his offer as "far reaching."
But to those of us who saw the map or witnessed the reality, the "97%
concession" was clearly apartheid, cleverly repackaged and renamed. His
offer was a patchwork of isolated islands hemmed on all fronts by Jewish-only
settlements and
Jewish-only
roads.
Author
Breyten Breytenbach was dispatched in March to the occupied territories as part
of a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers. Upon his return he
wrote:
"I
recently visited the occupied territories for the first time. And yes, I'm
afraid they can reasonably be described as resembling Bantustans, reminiscent
of the ghettoes and controlled camps of misery one knew in South Africa."
Breytenbach,
too, is familiar with apartheid. He spent seven years in prison under the
"Terrorism Act" in South Africa-the same act under which Mandela was
imprisoned.
Yet
a brutal Israeli occupation endures long after apartheid collapsed and it
builds tall barriers throughout the land, long after the world understood the
wickedness of the Berlin Wall.
Israel's
ironic denial of Palestine's right to life (repeated again this month by its
ruling party) spurs the hearts that fought apartheid like few others.
In
an open letter to Ariel Sharon Breyten wrote: "there can be no peace
through the annihilation of the other, just as there is no paradise for the
“martyr” you have not broken the spirit of the Palestinian people."
Desmund
Tutu uttered the questions that baffle us all. "My heart aches," he
said. "Why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers
forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the
home demolition, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on
their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God
cares deeply about the downtrodden?"
It
makes my heart ache, too. The anger and helplessness I felt in Jenin and
Ramallah subside now to a constant ache. But I keep looking to the final
similarity between Zionism and Apartheid. The fruition of that accidental
prophecy.
The time when the subjugation of my people will end. When the institution of
religious exclusivity will crumble in Palestine and Israel like apartheid did
in South Africa.
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian living in Pennsylvania. She is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-profit organization dedicated to building playgrounds and recreation areas for Palestinian children living under military occupation. To find out more about this vital project, visit:
www.playgroundsforpalestine.org/. Susan can be
contacted at: JABROLE@aol.com