Israeli television showed him on his first day, visiting the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At an official state banquet held for Vorster, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin toasted the “ideals shared by Israel and South Africa.”

Why was an outspoken member of a Nazi militia in South Africa during the Second World War and a leading member of the party that crafted official apartheid policies in South Africa being feted in Israel?

A statement in the South African government’s yearbook made two years after Vorster’s visit provides an answer: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

These close ties came from the identification that both states had for each other’s cause. Both were settler states that claimed to be bringing “civilization” to so-called backward peoples. And both were committed to using any and all means to maintain their regional domination over the “natives” that they had conquered–in South Africa, to create a white state based on the exploitation of Black labor; in Israel, to create an exclusively Jewish state through the systematic removal of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Victims of repression in South Africa and Palestine

In an excellent two-part article in the Guardian in 2006, Chris McGreal quotes Ronnie Kasrils, then the intelligence minister in the post-apartheid government led by the African National Congress. Kasrils, who is Jewish and had co-authored a petition protesting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, explained why such a close affinity could develop between the two countries:

Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity.

This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was “a land without people for a people without land,” so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

Vorster’s visit signaled an acceleration of economic, diplomatic and military cooperation between the two countries, a collaboration that already had a lengthy history.

South African Gen. Jan Smuts, who had a close relationship with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, Israel’s first prime minister, had been instrumental in convincing Britain to sign the Balfour Declaration that agreed to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After 1948, South Africa was one of the first countries to recognize Israel.

N. Kirschner, a veteran South African Zionist leader, wrote in 1960 in an Israeli publication: “There exists a bond between Jewish aspirations and the aspirations of the people of South Africa.”

That bond was expressed chiefly in growing military and secret nuclear cooperation. Each country shared its intelligence and counterinsurgency techniques with the other, and South Africa purchased arms from Israel. Israel purchased nuclear materials from South African in order to develop its secret weapons program, and in return, Israel provided scientific and technical assistance to help South African build its nuclear bombs.

Hundreds of white South Africans graduated from Israeli military training schools. “It is a clear and open secret,” wrote an Israeli journalist in 1976, “that in army camps, one can find Israeli officers in not insignificant numbers who are busy teaching white soldiers to fight black terrorists, with methods imported from Israel.”

The parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa are striking. In South Africa, the white colonial settler minority conquered the Black majority, forcing them into Bantustans–so-called independent African homelands–that covered only 13 percent of the country. This allowed the whites to declare South Africa a white country.

Blacks, who outnumbered whites by 4-to-1, became the cheap labor that built South Africa’s economy, but they couldn’t be citizens.

Likewise, Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, sold the Jewish state to its potential imperial backers as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

Variations on statements such as this one from Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, can be found scattered throughout the writings of the founders of the state of Israel: “There is no room for both peoples together in this country…There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

These principles guided the Zionist armies and paramilitary gangs that used massacres and terror to drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel, and again led to the expulsion of 325,000 Palestinians from their land after the 1967 war.

These are not old, outdated views, but the deeply held conviction of leading Zionists today. Listen to the ravings of Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, head of the Israel Defense Force’s National Defense College, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 2004 about Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza:

We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Qassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful.

It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace”–it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.

There are some differences between South African and Israeli apartheid.

Israel’s relationship to Arab labor was different than that of the South Africa rulers to the Black majority. Rather than exploiting cheap Arab labor, the early Zionist settlers in Palestine built their state-in-embryo by excluding Arab labor, under the slogan “Jewish Land, Jewish Labor.”

After the formation of the state of Israel, Arabs did become a source of cheap labor, but Israel has never been dependent on Arab labor–whereas in South Africa, strikes threatened to bring down apartheid because Black labor was its lifeblood.

Yet the similarities are more striking than the differences. If apartheid South Africa declared itself a white state by creating the fiction of Black “homelands” and implementing pass laws to severely restrict the movement of Africans, in Israel, an exclusively Jewish state was creating by expelling the majority of Palestinians from their lands and legally barring their return.

A battery of laws were put in place after 1948 that grant the state legal authority, in various ways, to seize Arab farms, orchards, homes and businesses if the owners are absent for any length of time, or for “security” reasons. At the same time, any Jew in the world was granted the legal right to enter Israel and become a citizen.

Today, Israel treats the Arab minority within its current borders as third-class citizens (behind the Mizrahim, or the Middle Eastern, as opposed to European, Jews). Palestinians receive lower wages and education funding, face routine harassment and police brutality, and are subjected to high incarceration rates; they are restricted from owning land, and are victims of land seizures and expulsions that continue to this day.

A paper on Israel’s Arab minority by Eric Gust of the Center for Contemporary Conflict explained that “advancement of Arabs within Israeli society, whether in the demographic, economic, political or educational sectors, is viewed as occurring at the expense of the Jewish population, and could be perceived as a threat to the Jewish nature of Israel.”

Israel is also an apartheid state in form, if not in legal terms, because it has turned the lands it occupied in 1967–the West Bank and Gaza–into South African-style Bantustans, whose inhabitants face economic blockade and routine assaults from the Israeli army and settlers, and whose towns and refugee camps are cut off from each other by an apartheid wall and a system of checkpoints, while special roads crisscross the West Bank that can only be used by Jews.

Any “two-state” solution that Israel accepts will merely put a legal stamp on this fact.

Israeli leaders are usually loath to publicly admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there are moments of candor.

Former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Force, Gen. Rafael Eitan, speaking at a closed meeting of Israeli professionals in 1983, gave a presentation that considered South Africa’s Bantustan policy as a possible solution to the Palestinian problem.

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a statement that if Israel was unable to implement a two-state solution, it would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He had warned four years earlier: “We don’t have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle–and ultimately, a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”

Israel leaders look with horror on the prospect of the struggle for a democratic, secular Palestine–a state for all its inhabitants–because the whole basis of the existence of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state would be destroyed.

For that same reason, those of us who oppose Zionism should welcome such a struggle with open arms.

On January 10, some 20,000 people gathered in Washington for an emergency national mobilization. Large demonstrations — bigger by far than any pro-Palestinian rights demonstration for many years — have taken place in cities around the country.

Arab Americans and Muslims have been the mainstays at these protests, but many activists involved for the last several years in antiwar movement organizing instinctively responded to the call to take a stand against Israel’s terror.

But this raises a question that has divided the antiwar movement before: What attitude should activists take to Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, given the close connections between Israel and the war-makers in the U.S.? Should the movement point out the connections to the two U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan? Or do activists risk alienating those who would oppose the U.S. war on Iraq by bringing in the issue of Israel’s war on Palestinians?

Many liberal voices in the antiwar movement have sided with not taking up the issue of Palestine — including leaders of the main national antiwar coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). UFPJ’s response to Israel’s latest onslaught shows the problems with this approach.

UFPJ has issued statements deploring the humanitarian crisis in Gaza today, but it has stopped short of demanding an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. On its Web page, it instead calls for “an immediate cease-fire,” and explicitly supports UN Security Council Resolution 1680, passed on January 8, by a 14-0 margin, with the U.S. abstaining.

The resolution “condemns all acts of violence and terror directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism.”

In addition, it “calls upon member states to intensify efforts to provide arrangements and guarantees in Gaza in order to sustain a durable cease-fire and calm, including to prevent illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition and to ensure the sustained reopening of the crossing points on the basis of the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and in this regard, welcomes the Egyptian initiative, and other regional and international efforts that are underway.”

The Egyptian initiative referred to in the resolution is the plan of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, supported also by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas as well as the Israelis, for a cease-fire, an end to Hamas rocket attacks, internationally supervised border “security” to prevent arms from reaching Gaza, the opening of the Egyptian border crossing at Rafah to relief supplies, and new talks aimed at compelling Hamas to agree to let the Palestinian Authority back into Gaza.

In short, Egypt’s “peace” proposal reflects Israel’s war aims.

UFPJ claims that the U.S. decision to abstain, rather than veto the resolution, indicates that “our collective pressure is being heeded, and we are forcing a change in U.S. policy.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

First of all, the Security Council plan comes 13 days after the start of Israel’s attack, after hundreds of people have already been slaughtered. It is not so much a plan to stop Israel’s attack, but to let Israel finish its work and for the UN to step in at the right moment to broker peace terms favorable to Israel.

The abstention by the U.S. is an indication that it supports Israel’s continued assault, and it is not yet ready to step in and wind it down. The idea that a change in policy is being “forced” on the U.S. is at best naïve, and at worst deliberately deceptive. The unanimous resolutions passed in both houses of Congress in support of Israel should be proof enough that U.S. policy is not changing.

Second, the UN resolution, as one analyst supportive of the attack on Gaza wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “does not dictate halting the Israeli operation nor does it demand the immediate pullout of Israel Defense Forces troops.” It merely calls for a cease-fire.

Worse, while the resolution fails to call for any disarming of Israel — the fourth-largest military in the world and the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid — it does call for stopping arms from reaching Hamas.

Can we really call this a plan for a “cease-fire”? A proposal demanding that an oppressed people — enduring squalid conditions as a result of the Israeli blockade, unable to come or go without Israel’s okay, subject to daily violence by the Israelis — be deprived of any means of resisting the military onslaught?

If so, then it is the victor’s peace, creating a wasteland, to paraphrase Tacitus, and calling it peace.

Also, the resolution, rather than condemning Israel’s relentless pounding of Gaza, condemns violence and “terrorism” against all civilians — a formulation designed to refer to Israelis who might be affected by rockets fired by Palestinians. As if an attack on a defenseless, blockaded and occupied refugee population by the world’s fourth most powerful army is equivalent to the firing of ineffectual rockets by forces resisting that occupation.

The resolution presents the wildly disproportionate violence as if there were a struggle between relatively equal forces. Thus, one UN Security Council press release, for example, writes of “two weeks of escalating violence and suffering in Gaza and southern Israel.”

The UN resolution is geared to the interests of the aggressors in this conflict — designed to disarm the Palestinian people who are legitimately resisting Israel’s aggression. As such, it is a shameful document that no serious antiwar forces can support.

That UFPJ nevertheless supports this resolution is not surprising. In deference to the Democratic Party, which took control of Congress in 2006, and to President-elect Obama, it has not called a national demonstration against the Iraq war in close to two years.

Moreover, because of UFPJ’s close association with liberal supporters of Israel, it has been loath to include the issue of Palestine in organizing efforts. In the past, it has claimed to exclude demands relating to Palestine on the grounds that this would make it “possible for the largest and widest array of people to come together in opposition to the war.”

As Lance Selfa wrote some years ago in Socialist Worker, “What UFPJ doesn’t say is that the people it is more worried about alienating are Zionists in their ranks and Democratic Party politicians, whose support for Israel is a given. UFPJ’s leaders would rather sideline thousands of Arabs and Muslims who have been the targets of state repression than a handful of Democrats and their liberal supporters.”

If the argument to limit the movement’s demands was spurious when UFPJ made it in 2005, it is even more so now, when tens of thousands of people are in the streets protesting Israel’s genocide against Gaza.

Now, the issue of Israel and its assault on Palestinians is at center stage, and it is high time that the antiwar movement move decisively to take up the cause of Palestinian liberation.

“Palestine not an abstract question peripheral to the war in Iraq,” Selfa wrote. “In fact, as this newspaper has demonstrated in numerous articles, U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine can’t be separated from the Iraq occupation. Not only do they flow from the same plan of U.S.-Israeli domination of the Middle East, but Israel has actually advised the U.S. on every aspect of the occupation of Iraq, from training Kurdish militias to the torturers in Abu Ghraib.”

The link between these wars — meticulously denied by liberal antiwar forces — is openly proclaimed in the U.S. press. Israel is seen as a strategic partner in U.S. efforts to reshape the Middle East, an effort that includes occupying Iraq, going after Syria and Iran, and smashing Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

The antiwar movement must link these issues together — Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine — and acknowledge that we cannot build a united antiwar movement that fails to take on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism or the issue of Palestine.

Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, who is still at large, have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in the Hague, in connection with the siege of Sarajevo, during which up to 11,000 people were killed, and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica.

That Karadzic is responsible for war crimes should not be in question. Under his political leadership, Serbian nationalists engaged in terrible atrocities–including the shelling of cities and towns, massacres of civilians, rapes and herding people into concentration camps–to drive people out and create an “ethnically pure” swath of Bosnia and the Krajina region of Croatia that they hoped to annex to Serbia.

But this fact alone does not close the case. As with all war crimes tribunals in history, there is selectiveness about what is considered a war crime and who ends up on the dock.

After the Second World War, some Nazis were put on trial in Nuremburg (though because of U.S. Cold War interests in establishing a strong German state and utilizing former Nazis as spies and scientists, the trials were wound up quickly). But as a court of the victors, no Americans were tried for the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or for the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden.

Throughout the Balkans conflict, Serbs were systematically demonized in the Western press, while atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by Croats and Muslims were either omitted or played down.

On first look, the ICTY offers an image of impartiality. In addition to indicting Slobodan Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, it has also indicted Milan Babić, president of the Republika Srpska Krajina; Ramush Haradinaj, former prime minister of Kosovo (recently acquitted); Rasim Delić, who served as commander of the main staff of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina from June 1993 until September 200; and Ante Gotovina, former general of the Croatian Army (currently on trial).

However, of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, from common soldiers to generals, police commanders and political leaders, three-quarters are Serbs or Montenegrins. This is not surprising considering the court was established by the UN Security Council, under pressure from the U.S.–making it, again, a “court of the victors.”

While it is true that the conflict in the region developed out of the ambitions of Slobodan Milosevic for a greater Serbia, uniting the Serbs of Serbia with those living in Bosnia and Croatia, Croatia’s nationalists under Franjo Tudjman were no less ruthless in their efforts to create a “greater Croatia,” based on the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina and Serbs and Muslims from parts of Bosnia.

Croatian paramilitaries massacred hundreds of Muslim civilians in the town of Ahmici, to give just one example. After shelling the town to force townspeople to flee, Croatian forces sprayed them with machine gun fire across an open field through which the people were forced to run, a scenario similar to the atrocities committed by Serbian forces in many Bosnian villages during the war.

Indeed, as Bosnia came under attack from Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries, Muslim nationalists, with (eventually) military aid and air support from the U.S. and Europe, engaged in similar acts of ethnic cleansing as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. Journalist Misha Glenny, in his excellent book The Fall of Yugoslavia, offers an example:

Wherever they could, the Muslims used the considerable sympathy which they enjoyed in the outside world as a cover to undertake military operations.

In December and early January [1993], they launched an intensive offensive from Srebrenica with the aim of regaining control of Bratunac, to the east on the river Drina. The Serbs were caught unawares by the attack, and the Muslims moved swiftly through Serbian villages, slaughtering a large number of civilians on the way. Because the atrocities were being perpetrated by the Muslims, they received relatively little attention in the world media.

They also provoked a fearsome counter-attack by the Serbs, who had soon driven the Muslims back to Srebrenica. Politicians and journalists were quick to condemn the Serbs for this operation, but they entirely neglected to point out that it had been provoked by the original Muslim offensive.

But what really throws the impartiality of the court into question is that no individuals–military or political leaders–from NATO countries that intervened in the war have been indicted. Yet there can be no doubt that the United States and NATO forces committed war crimes in the former Yugoslavia–first, in the Bosnian war, and later, in the air war against Serbia in 1999 during the conflict over Kosovo.

From the start, there was the complicity of the Western powers in creating the conditions that made war and ethnic cleansing inevitable. As Phil Gasper wrote:

In the end, Germany’s recognition of Croatia’s independence–without any guarantees of the Serb minority’s national rights in Croatia–made the outbreak of war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia inevitable. The same holds true for Bosnia. Germany and the U.S. recognized Bosnian independence even though the majority of Bosnian Serbs and Croats–about 51 percent of the republic–had rejected it. By doing so, they put their seal of approval on Bosnia’s descent into war.

Then there is the direct complicity of the United States in the greatest single act of ethnic cleansing that took place during the war–Operation Storm in August 1995.

By 1993, the U.S. was finally able to strong-arm its reluctant European war partners into adopting a new policy (the old one being an arms embargo on Bosnia)–NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, combined with arming the Bosnian Muslim army. The policy was called “lift and strike.”

Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia, brokered a new alliance–after the two sides had been fighting for months in central Bosnia–between Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims.

To “level the playing field” further, a group of retired U.S. generals helped Croatia to devise a military plan, with U.S. and German military aid, to overrun the Serb-held Krajina region. A private U.S. mercenary company, Military Professional Resources Inc., provided training to the Croatian Army.

The August 4, 1995, Croatian offensive, dubbed “Operation Storm,” drove upwards of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their homes. Human rights observers reported the burning of homes, looting and massacres of elderly Serbs too old to flee the region. Croatia was completely “cleansed” of its historic Serbian population, and in the following weeks, U.S. air support for Muslim and Croatian forces allowed them to seize 20 percent of Bosnia back from the Serbs.

According to Mark Danner, writing in the New York Review of Books:

During two weeks beginning at the end of August, NATO pilots flew 3m400 sorties, destroying Serb antiaircraft batteries, radar sites, ammunition depots, command bunkers, bridges. Meanwhile, the Croats and Bosnians pressed their combined attacks in northwest Bosnia, conquering town after town. Indeed, NATO planes had in effect become the Croatian and Bosnian air force, ensuring that they would succeed, in just over two weeks, in changing the balance of power in Bosnia.

Bill Clinton praised Operation Storm, saying that he was “hopeful Croatia’s offensive will turn out to be something that will give us an avenue to a quick diplomatic solution.” The three-pronged offensive–the Croat invasion of Krajina, a Muslim attack in central Bosnia and punishing air strikes–pushed all sides to the negotiating table in 1995 to sign the Dayton Accords.

Today, Ante Gotovina, the Croatian general who led Operation Storm, along with two other generals, is currently facing trial on war crimes charges associated with that operation. But Bill Clinton and the U.S. generals who helped plan it and gave the green light for it remain at large.

Finally, the 11-week NATO air assault on Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 is a war crime that the tribunal won’t touch.

The U.S. claimed that it went to war to help Kosovar Albanian refugees under attack by Serbian forces. However, the NATO bombing produced another several hundred thousand Kosovar refugees and later helped facilitate the cleansing of the Serb minority from Kosovo.

U.S. and NATO planes conducted several thousand sorties, destroying Serbia’s power grid, factories (372 industrial sites), railways, bridges, schools and hospitals. Between 1,200 and 1,500 Serb civilians and as many as 5,000 Serbian military personnel were killed. At one point, NATO planes destroyed a bridge filled with fleeing refugees, killing 87 people. After blowing up Belgrade’s TV station with a cruise missile, killing 16 people, NATO officials justified it by claiming that the station had been a source of “propaganda.”

Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering civilians–these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took place under the pleasant halo of “humanitarian intervention.”

The perpetrators of these great “humanitarian” deeds will likely never see the inside of a jail cell or face criminal prosecution for their crimes against humanity without a massive alteration in the balance of forces in the world between the powerful and the dispossessed.