The Attempted ‘Rebranding’ of BDS on the African Continent - by Ben Cohen

BDS South Africa’s shameful misrepresentation of Nelson Mandela as a militant anti-Zionist is simply one aspect of its broader campaign of defamation, in which no inaccuracy, half-truth or outright lie is too wild if it helps with the demonization of Israel and Zionism.

Ben Cohen..
JNS.org..
13 March '20..

The BDS movement, whose goal is for rest of the world to quarantine the State of Israel as though it was the coronavirus, is undergoing a “rebranding” in its South African heartland.

Last week, BDS South Africa—an NGO that enjoys significant influence within the ruling African National Congress—announced that it was adopting a new name, a new logo and a new(ish) mission. Henceforward, the group will be known as “Africa for Palestine.” Its understanding of what constitutes “Palestine” is displayed in its logo, which shows a Palestinian keffiyeh carefully folded into a map of the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.

What’s with the organization’s redefined mission? According to a statement last week from BDS South Africa, the newly branded group—whose acronym, AFP, is suspiciously similar to that of Africans for Peace, a local grassroots group that is firmly opposed to the boycott of Israel—“will seek to build alliances and partnerships across the continent, reinforce direct support to Palestine and assist the Palestinian Diaspora.” The main means of achieving this is through “pushing back against Israel’s creeping infiltration into our continent.”

Leaving aside the “creeping” medieval echoes of this latter statement, one is struck by the sheer resentment underlying it. After the Jewish state developed close economic and political ties during the 1950s with African nations newly liberated from the shackles of European colonialism, Arab pressure forced Israel out of the continent for several decades. During this century, however, a combination of creative Israeli diplomacy, cutting-edge Israeli technology and development expertise, and a new determination among African leaders to set relations with Israel on their own terms (as opposed to those of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic organizations) have brought that period of isolation to a decisive end. The Israeli presence has mushroomed across the continent, and Jerusalem now has full diplomatic relations with 41 of the 44 sub-Saharan states.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Evidently Wits University can have antisemitism and support for terrorists - but a female Ethiopian Israeli reservist is not acceptable - by Elder of Ziyon

...Look how upset these people are at a proud, black Jewish Zionist woman. This anger in the video has nothing to do with "justice" or supporting Palestinians - it is pure hate that someone who passes all the intersectionality victimhood rules disagrees with them.

Elder of Ziyon..
09 April '19..

The Wits (University) Vuvuzela reports:

A guest speaker for the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) at the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was escorted off the Wits University campus on Thursday, April 4, after it was found that she is a soldier.

Ashager Araro, a well-known Israeli-Ethiopian Zionist and reserve soldier of the Israeli Defence Forces left the campus surrounded by private security after supporters of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) confronted her about her military role.

PSC and SAUJS supporters found themselves in a heated and tense exchange over Araro as both groups of students converged on the piazza in front of the Chamber of Mines building.

“You guys are letting soldiers on to our campus now, we’ll note this,” said a Palestinian supporter to Jabu Mashinini, senior programme adviser for student governance, in reference to Araro.

Apparently, both the Jewish/Zionist students and the Israel haters had informally agreed that no military personnel would be allowed to participate.

But explicitly supporting terrorist is perfectly fine.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Cape Town May Dry Up Because of an Aversion to Israel - by Seth M. Siegel

...If the South Africans are snubbing the Israelis out of solidarity with the Palestinians, they might want to consider this: The Palestinian Authority has worked with Israel on a range of water projects since 1995. Israel offers training for Palestinians in wastewater management, infrastructure and security. Israel also provides the Palestinian Authority with more than half the water for domestic consumption by Palestinians in the West Bank. And it pipes more than 2.5 billion gallons of water into Hamas-controlled Gaza each year. Why does South Africa feel compelled to be so anti-Israel? The question has no rational answer.

Seth M. Siegel
Wall St. Journal..
21 February '18..
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cape-town-may-dry-up-because-of-an-aversion-to-israel-1519254816

Cape Town, South Africa, has designated July 9 “Day Zero.” That’s when water taps throughout the city are expected to go dry, marking the culmination of a three-year drought. South African officials aren’t responsible for the lack of rain, but inept management and a devotion to anti-Israel ideology needlessly made the situation worse.

Even before Israel declared statehood in 1948, its leaders focused on water security as closely as they did military preparedness. Mostly desert, Israel would need adequate water to thrive. In the decades since, the country has developed an apolitical, technocratic form of water governance.

Conservation is taught from kindergarten. Market pricing of water encourages everyone to waste nothing. Sensitive prices have driven innovation. Israelis helped create desalination, drip irrigation and the specialized reuse of treated wastewater in agriculture. Although Israel is in the fifth year of a drought, today its citizens can reliably count on abundant water.

Cape Town is another story. Its reservoirs began receding more than two years ago. This problem turned into a crisis because of subsidy-distorted water pricing, inefficient irrigation, and a lack of desalination facilities and a long-term plan. In 2016 officials from Israel’s Foreign Ministry recognized the problem and alerted national, provincial and local governments in South Africa. Israel has trained water technicians in more than 100 countries, and it offered to bring in desalination experts to help South Africa.

South African officials ignored or rebuffed the no-strings Israeli proposal. It would be admirable if South Africa’s rejection came from a can-do attitude, in a statement of national self-sufficiency. But it appears to have been for ideological reasons that South African officials wanted no help from Jerusalem.

The leadership of South Africa’s dominant political party, the African National Congress, aligns itself with the Palestinian cause. Although the two countries have diplomatic ties, South Africa under the ANC has refused to develop warm relations with Israel. This antagonism goes back to the 1960s, when current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lived in Moscow with exiled ANC leaders, and Yasser Arafat often visited. Students and leaders of the two movements were supported by the Soviet Union, and they shared revolutionary aspirations.

Is Refusing Israeli Help Worth a Drought? - by Daniel Pomerantz

...Based on all these misstatements of fact, Akoob concludes: South Africa does not need the help of Israel to solve our drought. And just to make her point, Rumana Akoob is — apparently — willing to bet the very safety of the South African people on her views.

Daniel Pomerantz..
Algemiener.com..
15 February '18..

Is refusing Israeli help worth a drought? According to South Africa’s Rumana Akoob, writing in the Daily Vox and Mail & Guardian, the answer is (apparently): yes.

It’s a horrible fact: South Africa is running out of water. Cities like Cape Town are already cutting access and more cities are set to follow. South Africa has already declared the situation a national disaster.

It’s also a fact that Israel has offered to provide vitally needed assistance through its role as a world leader in drought prevention — through desalination.

But Akoob says:

This is not true. If Israelis have sufficient water, it’s only because they deny water rights to Palestine.

She then embarks on a screed about Israel’s supposedly harmful activities toward Palestinians in the area of water supply, referring to:

The colonial, apartheid state of Israel which continues to use water as a method of colonization and segregation.

There’s just one problem: the “water libel” against Israel is simply untrue.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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BDS South Africa’s Terrible Week. How About 2 in a Row? - by Jonathan Marks

...And to think, the week started out with so much promise.

Jonathan Marks..
Commentary magazine..
11 March '16..

I have written here before about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in South Africa. This week was supposed to be a good week for its supporters. Israeli Apartheid Week ran from March 1st through the 10th (because in South Africa just one week isn’t enough to unburden oneself of one’s loathing of Israel). The ruling African National Congress had, as it has in prior years, heartily endorsed Israeli Apartheid Week and made members of its executive committee available for various events associated with it. Things were looking up.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the celebration of anti-Israel bias. BDS-South Africa proved that it does not know how to play a winning hand.

The Daily Vox, a South African paper written by and for young people, has been running a series called Apartheid 2.0. The Vox, though it is affiliated with no political party, is no lover of Israel. Indeed, Apartheid 2.0 is about “Palestine, Israel’s settler-colonial project, and apartheid policies over the Palestinian people.” But the editors made the error of running two pieces critical of the BDS movement.

Neither piece was pro-Israel. One ended “Israel must fall.” The other complained that “Zionist influence has strengthened” as a result of the incompetence of the BDS movement.

As if to prove the latter point, BDS-South Africa responded by attacking the paper. When the editors offered Muhammad Desai, a BDS leader (and himself a nasty piece of work) a chance to respond, he consulted his board. Farid Esack, a professor at the University of Johannesburg wrote back to Desai, but copying the Vox: “This is fuckin malicious! Couldn’t these guys have waited a week or two until after IAW to run these piece. Where the hell do they expect us to get the time to do replies in the middle of this week. Just what is their agenda?” BDS-South Africa promptly canceled a previously scheduled online discussion hosted by the Daily Vox.

Children and what a soulless society can do to them

...No immediate word on how firmly the ANC stands behind children with daggers or the adults who put them there. Or whether they subscribe, as Hamas does, to the uplifting value of viciously murdering unarmed Jews and other Israelis as part of its efforts to “free Al-Aqsa”.

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
20 October '15..

"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]

Hamas, which more closely resembles a death cult than a functioning government, organized a rally this past Friday night in Rafah, Gaza Strip. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these representative photos below, published originally in Arabic-language channels and not (yet) syndicated by the major news agency names, sum up the tragedy of the Palestinian Arabs.

They also highlight the hypocrisy of those who ignore the evidence in front of their faces in the rush to embrace the Islamists and their "struggle" to "resist". So does the utter silence emanating from the many child-protection agencies around the world who published heart-rending images of under-nourished or war-impacted or genitally-mutilated children (as they should) but will not touch the rampant, highly public child abuse that is a daily reality in the world of the jihadists, and in particular the dark netherworld of Hamas.

Bear in mind as you glance at them what's going on in the late Nelson Mandela's homeland the last few days:

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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BDS Movement: We Know Who You Are and Where You Live

...the protest of Williams was a huge embarrassment for BDS, which turned out 500 protesters rather than the 40,000 they were aiming for. But that was not for want of trying. Muhammad Desai, Coordinator of BDS-South Africa had this to say to those who have not stuck with the Woolworth’s boycott: “Those who have gone back to Woolworths, we know who you are and where you live.”

Jonathan Marks..
Commentary Magazine..
28 September '15..

South Africa, because of its experience with apartheid, is a feather in the cap of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. If South Africans think that Israel is an apartheid state, the reasoning goes, we should take them seriously since they know a thing or two about apartheid.

But as I have written before, the boycott movement in South Africa has been particularly ugly; flirting quite openly with violence, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theorizing.

Evelyn Gordon has written in these pages about the latest embarrassment to BDS-South Africa, a protest against a performance in Cape Town by the singer, Pharrell Williams. Williams’s sole crime is working with Woolworth’s, a retailer that is inexplicably a boycott target, even though, as Haaretz reports, it “has said it does not source produce from the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, [that] less than 0.1 percent of its food comes from Israel and that it clearly labels every product’s country of origin.” The movement against Woolworth’s in South Africa has already featured the placement of a severed pig’s head in the kosher food section of one store.

As Gordon points out, the protest of Williams was a huge embarrassment for BDS, which turned out 500 protesters rather than the 40,000 they were aiming for. But that was not for want of trying. Muhammad Desai, Coordinator of BDS-South Africa had this to say to those who have not stuck with the Woolworth’s boycott: “Those who have gone back to Woolworths, we know who you are and where you live.”

The Growing Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism in South Africa

...Not all critics of Israel, even harsh critics, are anti-Semitic, but there can be no question about the running together of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in South Africa, a nation in which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, 50 percent of respondents to its survey on attitudes toward Jews agreed that “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.” Let’s try to remember that the next time South Africa’s leaders try to school us on solidarity.

Jonathan Marks..
Commentary Magazine..
21 July '15..

The student anti-Israel movement in South Africa is more extreme than most. In February, the student government at the Durban University of Technology called for the expulsion of Jewish students, particularly supporters of Israel. In March, the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) responded to a protest in which the lives of Jews were threatened by denouncing the presence of the Community Security Organization, whose purpose is to protect Jews and who were cooperating with local police. The COSAS called the South African Board of Jewish Deputies, an organization that represents South Africa’s Jews, “the Jewish ISIS” that “threatens our sovereignty through, illegal [sic], mercenaries, militia and invasion.” They hastened to add that they had nothing against Jews, but only against those who have long represented them in South Africa, and concluded with this flourish: “Away racist Jewish deputies away!”

It is, therefore, no surprise that the South African Students Congress (SASCO) has gotten into the act by suspending three student members for visiting Israel on a trip sponsored by the South Africa Israel forum. “We view an act by some of our members to visit Israel as crossing the picket line.” This move is more surprising than it seems. As offensive as boycotts like the one adopted by the American Studies Association are, no one there has proposed to discipline members who buck it. SASCO on the other hand, wishes “to state categorically that SASCO is a voluntary organization where members join and subordinate themselves to its constitution, its policies, and its resolutions. Therefore [they] urge all [their] members to respect, defend and advance all decisions of the organization without exception.” SASCO may be an extreme organization, officially aiming to “ensure the destruction of capitalist relations of production and the ushering of a socialist society.” But it is by no means marginal; Haaretz calls it the “biggest South African student organization.”

Any Surprise? BDS Youth Speak Out: “Expel the Jews”

...So far, I haven’t seen any coverage of this incident from those who favor BDS. That makes sense. It wouldn’t do to criticize the moral center of one’s movement.

Jonathan Marks..
Commentary Magazine..
12 February '15..

The campus boycott, divestment, sanctions movement depends on two myths of purity. One concerns South Africa. Ignoring South Africa’s alliance with human-rights violators like Russia and China, the BDS movement draws at every opportunity on statements of support from South Africa to demonstrate its bona fides: these people know a little something about apartheid, they suggest, so our assertions that Israel is an apartheid state must also be taken seriously.

The second concerns students. Ignoring signs that young people are at least as capable of prejudice and stupidity as their elders, the BDS movement suggests that the young are on “the right side of history” and that, consequently, BDS’s occasional successes at colleges and universities demonstrate the essential rightness of their cause. As the anti-Israel activist Anna Balzer has put it, BDS will benefit from “a generational shift, driven by young people, who have become allies to the cause even as their parents repeat the same tired arguments.”

Mike Berger - With Malice Aforethought: Media Bias and the CapeTimes

Rolene Marks..
Media Team Israel..
02 November '12..



Mike Berger Op-Ed Exposing Bias in Cape Times

One of the strange paradoxes of our age is the unholy alliance between many self-designated Western social progressives and assorted tyrants, homophobes, xenophobes and anti-Semites in the Middle East. It’s a dalliance which leaves the few brave Arab-Muslim voices openly questioning the assumptions underpinning their dysfunctional societies, bereft of the support whence they should most expect it.

Israel is the common ground, where xenophobia, ignorance, fanaticism, self-interest and, yes, sheer malice, intersect and trump the enormous gulfs of culture and ideology. The remarkable but flawed democratic Israel with all its cultural, linguistic, political and religious diversity is reduced to a nothing but a symbol of Western-Jewish militarism and racism – hated and envied in equal measure.

Such attitudes are especially prevalent in much of the English, post-apartheid popular press in South Africa. And, amongst these, the CapeTimes is one of the most notorious. The vast majority of Jewish South Africans support Israel despite diverse political views; and the systematic bias which has pervaded the coverage of Israel by the CapeTimes and some other media has been both distressing and infuriating.

Many feel impotent and rejected. A few have found their home amongst Israel’s enemies and work feverishly to blacken her name. They are much treasured by certain newspapers and the hyperactive Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement in this country.

S. Africa’s Rulers Line Up Behind BDS

ANC chairman Baleka Mbete

Ben Cohen..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 October '12..

To the cheers of assembled delegates, the Third International Solidarity Conference of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which met in Pretoria earlier this week, endorsed the call for a campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting the Israel. A lone German representative who stood up and challenged the prevailing wisdom that Israel is the reincarnation of South Africa’s apartheid regime was roundly dismissed by the chairman of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, who said that she herself had visited “Palestine,” where she’d discovered that the situation is “far worse than apartheid South Africa.”

This is not the first time that a senior member of South Africa’s leftist political establishment has made that exact point. In a particularly noxious speech delivered last May, the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu asserted that the Palestinians were “being oppressed more than the apartheid ide­o­logues could ever dream about in South Africa.” Tutu’s co-thinker, the Reverend Allan Boesak ­– best known for his conviction for defrauding charitable donations from the singer Paul Simon and others — has also declared that Israel “is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it.” And in an interview earlier this year, John Dugard, a South African law professor and former UN Rapporteur, approvingly referred to “black South Africans like Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu and others who have repeatedly stated that, in their opinion, the situation in the Palestinian territory is in many respects worse than it was under apartheid.”

At times, these thunderous denunciations from ANC figures have descended into open anti-Semitism. In 2009, Bongani Masuku, a mid-level ANC operative, was found guilty by South Africa’s Human Rights Commission of deploying “hate speech” after he announced that any South African Jew who did not support the Palestinian cause “must not just be encouraged but forced to leave.” In his defense, Masuku might have pointed out that he was merely echoing similar sentiments to those expressed by Fatima Hajaig, the former deputy minister of foreign affairs, who claimed that “the control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money, and if Jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else.”

Is It South African BDS or Just BS

Shoshana Bryen..
American Thinker..
25 August '12..

The government of South Africa has defined the State of Israel as not including Beersheva, Yad Mordechai, Acco, Afula, and Nahariya. It creates an "Arab Enclave" in Jaffa not governed by Israel. It reduces the borders of Israel in two places to points on a map -- one in the Galilee and one in the Negev Desert -- and, for good measure, restores Jerusalem and certain of its suburbs to "corpus separatum." Yasser Arafat didn't have the nerve to define such borders.

South Africa has decided to label goods entering the country from certain places as "IOT" for "Israeli Occupied Territory." The outraged Israeli government called the decision "blatant discrimination based on national and political distinction. This kind of discrimination has not been imposed -- and rightly so -- in any other case of national, territorial or ethnic conflict[.] ... What is totally unacceptable is the use of tools which, by essence, discriminate and single out, fostering a general boycott."

It is worse than that.

The statement by the South African cabinet "approved that a notice ... be issued by the minister of Trade and Industry requiring the labeling of goods or products emanating from IOTs (Israel Occupied Territories) to prevent consumers being led to believe that such goods come from Israel. This is in line with South Africa's stance that recognizes the 1948 borders delineated by the United Nations and does not recognize occupied territories beyond these borders as being part of the State of Israel."

The South African Cabinet appears to insist on the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan as the parameters for an Israel with which it is morally comfortable. Aside from the historical oddity of choosing 1948 -- a year in which no borders for Israel were determined -- there is the question of how to react to the delicate moral sensibilities of a government that just shot and killed 34 of its own citizens and wounded more than 70 others for protesting over pay.

Dear Minister Davies, the UN did not demarcate Israel’s borders in 1948.

LOTL..
28 June '12..

While Emmanuel Navon has been otherwise occupied for the last few months, today he has returned in full force with a new post "Hopeless or Infinite?" on his For the Sake of Zion blog. A hearty welcome back and now to the issue at hand.

Last month, South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies declared that he intended to issue an official notice “to require traders in South Africa not to incorrectly label products that originate from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) as products of Israel.” Davies added that Pretoria recognizes the State of Israel “only within the borders demarcated by the United Nations (UN) in 1948.”

The UN did not demarcate Israel’s borders in 1948. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to divide the British Mandate on Palestine between an Arab state and a Jewish state (Resolution 181). This vote constituted a mere recommendation since General Assembly resolutions are not binding in international law. Thus, the idea that the UN “created” the state of Israel with Resolution 181 is mistaken (the General Assembly can approve the admission of new states to the UN, but it cannot create states). This resolution became moot as soon as it was passed since the Arab states flatly rejected it.

Elder - SA CEO responds to critics for selling Israeli products, Muslims seethe

Elder of Ziyon
28 December '11






From IOL News (South Africa):

Ivan Saltzman, the chief executive of pharmacy giant Dis-Chem, is embroiled in an ugly spat with a Durban woman over the retailer’s decision to sell Israeli-made skin care products.

The spat began when Fathima Moosa visited the Westwood Mall branch of Dischem and noticed that they were selling Dead Sea products made in Israel.

She later submitted an online letter of complaint, asking them to remove the products on the basis that Israel’s “human rights violations replicate Hitler’s Nazism”.

After Dis-Chem’s initial response that the products were not going to be removed, Moosa demanded that her e-mail be forwarded to top management.

Twenty days later, Saltzman responded to her personally, telling her that likening Israel’s supposed human rights violations was a “a scurrilous slur that you have clearly chosen to employ in order to give maximum offence”.

The spat which has since seen the Islamic Media Review Network get involved with an open letter to Saltzman now threatens to turn into boycott of Dis-Chem by pro-Palestinian groups in SA.

(Read full "SA CEO responds to critics ...")

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Praeger - Israel — an Apartheid State?

Dennis Praeger
National Review Online
30 August '11

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/275823

Of the world’s many great lies, this is among the greatest.

Next month, the U.N.-sponsored Hate-Israel Festival known as Durban III takes place. Under the heading “Anti-Racism,” the great bulk of the conference, like its Durban I and II predecessors, consists of condemning Israel for racism and equating it with an apartheid state.

Of the world’s many great lies, this is among the greatest.

How do we know it is a lie? Because when South Africa was an apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one. Even the U.N. would have regarded the accusation as absurd.

Israel has nothing in common with an apartheid state, but few people know enough about Israel — or about apartheid South Africa — to refute the libel. So let’s respond.

First, what is an apartheid state? And, does Israel fit that definition?

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa, the country that came up with this term, had an official policy that declared blacks second-class citizens in every aspect of that nation’s life. Among many other prohibitions on the country’s blacks, they could not vote; could not hold political office; were forced to reside in certain locations; could not marry whites; and couldn’t even use the same public restrooms as whites.

Not one of those restrictions applies to Arabs living in Israel.

One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of the country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property, businesses, and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: It was an Arab judge on Israel’s supreme court who sentenced the former president of Israel, a Jew, to jail on a rape charge.

Some other examples of Arabs in Israeli life: Reda Mansour was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history, and is now Consul General at Israel’s Atlanta Consulate; Walid Badir is an international soccer star on Israel’s national team, and captain of one of Tel Aviv’s major teams; Rana Raslan is a former Miss Israel; Ishmael Khaldi was until recently the deputy consul of Israel in San Francisco; Khaled Abu Toameh is a major journalist with the Jerusalem Post; Ghaleb Majadele was until recently a minister in the Israeli Government. They are all Israeli Arabs. Not one is a Jew.

Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have.

Now one might counter, “Yes, Palestinians who live inside Israel have all these rights, but what about the Palestinians who live in what are known as the occupied territories? Aren’t they treated differently?”

Yes, of course, they are — they are not citizens of Israel. They are governed by either the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) or by Hamas. The control Israel has over these people’s lives is largely manifested when they want to enter Israel. Then they are subjected to long lines and strict searches because Israel must weed out potential terrorists.

Otherwise, Israel has little control over the day-to-day life of Palestinians, and was prepared to have no control in 2000 when it agreed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state to which it gave 97 percent of the land it had conquered in the 1967 War. The Palestinian response was to unleash an intifada of terror against Israeli civilians.

And what about the security wall that divides Israel and the West Bank? Is that an example of apartheid?

That this is even raised as an issue is remarkable. One might as well mention the security fence between the United States and Mexico an example of apartheid. There is no difference between the American wall at its southern border and the Israeli wall on its eastern border. Both barriers have been built to keep unwanted people from entering the country.

Israel built its security wall in order to keep terrorists from entering Israel and murdering its citizens. What appears to bother those who work to delegitimize Israel by calling it an apartheid state is that the barrier has worked. The wall separating Israel from the West Bank has probably been the most successful terrorism-prevention program ever enacted.

So, then, why is Israel called an apartheid state?

Because by comparing the freest, most equitable country in the Middle East to the former South Africa, those who seek Israel’s demise hope they can persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist just as apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve to exist.

Yet, the people who know better than anyone else what a lie the apartheid accusation is are Israel’s Arabs — which is why they prefer to live in the Jewish state than in any Arab state.

There are lies, and then there are loathsome lies. “Israel is an apartheid state” is in the latter category. Its only aim is to hasten the extermination of Israel.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.


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Victory for ignorance and prejudice

Petra Marquardt-Bigma
The Warped Mirror/JPost
27 March '11

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/victory-ignorance-and-prejudice-0

Last week, South Africa – which faces a severe water crisis that has grim implications for the country’s development – hosted a three-day event to mark World Water Day. However, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) decided that this was a good time to downplay South Africa’s water crisis and to focus instead on what really matters to them: ending collaboration with Ben Gurion University (BGU) on research intended to combat the algae that is contaminating the drinking water of Johannesburg.

The decision will take effect “as per protocol on 1 April” – I kid you not.

The cheerleaders for this preposterous act of academic April 1 foolishness are ecstatic. In their Orwellian world, “Palestinians, South Africans and the international academic and solidarity community rejoice at this decisive victory.” They hope fervently for a “domino boycott effect,” asserting that UJ has set a “worldwide precedent” by becoming the first academic institution in the world to hand supporters of the anti-Israel boycott campaign a victory by formally cutting ties with a university that Nelson Mandela once described as representing “the best in the traditions of the Jewish people: a sense of mission; internationalism; inventiveness. It is an institution that gives inspiration through its chosen mission, summed up in the words of the prophecy: ‘The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.’”

When battling the boycott efforts last year, BGU was certainly right to describe them as “based upon ignorance and prejudice,” but the problem is that it’s a carefully cultivated kind of “ignorance and prejudice.”

There is a huge treasure trove of arguments that demonstrate the hypocrisy, bigotry and political failure of the anti-Israel boycott campaigns at Engage; and since all of this material is written from a staunchly left-wing point of view, the many boycott enthusiasts who would describe themselves as “progressive” are actually working hard to give the left a bad name.

One issue that should be highlighted in this context is the racism of low expectations that is reflected in the fact that the anti-Israel boycott enthusiasts generally have no interest in making sure that the Palestinian universities they supposedly support with their activism conform to norms that are worthy of left-wing “solidarity.”

This is particularly relevant in the case of the UJ boycott decision, because one condition for continuing the collaboration was reportedly that BGU find a Palestinian partner university. Indeed, UJ vice-chancellor Professor Adam Habib claimed that he had even sent a delegation to the Palestinian territories in an attempt to find an institute of higher learning to collaborate with BGU, but all these efforts were “to no avail.”

Habib also claimed last year in an interview with Al Jazeera that it was important to create “an enabling environment for reconciliation and the achievement of human dignity.”

It would seem that the pursuit of this worthy goal precluded UJ engagement with several Palestinian universities.

The most obvious example is Gaza’s Islamic University, a Hamas institution where students have a chance to be taught not only by hard-line Islamists and jihadists, but also by Iranian military experts who know everything about the manufacturing of explosives.

Then there is the problematic record of Al-Najah University in Nablus, which used to serve as a “stronghold for […] various terrorist organizations.”

Birzeit University provides yet another example of a campus that nurtured terrorism and remains active in propagating “resistance” and opposition to any “normalization” with Israel.

For the anti-Israel activists in South Africa, all this may not matter much – after all, as long as they boycott Israel, they don’t run the risk to be blown to pieces in places like the Hebrew University cafeteria or the parking lot of Sapir College.

But one thing is for sure: anybody who thinks that only Israeli universities should be expected to provide “an enabling environment for reconciliation and the achievement of human dignity,” while Palestinian universities should be entitled to glorify “resistance” and to oppose “normalization,” has precious little interest in peaceful coexistence.

Admittedly, it’s perhaps too much to expect the South African proponents of the boycott campaign to be interested in peaceful Israeli-Palestinian coexistence when problems much closer to home – like South Africa’s water crisis – seem of little concern to them. Indeed, Professor Habib dismissively opined that this was a problem that could easily be solved with money.

So no need to collaborate with Israeli experts, and really, no need to worry: even if it turned out that South Africa would find it difficult to provide the necessary financial resources, it’s safe to assume that Professor Habib would easily be able to afford buying imported bottled water for himself and his family.

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BDS and South Africa – 3

Jon Haber
Divest This!
05 October '10


A BDS debate involving South Africa usually follows certain predictable patterns. BDS advocates claim that those involved in the struggle to topple Apartheid in SA see the Arab-Israeli conflict in the same terms with Israelis serving as stand-ins for the Boers. Various names are dropped, but since most Americans are unfamiliar with the cast of characters (and because most students at schools targeted for BDS campaigns weren’t even born when Apartheid existed or ended), the only two names with any resonance are Desmond Tutu and, of course, Nelson Mandela.

Because Reverend Tutu is a four-square champion for BDS, his support for a boycott or divestment program can only be trumped by invoking the name of Mandela whose relationship with Jews and Israel is more ambiguous. One of the reasons the recent attempt to break ties between the University of Johannesburg and Ben-Gurion University in Israel failed was because of Mandela’s involvement in the relationship between the two centers of learning. This is why the endorsement of Mandela is so sought after that BDS advocates are not beyond using fraud to pretend to obtain it.

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Polakow-Suransky’s Radioactive Thinking

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
27 May '10

Sacha Polakow-Suransky’s new book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa has a clear agenda: to argue that there is an ideological similarity between Zionism and Apartheid, and that today’s Israel is the heir of yesterday’s South Africa.

Polakow-Suransky’s book has been celebrated as a welcome eye-opener by Israeli journalists, scholars and politicians, such as Akiva Eldar, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Yossi Beilin, and Avi Shlaim. In truth, however, the book contains no historical revelation (not even the alleged nuclear cooperation between Israel and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s). Nor is there anything new about the attempt to “prove” the ideological similarity between Zionism and Apartheid. Arab propagandists and European leftists have been playing this tune for over three decades (Jane Hunter’s book Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America [1987] comes to mind).

The story goes like this. Starting in the mid-1950s, Israel built diplomatic relations with the new African states, offering its know-how and help to peoples who had suffered from oppression just like the Jews. But then Israel became a colonial power itself in 1967, thus alienating its African friends. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was broke and couldn’t think of a better way of making ends meet than by selling weapons to South Africa. No wonder: since Israel became colonialist and racist after 1967, collaborating with South Africa was only natural. From alienated, African countries became furious and broke their ties with the Jewish state. Today, Israel is itself an Apartheid state and the only desirable outcome is for the Jews to follow the example of their Afrikaner brothers by rescinding power to the autochthonous and oppressed majority.

The true story, of course, is very different. The fact that Israel extended its borders in June 1967 as a result of a defensive war was not a source of outrage in Sub-Saharan Africa –on the contrary. During my frequent trips to Africa I have witnessed firsthand that Africans are still resentful of their former Arab enslavers. While they have no sympathy for the Arabs (including for the secluded Lebanese who control entire swaps of Africa’s economies), African Christians are staunch admirers and supporters of Israel.

(Read full article)

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Liberal Left UK newspapers launch new “apartheid” agenda against Israeli nuclear status

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
24 May '10

When the two leading voices in Britain’s liberal-left newspaper media, the Guardian and the Independent, strike out on the same subject at the same time, you are usually being given a signal that something is afoot. The BBC, in thrall to the thinking and worldview of both papers, will soon follow suit and before you know it a new item has been placed at the top of the mainstream political agenda.

With an editorial on the subject today in the Guardian and an op-ed today by leading commentator Donald Macintyre in the Independent, that item is Israel’s nuclear programme. The quest to disarm Israel has been given a new lease of life by a new book from Sasha Polakow-Suransky entitled “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa”.

The Guardian claimed an exclusive in revealing key details from the book, principally Israel’s alleged willingness to give South Africa nuclear weapons, in a report yesterday which has been comprehensively demolished in a piece on Cif Watch (which readers can see by clicking here) and in a piece by Jonathan Hoffman in the Jewish Chronicle (which readers can see by clicking here).

So what’s this all about? Well talk about killing two birds with one stone: you get to lash out at Israeli “hypocrisy” for having nuclear weapons of its own while simultaneously calling for Iran not to be allowed to acquire them, and you get another opportunity to besmirch the Jewish state’s reputation via a linkage with apartheid South Africa. They died and went to heaven! Except it’s all bunkum. Here’s why:

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Peres' Office Responds to Guardian Report

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
24 May '10

A front-page article in the Guardian today claims to reveal how apartheid-era documents prove that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to the apartheid regime of South Africa. The office of President Peres, who was named by the Guardian as the leading Israeli official involved in the alleged affair, issued the following statement:

There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian that in 1975 Israel negotiated with South Africa the exchange of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, The Guardian elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts. 

Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place.

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