(NOTE: 2 ARTICLES
1. Apartheid in the Holy Land BY Desmond Tutu
2. Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid Israel and the Struggle
for Palestine.)

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Apartheid in the Holy Land
Desmond Tutu
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 April 2002 02.21 BST

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish
people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the
disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression
and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron
of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to
secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another
people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in
my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to
us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the
Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when
young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the
Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he
pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for
security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and
homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now
occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the
head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and
said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is
now occupied by Israeli Jews."

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish
sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten
the collective punishment, the home demolitions, 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?

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing
another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice.
We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the
corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the
violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the
inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not
provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify
the hatred.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation;
exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based
on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and
the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories
side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness
could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else
in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come
to the Holy Land?

My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this
people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice,
anti-oppression."

But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is
placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be
immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not
semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group.
And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the
apartheid government on security measures?

People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong
because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what?
For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe.
The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer
exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin
were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful
have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what
is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the
basis of that, God passes judgment.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of
Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace
based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to
achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to
live amicably together as sisters and brothers.

Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of
South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was
given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston,
Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the
current edition of Church Times.

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Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid Israel and the Struggle for
Palestine.

Issued by the Palestine Solidarity Committee
Durban South Africa August 31, 2001

* * * * * * *

The Palestinian rebellion has been a long time coming. Over three
decades of occupation is but one dimension of their tragedy. Driven
from their original homes, villages and land by sustained atrocities,
condemned to miserable camps, dispersed in a far-flung Diaspora,
subjected to massacres like the Sabra and Shatila slaughter of over
2000 refugees, and unending persecution.

The suffering in the West Bank and Gaza is the continuation of the
colonisation of all of Palestine. Zionist militias seized 75% of the
land and drove out 800 000 Palestinians through a series of massacres
between the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the formation of Israel.
With the declaration of the state of Israel, 385 out of 475 Palestinian
cities, towns and villages were razed to the ground, disappearing from
the map. The 90 remaining were denuded of land, confiscated without
compensation.

We acknowledge the theft of the land and realise how today the Jewish
National Fund, a member of the World Zionist Organisation, administers
93% of the land of Israel. To live on land, lease it, sharecrop or work
on it, one must establish four generations of maternal Jewish descent.
In Israel, such a lineage is necessary in order to enjoy elementary
rights. We cannot mistake the quintessentially racist character of such
a state. Israel is an apartheid state, founded on pillage and
predicated on exclusivity. Rights flow from ethnic and religious
identity.

We, South Africans who have lived through apartheid cannot be silent as
another entire people are treated as non-human beings; people without
rights or human dignity and facing daily humiliation. We cannot permit
a ruthless state to use military jets, helicopter gun- ships and tanks
on civilians. We cannot accept state assassinations of activists, the
torture of political prisoners, the murder of children and collective
punishment.

We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with a colonial
mentality see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of colonialism
in the 21st century. Only in Israel do we hear of `settlements' and
`settlers'. Only in Israel do soldiers and armed civilian groups take
over hilltops, demolish homes, uproot trees and destroy crops, shell
schools, churches and mosques, plunder water reserves, and block access
to an indigenous population's freedom of movement and right to earn a
living. These human rights violations were unacceptable in apartheid
South Africa and are an affront to us in apartheid Israel.

We South Africans faced apartheid and exploitation, bullets and prison,
not with bouquets of flowers, but with resistance. We are proud of
this, our history. This is the history of all oppressed people. Why
should it be different for Palestinians? Born in squalid refugee camps,
living in poverty and believing the world community does not care, more
and more young Palestinians see empty futures, aborted hopes and feel
unbearable frustrations. The great African- American poet, Langston
Hughes, asked: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a
raisin in the sun?or does it explode?" The shocking suicide bombings
answers this rhetorical question. Apartheid Israel has created a
situation in which people feel they have nothing to lose. This
dangerous situation could be reversed, if the Israeli state and the one
country that funds and supports it unconditionally- the US, as well as
the world community, act in a moral and just manner.

It's Apartheid Again!

We note how the Israeli state rests on overt repression, a system of
structural violence and institutionalised discrimination that
dehumanises one group to the advantage of another. Apartheid Israel has
developed an elaborate system of racial discrimination, embedded in its
legal system-even surpassing Apartheid South Africa's laws. These laws
include the Law of Entry, the Law of Return, Citizenship Law, legally
sanctioned discriminatory rabbinical rulings and the Military Service
Law. Palestinians are denied various welfare benefits, access to many
jobs, and the leasing of homes and land controlled by government
bodies. We realise that while Palestinians within the '48 borders may
vote, they face these discriminatory laws and are treated like third
class citizens. Electricity, sewerage, roads and water supplies are
provided free to Israeli households whereas many Palestinian
communities in Israel, let alone the occupied territories, have existed
for decades without adequate services. The Israeli education system is
racist in practice and in content. Almost no Arab history is covered
and there are no Arab textbooks in the Israeli curricula. Palestinians
also face significant barriers in gaining access to universities. In
South Africa similar factors contributed to the Uprisings in 1976 and
the 1980s.

Laws governing land ownership such as the Law of Acquisition of
Absentee Property and the Law for Acquisition of Land blatantly
discriminate against Palestinians. Although settlers constitute a tiny
minority in the West Bank, they own 60 percent of the land. Many of
these settlers come from the US, the ex-Soviet Union and South Africa.
In Gaza, 6000 settlers live among a population of one million
Palestinians yet they own 42 percent of the land. Land ownership in
Palestine is more unjust than it ever was in South Africa. At the
height of apartheid black people nominally `controlled' 13 percent of
the land, in Israel the oppressed control only 2 percent. The Israeli
government also pursues a grossly discriminatory water policy. In Gaza
in 1985, for instance, settlers consume about 2000 cubic meters of
water per person; Palestinians are allowed to consume only about 120.

Despite the terminology, we recognise segregation when we see it. The
policy of `closures' is a policy of segregation. Blockades which allow
settlers free movement but restrict Palestinians have lost 100 000
workers their jobs. Some roads are for settlers only. The Israeli
government issues identification cards and car number-plates, colour
coded, which restrict travel for non-Jews. Palestinians in the West
Bank are routinely prevented from travelling to the Gaza Strip because
they have to travel through `Israeli' territory. No significant
industry has been permitted to develop in the West Bank or Gaza.
Consequently, Palestinians are concentrated in the lowest paying jobs
and form a super-exploited labour force for Israeli capital. The
occupied territories import 93% of goods but export a mere 7% of what
they produce. Palestinian exports to Western Europe are banned so as
not to compete with Israeli exports. Ninety percent of Palestinian
workers must travel to Jewish towns for employment.

Israel is, simply, an Apartheid state. Apartheid laws, such as the pass
system and influx control, bantustans, job reservation, bantu education
and laws resulting in unequal resource allocation live on. As one South
African journalist wrote after visiting Israel: "In both countries
[apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel] `subordinate races' were
dispossessed of their land and crowded into marginal, drought-stricken
ghettoes; their movement was restricted; access to education and
skilled jobs limited so that they inevitably sank into a pool of low
wage labour. In both societies, bans on inter-marriage and daily lives
segregated by race did little to dispel the fear and ignorance that
feeds racial bigotry."

Globalisation's Watchdog.

Israel is the highest recipient of US support. In return, it makes its
own contributions to maintaining the imperialist world order and
stability for transnational corporations, particularly oil companies.
In the `70s it supplied the military dictatorships of El Salvador,
Guatemala and Nicaragua with more military hardware than the US. It
supports adventures and trains personnel of unpopular regimes the US
does not openly want to be identified with. The latest regime is
Turkey, which brutally suppresses its trade unions, workers'
organisations and the Kurds. In its illegal blockade of Cuba, the only
support for the US now comes from Israel. Of course, we will never
forget the support Israel provided to apartheid South Africa. While the
world condemned apartheid in South Africa as a crime against humanity,
Israel happily cemented trade, cultural, military and nuclear links
with the white minority regime.

A Bantustan or a Democratic Secular State?

We realise that the `peace plan' brokered by the US at Oslo, Camp
David, and the Wye River were recipes for continued misery and poverty
for millions of Palestinians. Rather than promise a future of peaceful
co-existence they virtually guaranteed a continuation of conflict and
violence. They proposed a Bantustan, a `state' with a dependent
economy, no contiguous territory and no substantial power, where
Palestinians can be exploited, controlled, restricted and confined in
reservations. A dependent Bantustan alongside an apartheid state is a
mockery of self-determination-as it existed in apartheid South Africa
and now in apartheid Israel. In Israel, no less than in South Africa,
minimum justice requires dismantling the apartheid state and replacing
it with a democratic secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs,
Christians and Muslims, live together with equal rights and
opportunities.

We observe the stone throwing children of Jabaliya, the Beach Camp,
Balata, Khan Younis and Dheisheh and we see the response to over five
decades of outrageous tyranny and occupation. It is echoed in those
Israeli Jews who resist the oppression of others, like Mordechai Vanunu
who, in 1986, was sentenced by a secret security court to 18 years in
prison for exposing Israel's nuclear plans and indirectly Israel's
nuclear collaboration with apartheid South Africa.

We reject the calumny that to condemn Israeli apartheid or Zionism's
`ethnic cleansing' implies animus against Jews; or that it attempts to
diminish the Holocaust. The opposite is true. As the famed violinist
Lord Yehudi Menuhin told the French newspaper Le Figaro "It is
extraordinary how nothing ever dies completely. Even the evil which
prevailed yesterday in Nazi Germany is gaining ground in that country
[Israel] today".

We, South Africans, extend our hands to the heroic people of Palestine.
Theirs is the struggle, slingshots in hand, of David against Goliath.
Theirs is the vision of a country shorn of racist dominion. Theirs is
the passion for life without oppression. Theirs is the struggle, Arab
and Jews to be free from discrimination and injustice. As South
Africans we understand these struggles, visions and passions. We
support the demand to isolate Apartheid Israel, the right of return of
millions of Palestinian refugees and the dismantling of racist
settlements. We pledge ourselves to be part of a new International Anti-
Apartheid movement against Israel.

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