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South Africa Is Wrong: Israel Is Not an Apartheid State
An anti-Israel ‘apartheid wall’ on display at Columbia University during Apartheid Week in 2017. Photo: Facebook.
No pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protest would be complete without a few posters or banners demanding an end to “Israeli apartheid” — after all, many of the protesters attend colleges that host an annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” as part of their Spring festivities.
But the term “Israeli apartheid” is a farcical slur, meant to indict Israel as a racist nation by comparing it to the South African apartheid government.
There are two components to refuting this claim. The first one is easy, involving only a brief comparison between apartheid South Africa and Israel. The second part is more difficult, explaining the origin of the slanderous accusation.
The term “apartheid” is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness.” Beginning in 1948, South Africa’s government implemented a series of laws that forced Black people to live apart from whites within the same country — an important detail. Those who accuse Israel of apartheid conflate foreign and domestic policy to substantiate their weak claim that Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and parts of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA) are forced to live apart from the citizens of Israel. But these “Palestinians” do not have rights to anything in Israel since they don’t live in Israel. This is not apartheid social policy, but rather common-sense international relations. For instance, US laws don’t apply in Canada, and Canadians can’t vote in American elections, but nobody calls this arrangement “apartheid.”
South Africa’s apartheid laws withheld from Black citizens the rights and privileges that white citizens enjoyed. But there are no such laws in Israel today. Not a single element of apartheid South African law discriminating against non-whites is applied by Israel against its non-Jewish citizens.
Arab citizens of Israel are not forced to live separately from Jewish citizens. Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens. Arab citizens of Israel can be anything they want in Israel — doctors, lawyers, soldiers, police officers, members of the Supreme Court, and politicians. Many Arab citizens of Israel join the IDF. Nearly 20 percent of students at Israeli universities are Arab citizens, and Israel has devoted considerable efforts to increase that number.
That’s not how apartheid works.
It is important to understand that the “Israel-is-an-apartheid state” lie did not originate from one of the usual suspects — the UN, academia, or a Hamas front group. In fact, it came from post-apartheid South Africa itself.
The link between post-apartheid South Africa and Palestinian terrorists begins with the friendship between Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat. In 1990, Mandela said, “we identify with the PLO because just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination.”
From its earliest days as a nation, Israel rejected apartheid. In 1962, Israel voted to condemn South Africa’s apartheid policies at the UN, where then-foreign minister Golda Meir said it was a “shameful iniquity.” But after the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, almost every nation in Africa had severed ties with Israel. South Africa was not one of them, so Israel traded with it and maintained diplomatic ties. Mandela, it seems, never forgave Israel. He explained in 1994 that his African National Congress (ANC) party, then ruling the country, was “extremely unhappy” about Israel’s relations with South Africa’s apartheid government.
Mandela never called Israel an apartheid state, but his wife Winnie did, and so too did his grandson, a convert to Islam. In 2004, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela mourned the death of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, telling a group called the Palestine Solidarity Alliance in Johannesburg that “Apartheid Israel can be defeated, just as apartheid in South Africa was defeated.” In 2017, Mandla Mandela, son of Nelson’s son Makgatho, called Israel “the worst apartheid regime,” and exclaimed that “Palestinians are being subjected to the worst version of apartheid.”
Another famous South African combined his anti-apartheid credibility with his religious authority to make the charge. Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa, or as Yishai Fleisher calls him, “the reverend father of Israel apartheid,” also called Israel an apartheid state. According Fleisher, “with his credentials in fighting apartheid, Tutu worked to reframe Israel in the same category as South Africa: as white oppressors, interlopers, colonialists, a foreign entity in the Middle East.”
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt concurs, arguing that “Tutu was probably more responsible for introducing the slanderous accusations about Israel being an Apartheid state into the public discourse than anyone else.”
As Alan Dershowitz points out, Tutu “accused the Jews of Israel of doing ‘things that even Apartheid South Africa had not done.’”
It’s not a coincidence that the UN held its World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 8, 2001. The conference’s declaration targeted Israel by equating Zionism with racism, and identifying Israel as an occupying power. The declaration drafting committee, chaired by Iran, adopted language recognizing a “right” of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.
After the Durban conference, the once-venerable Human Rights Watch (HRW) took up the apartheid slur. Under Kenneth Roth’s direction, HRW became devoted to anti-Israel activism, culminating with his effort to tar Israel as an apartheid state in a report released on April 27, 2021.
Following the deaths of both Mandela in 2013 and Tutu in 2021, South Africa under the ANC increased its anti-Israel stance, including support for Hamas. After the October 7 pogrom in Israel, Hamas sent two of its top officials to Johannesburg — Bassem Naim and Khaled Qaddoumi, Hamas’ representative in Iran. On December 5, Naim took more Hamas officials to South Africa to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Mandela’s death. They were warmly received in Pretoria.
On November 6, South Africa recalled its ambassadors from Israel. On November 21, South African lawmakers voted to close the Israeli embassy in Pretoria, and in late December, they brought charges against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice.
Psychologists might explain South Africa’s hostility towards Israel as a combination of guilt, projection, revenge, and simple antisemitism. Whatever the impetus, the slur that Israel is practicing apartheid against Palestinians is a gross distortion of history that diminishes the horrors of genuine apartheid.
Investigative Project on Terrorism (IP)T Senior Fellow A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Ginsberg-Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published at IPT.
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US Senators Urge Secretary of Homeland Security to Secure Northern Border From Gaza Refugees
US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaking at a press conference about the United States restricting weapons for Israel, at the US Capitol, Washington, DC. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Six US senators sent a letter to US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas this week requesting that he increase security measures along the northern border in response to Canada accepting an influx of refugees from Gaza, the Palestinian enclave ruled by the terrorist group Hamas.
The six Republican lawmakers — Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Ted Cruz (TX), Joni Ernst (IA), Tom Cotton (AK), Mike Braun (IN), and Josh Hawley (MO) — said they were “deeply concerned” that refugees from Gaza could sneak into the United States. The senators warned that allowing unvetted Palestinian refugees to cross the border poses a serious national security threat.
“On May 27, 2024, the Government of Canada announced its intent to increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into their country under temporary special measures,” the senators wrote. “We are deeply concerned and request heightened scrutiny by the US Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”
After arriving in Canada, the Palestinian refugees will be given a “Refugee Travel Document,” which serves as a valid form of identification, the letter claimed, adding that US Citizenship and Immigration Services recognizes these documents as a valid substitute for a passport. The senators warned that “individuals with ties to terrorist groups” could potentially enter into the United States.
The letter argued that the US should maintain “common-sense terrorist screening and vetting” for any individual attempting to enter its borders from a foreign country. The lawmakers lamented that the Biden administration’s “”ax border enforcement” has rendered the country vulnerable to potential terrorist attacks. From April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations intercepted over 233 suspected terrorists at the northern border, according to the letter.
“[T]he possibility of terrorists crossing the US-Canada border is deeply concerning given the deep penetration of Gazan society by Hamas,” the senators wrote. “It would be irresponsible for the US to not take necessary heightened precautions when foreigners attempt to enter the United States.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre of 1,200 people across southern Israel. The Palestinian terrorist group also kidnapped over 250 hostages.
In response, Israel launched defensive military operations in Gaza with the aim of freeing the hostages and permanently dislodging Hamas from the neighboring enclave.
The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, still support Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel that started the ongoing war, and they would prefer a “day after” scenario in which Hamas remains in control of Gaza rather than the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, or other Arab countries, according to recent Palestinian polling. The same polling found that, when asked about support for Palestinian political parties and movements, a plurality chose Hamas.
US lawmakers are split along party lines as to whether the United States should accept refugees from Gaza. Republicans are largely opposed to importing refugees from Gaza, arguing that individuals from the war-torn enclave present “a national security risk” to the United States.” In May, Ernst and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sent US President Joe Biden a letter, urging him not to accept any refugees from Gaza.
In June, however, a group of 70 Democratic lawmakers sent Mayorkas a letter, requesting he create “pathways” for more refugees of the Israel-Hamas war to resettle in America.
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Video of Masked Man Vowing ‘Rivers of Blood’ at Paris Olympics Over Israel Support Appears to Be Fake, of Russia Origin
Screenshot of a widely circulated video published on social media showing a masked man vowing that “rivers of blood will flow” at the 2024 Paris Olympics due to France’s support for Israel. According to reports, the video appears to be fake and of Russian origin.
A widely circulated video published on social media this week showing a masked man vowing that “rivers of blood will flow” at the 2024 Paris Olympics due to France’s support for Israel appears to be fake and of Russian origin, according to reports.
The video — published on Tuesday on social media networks including X/Twitter and Telegram — featured a keffiyeh-clad man with his face covered, delivering an Arabic-language address threatening France with violence due to the country’s alleged support for Israel amid its ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza.
Addressing “the people of France” and “French President [Emmanuel] Macron,” the masked individual said, “You supported the Zionist regime in its criminal war against the people of Palestine. You provided Zionists with weapons; you helped murder our brothers and sisters, our children.”
“You invited the Zionists to the Olympic games. You will pay for what you have done!” continued the man, who wore a shirt adorned with a Palestinian flag. “Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris. This day is approaching, God willing. Allah is the greatest.”
The video, published on X/Twitter by the account @endzionism24 and retweeted by Palestinian activist Ihab Hassan, ended with the speaker holding a prop severed head complete with fake blood up for the camera.
He is not a Palestinian:
A video clip has surfaced showing an individual wearing a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag badge, threatening France with a “river of blood” at the Olympic Games.
It is glaringly obvious to any Arabic speaker that this person is not Arab; his dialect… pic.twitter.com/rwWGkkbiAi
— Ihab Hassan (@IhabHassane) July 23, 2024
Hassan and other social media users immediately noted that the man speaking was clearly not a native Arabic speaker, citing his reasonably fluent but awkward and occasionally incorrect pronunciation.
Many social media users aware of the mispronunciations seemed to blame Israel for the video, implying the clip was a false flag meant to fearmonger and demonize Palestinians and Muslims. They did not address the fact that Israel has access to hundreds of thousands of native Palestinian Arabic speakers who would sound far more convincing than the man in the video.
On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that “French secret services and their partners have not been able to authenticate the veracity of this video.”
According to researchers at Microsoft, however, the video appears to be part of a Russian-linked disinformation campaign meant to disrupt the Olympics, which began with the opening ceremony on Friday.
The researchers from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center told NBC News that the clip appears to have come from a Russian disinformation group known as Storm-1516, an outgrowth of Russia’s Internet Research Agency.
The latest clip was linked to a similar disinformation video falsely alleging that Ukraine had sent arms to Hamas — a claim for which there is no evidence. According to the researchers, the more recent video appears to be part of a Russian scare campaign meant to disrupt the Olympics.
The video came just days before France’s rail infrastructure was hit on Friday, ahead of the start of the Olympics, with widespread acts of vandalism including arson attacks, paralyzing travel to Paris from the rest of France and Europe just hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympics. French authorities described the acts as “criminal” and “malicious.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that the sabotage of France’s high-speed rail network was directed by Iran, which Western intelligence agencies have for years labeled as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
“The sabotage of railway infrastructure across France ahead of the Olympics was planned and executed under the influence of Iran’s axis of evil and radical Islam,” Katz wrote on X/Twitter. “As I warned my French counterpart [Stéphane Séjourné] this week, based on information held by Israel, Iranians are planning terrorist attacks against the Israeli delegation and all Olympic participants. Increased preventive measures must be taken to thwart their plot. The free world must stop Iran now — before it’s too late.”
Katz was referring to a letter he sent on Thursday to Séjourné raising alarm bells about what he described as a plan by Iran to attack Israel’s Olympic delegation.
Darmanin and French National Police both announced previously that they are taking increased security measures to ensure the safety of Israel’s Olympic delegation while they are in Paris amid mounting threats. These measures include providing them with round the clock security from French police. The Israeli delegation will also receive additional security details from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency during the Olympics.
The post Video of Masked Man Vowing ‘Rivers of Blood’ at Paris Olympics Over Israel Support Appears to Be Fake, of Russia Origin first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Top St. Louis Newspaper Endorses US Rep. Cori Bush’s Opponent, Argues Incumbent’s Israel Stance Is ‘Disqualifying’
US Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) raises her fist as US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses a pro-Hamas demonstration in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters/Allison Bailey
The editorial board of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the largest daily newspaper in Missouri, has endorsed the opponent of US Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), pointing to the incumbent congresswoman’s lack of legislative accomplishments and stance on the Israel-Hamas war.
The Post-Dispatch argued that Bush’s position on Israel and the Gaza war should be “disqualifying” for any elected representative. The outlet took umbrage with Bush for equating a close democratic ally of the US with a genocidal terrorist organization.
“Israel’s conduct of the war has been far from perfect, but it remains a democracy fighting for survival against an evil terrorist organization. Bush’s tendency to equate both sides — and even to side with the terrorists, as when she cast one of just two House votes against a resolution to bar Hamas members from the US — should in itself be disqualifying for re-election,” the editorial board wrote.
Bush has established herself as one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress. Only nine days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, Bush called for an “immediate ceasefire” between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. As the war dragged on, Bush’s rhetoric toward Israel sharpened, with the congresswoman accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” in Gaza and “apartheid” in the West Bank. Bush has also accused Israel of inflicting a “famine” in Gaza without providing evidence.
Bush seems more interested in pandering to the far-left fringes of the progressive movement than serving her constituents, the Post-Dispatch argued. Bush’s membership in “The Squad” — a clique of far-left progressive, anti-establishment lawmakers in the House of Representatives — has rendered her completely incapable of “accomplishing anything” in the halls of Congress, according to the newspaper.
The editorial board urged its readers to vote for Wesley Bell, pointing to his moderated approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of his pragmatism and moral clarity.
“On Israel, Bell offers an appropriately measured stance, acknowledging the need to protect Gazan civilians and work toward a two-state solution, while supporting America’s closest ally in the Middle East,” the outlet wrote.
In contrast to Bush, Bell has expressed more sympathy to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, emphatically rejecting the notion that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing.”
Moreover, Bell has strengthened his ties with the Jewish community over the course of his campaign. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, donated a reported $5 million to Bell’s campaign through its United Democracy Project super PAC. A group of 30 St. Louis-area rabbis penned a letter endorsing Bell, accusing Bush of a “lack of decency, disregard for history, and for intentionally fueling antisemitism and hatred.” Bell also brought about an official “director of Jewish outreach” to increase turnout among the Jewish community.
A poll commissioned by McLaughlin & Associates and sponsored by the CCA Action Fund, a pro-Bell super PAC, showed Bell with a commanding 56 percent to 33 percent lead over Bush.
Supporters of Israel see the primary race as a prime opportunity to oust another opponent of the Jewish state from the halls of Congress. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a progressive lawmaker, lost his primary race to a pro-Israel challenger on June 25. Over the course of his reelection campaign, Bowman accused Israel of committing “genocide” and enacting “apartheid” against Palestinians. Bowman’s comments incensed Jewish constituents in the leafy suburbs of Westchester County, New York.
Furthermore, observers are looking to the race as a potential indicator of the Democratic electorate’s position on Israel. Opinions of the Jewish state among Democrats have soured in the months following Oct. 7, calling into question whether anti-Israel views are still a liability with American liberals.
The post Top St. Louis Newspaper Endorses US Rep. Cori Bush’s Opponent, Argues Incumbent’s Israel Stance Is ‘Disqualifying’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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