Refuting the “apartheid” analogy (South Africans)

Countering the Apartheid Slander

NGO Monitor March 01, 2012

Refuting the “apartheid” analogy (South Africans)

Justice Richard Goldstone – Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-9.

  • Israel and the Apartheid Slander (New York Times, October 31, 2011) – “The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.”

Benjamin Pogrund – Benjamin Pogrund, South African-born, was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, then chief foreign sub-editor of The Independent, London, then editor of The WorldPaper, Boston.

  • Israel is a democracy in which Arabs vote – Not an apartheid State (Focus 40, December 2005) – “Apartheid is dead in South Africa but the word is alive in the world, especially as an epithet of abuse for Israel. Israel is accused by some of being “the new apartheid” state. If true, it would be a grave charge, justifying international condemnation and sanctions. But it isn’t true. Anyone who knows what apartheid was, and who knows Israel today, is aware of that. Use of the apartheid label is at best ignorant and naïve and at worst cynical and manipulative.”
  • Is Israel The New Apartheid? (Weekly Blitz, September 23, 2011) – “So why do so many put such effort into trying to attach the apartheid tag to the occupation, with so many incessant and emotive references to apartheid roads, the apartheid wall, apartheid checkpoints and the rest? This is where we get back to the beginning: yell apartheid again and again and again and some people will believe it, or at least that is the hope and aim of the shouters.”

Rhoda Kadalie & Julia Bertelsmann – Rhoda Kadalie is a former anti-apartheid activist and South African Human Rights Commissioner. Based in Cape Town, she is a widely-published columnist for newspapers including The Business Day and Rapport. Julia I. Bertelsmann is the editor-in-chief of New Society: Harvard College Student Middle East Journal.

  • Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy (Z Word, March 2008) – “Comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa were once a fringe phenomenon. Since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, however, they have become a staple of anti-Israel propaganda. The publication of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid  in 2006 gave the analogy new legitimacy-though, oddly, the word “apartheid” only appears three times in the former US President’s text.”

Maurice Ostroff – Maurice Ostroff is a founder member of the international Coalition of Hasbara Volunteers, better known by its acronym CoHaV.

  • Is Israel an apartheid state? (February 2007) – “A serious study will convince any impartial observer, that allegations of a similarity between the old South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Israeli system are spurious. Moreover, that such false allegations are often used as propagandistic slogans, unworthy of consideration by anyone who values moral integrity.”

Refuting the “apartheid” analogy (Others)

Gideon Shimoni – Professor (Emeritus) Gideon Shimoni is a former head of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry,  Among his books are The Zionist Ideology (1995), and Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (2003).

  • Deconstructing Apartheid Accusations Against Israel (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September 2, 2007) – “The historical context of the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Middle East is fundamentally different from that between the whites’ Afrikaner ideology of apartheid and the blacks in South Africa. The latter was a system of discrimination and inequality based upon racial criteria; a system of domination by a minority over a majority and refusal to negotiate a bilaterally agreed solution. Furthermore, for Palestinians, violence aimed primarily at civilians has been the first choice for many decades, for the African National Congress it was the last resort and never aimed intentionally at the murder of civilians.”

Michael Ignatieff – Former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.

Dorit Beinisch – President of the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice.

  • HCJ 2150/07, Ali Hussein Mahmoud Abu Safiyeh, Beit Sira Village Council Head (March 5, 2008, pp. 46-49) – “The comparison drawn by the petitioners between the use of separate roads for security reasons and the apartheid policy and accompanying actions formerly implemented in South Africa, is not a worthy one…Accordingly, the comparison between preventing Palestinian residents from traveling along Road 443 and the crime of apartheid is so extreme and disproportionate that it should never have been made.”

Dore Gold – President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.

  • The hidden agenda behind ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ (Jerusalem Post, June 6, 2010) – “Israel Apartheid Week is not about respect for human rights; it is an incredibly hypocritical initiative that ignores the apartheid practiced by the Palestinians themselves, who make the sale of land to Jews punishable by death. It is also not a movement dedicated to making peace, but rather to denying the historical rights of the Jewish people.”

Gerald Steinberg – Founder and president of NGO Monitor and professor of political science at Bar Ilan University.

  • Exploiting apartheid for political warfare (Bitterlemons, February 23, 2012) – “The use of the “apartheid” libel as the primary vehicle for de-legitimization is not directed against specific Israeli policies. The rhetoric and the campaigns on university campuses and in events such as “Israel apartheid week” explicitly target the existence of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Ben Dror Yemini – Israeli Journalist and former Peace activist.

  • The Arab Apartheid (NRG, May 14, 2011) – “The real ‘Naqba’ is the story of the Arab apartheid. Tens of millions, including Jews, suffered from ‘Naqba’, which included theft, expulsion and becoming a refugee. Only the Palestinians remain refugees because they were victims of persecution and repression at the hands of Arab states. This is the story of the real ‘Naqba’”. (Unofficial translation)

Ishmael Khald – Ishmael Khaldi is deputy consul general of Israel for the Pacific Northwest.

  • Lost in the blur of slogans (San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 2009) – “My perspective is unique, both as the vice consul for Israel in San Francisco, and as a Bedouin and the highest-ranking Muslim representing the Israel in the United States…I am a proud Israeli – along with many other non-Jewish Israelis such as Druze, Bahai, Bedouin, Christians and Muslims, who live in one of the most culturally diversified societies and the only true democracy in the Middle East.

Simon Deng – Sudanese human rights activist living in the United States. A native of the Shilluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, Deng spent several years as a domestic slave in southern Sudan.

Jonathan Kay – Canadian journalist

  • The return of the Israel Apartheid Week cult (The National Post, February 25, 2012) – “There is not a word of acknowledgement about how utterly ridiculous it is to run a week-long event vilifying Israel when right next door in Syria, the government has just exterminated more Arabs than were killed in both Intifidas, the 2008 Gaza conflict, and the 2006 Lebanon war combined.”