Apartheid: an Israeli story . . .

Contextualization

Israeli Apartheid Week is a global protest which aims to boycott Israel’s actions against Palestinians. Israel has occupied Palestine for over four decades, and subjected Palestinians to atrocities not dissimilar to those inflicted on black South Africans during apartheid. This editorial package focusses on the week-long series of events; rallies, lectures and cultural performances which were held at varies venues around Rhodes University campus in Grahamstown from Monday, 11 March 2013 – Friday, 18 March 2013. The event was hosted by the Rhodes University Palestinian Solidarity Forum (RUPSF) ‘supporting the Palestinians and raising awareness for their plight in the Occupied Territories and neighbouring refugee camps’.

Editorial

Having missed the entirety of Rhodes University’s Israeli Apartheid Week initiative, it is with absolute remorse that the photographs had to be sourced from the internet. The decision to go with the pictures provided came after watching IsraHELL on Earth – a documentary on which corroborates my “playground bully” theory; a theory I coined in High School when I, who had for many years been subjected to bullying, suddenly had the power to inflict the same injustice on others. The theory is based on the basis that the victims of systematic bulling may, subsequently, grow to become a bully themselves as a form of retaliation fuelled by unresolved anger and frustration.  It is to my understanding that the Jewish were actually given Palestine after the Holocaust. 

They were given complete authority over an entire nation and its people – and they subsequently saw it upon themselves to exact their revenge for the atrocities that were enacted upon them on a nation which had nothing to do with the Holocaust. It is with that in mind that I feel that pictures taken of an event held in a seminar room or a rally held in a quad at a well-off tertiary institution simply do not suffice as a representation of what is truly happening in Israel. The pictures provided in this editorial package are not a lazy attempt at having missed out on the IAW. They are, rather, a reminder to myself – a journalist and humanist – to not easily forget to care; to not be so quick to brush aside matters of inhumanity based on my being a fan of the Mossad after being drawn into an American series which showcases Mossad as being ‘a friend’.

Of the two images I sourced, the one taken in Cape Town in 2010 which resonates more inside of me than the other. It comforts me that even though I, myself did not care, there are those who did long before this was brought to my attention. It gave me hope that some South Africans do still have the capacity to sympathize – even though we have not yet fully-settled into our post-apartheid context as a nation, and irrespective that most in the country are too preoccupied with fighting the government over service delivery and the mythological ‘right to transparency’.

The second image – also taken in 2010 – cannot be verified, and is used with discretion in my capacity as an editor. It shows the force which the Israeli government handles Palestinians. It reminds me of the image of a grown Israeli soldier kicking a young Palestinian boy who was crying hysterically while being forcefully restrained by another Israeli soldier. The boy was no older than 9 years of age. Later in the video; dead children. They looked peaceful, almost as if they were asleep. One of them, who barely looked 7 years old, was staring into the sky, his hands tucked behind his head as if in deep concentration on the clouds. The other, a baby, his eyes closed and being cradled as though fast asleep. It wasn’t until his head was turned towards the camera that I saw the gunshot wound. These are images that I will never forget. Those are the images which most fuels my remorse at having allowed myself to be fooled into pop-culture that Israel is a friend.

Column

I SHOULD HAVE CARED . . .

It is one thing to want to protect your right to live; on the other side of that coin is the idea that it is okay to live at the expense of another.  It is on the latter point of that statement that I wish to dwell. Israel has never really appeared on my radar until deadline loomed post Israeli Apartheid Week, and I could no longer remain apathetical. My apathy and lack of interest were fuelled, admittedly, by a rather immature stance I took regarding the classification of Israel as an apartheid state. The crime of apartheid, they call it. Apartheid was never a crime. It was more a system that allowed for crude and inhumane crimes against humanity in South Africa – key word: South Africa. I had very little care for the likening of what’s happening in that country to our apartheid. What did it matter if Rhodes University invited over an Israeli pianist to come perform at the institution’s Israeli Apartheid Week? How can they even begin to describe the war between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israeli’s as being anything like apartheid? Apartheid wasn’t a war – it was one side making the lives of people on the other side of the fence a living hell. Apartheid was, in all retrospect, a Black and White affair; and it had nothing to do with religion or countries being given to states by European powers.  Mr Ayanda Kota of the Unemployed People’s Movement thought otherwise. Speaking at one of the talks during IAW on the occupation on Palestine by Israel, Kota said:

“There is a debate that says there is no apartheid in Palestine – that it is just a matter of conflict. That idea on its own is problematic. There is a source of the conflict. The entire conflict is unthinkable without taking into account the oppression, dispossession and exploitation practiced by Israel against Palestine. There are always consequences of these things, and that brews the conflict. There is always one force that dominates.”

It wasn’t until hearing political scientist, author and activist Mr Norman G. Finkelstein’s outburst at the University of Waterloo in March of 2010, which I only saw for the first time while watching the documentary IsraHELL on Earth the evening before my deadline that I grew to regret my earlier nonchalant stance. In the documentary, Finkelstein loses his temper at a female audience during a question and answer session at a seminar held at the University in Waterloo. Responding to her breaking into tears while commenting on his reference to Jewish people and members of the audience as being Nazis, he spoke frankly stating that he doesn’t ‘like or respect the crocodile tears’.

“I don’t like to play the foreign audience ‘the holocaust card’,” Finkelstein started.  “Now I feel compelled to. My late father was in Auschwitz … my late mother was in Majdanek concentration camp. Every single member of my family … on both sides was exterminated. Both my parents were under Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and it’s in precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.

“And I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and their martyrdom to try to justify the torture, the brutalization, the demolition of homes that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians. So I refuse any longer to be intimidated by the tears. If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians.”

After a long night of reading, and verifying images and reports, I can no longer deny that it was both childish and inhumane of me not to care up until this point. Now, however, I do.