September 13, 1985: Rep. George Crockett (D-MI), after visiting the Israeli-occupied West Bank, compares the living conditions there with those of South African blacks and concludes that the West Bank is an instance of apartheid that no one in the U.S. is talking about. [IBID]
In July 2000, President Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David II Peace Summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Clinton--not Barak--offers Arafat the withdrawal of some 40,000 Jewish settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, all of which are interconnected by roads that cover approximately 10% of the occupied land. Effectively, this divides the West Bank into at least two non-contiguous areas and multiple fragments. Palestinians would have no control over the borders around them, the air space above them, or the water reserves under them. Barak called it a 'generous offer" and Arafat rightly refused to sign away the rights of Palestinian civil society. [IBID]
August 31, 2001: Durban, South Africa, 50,000 South Africans marched in support of the Palestinian people. In their "Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid and the Struggle for Palestine" they proclaimed: "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." [IBID]
October 23, 2001: Ronnie Kasrils, a Jew and a minister in the South African government, co-authors a petition "Not in My Name," signed by some 200 members of South Africa's Jewish community, which stated: "It becomes difficult, from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression expressed by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule." [IBID]
Three years later, Kasrils will go to the Occupied Territories and conclude: "This is much worse than apartheid. Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armored vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale." [IBID]
April 29, 2002: Boston, MA. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says he is "very deeply distressed" by what he observed in his recent visit to the Holy Land, adding, "It reminded me so much of what happened in South Africa."
The Nobel peace laureate said he saw "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about."
Referring to Americans, he added,
"People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the
Jewish lobby is powerful--very powerful. Well, so what? The apartheid government
was very powerful, but today it no longer exists." [IBID]
On July 26, 1973, a UN draft resolution affirmed the rights of the Palestinians and established provisions for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories as embodied in previous General Assembly resolutions, but the American Government killed this international effort to end Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. [4]
It was 'civilized' men who carved up the Holy Land vis-Ã -vis the UN Partition Plan
in 1947, and over 700,000 indigenous Palestinians became refugees- who are
still denied their inalienable human right to return home-because they are the
wrong religion. And this is at the root of much of the misery in the Middle East and fuels the 'demon' of Anti-Semitism.
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