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May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Five
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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May
23, 2002
Israel and
South Africa
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
by Susan Abulhawa
The apartheid government of South Africa came
to power in 1948, the same year that the State of Israel was
created in Palestine. Having lived and witnessed the legacy of
Zionism, I wonder sometimes if this shared birth year was not
an accidental prophecy.
Both governments were born on the miserable
premise of entitlement for a select group of people. This entitlement,
to land rights and resources, spawned laws and societies that
measured human worth by human irrelevancies. In the case of South
Africa, it was skin color. In the case of Israel, it is religion.
In both lands, the privilege accorded to the chosen group came
at the expense and detriment of the natives--the 'un-chosen.'
As if we were children of a lesser God,
we were uprooted from our ancestral homes and piled like garbage
into wretched refugee camps or exiled into drifting oblivion.
As if they were not quite human, black souls of South Africa
were dumped in abject ghettos. In the Holy Land, where religion
has no physical features, everyone carries color-coded ID cards
and drives cars with color-coded plates. That is how oppression
discriminates there.
During the gist of Apartheid's cruelty,
Nobel Laureate and Archbishop Desmund Tutu went to the land of
my mothers. He stood in Jerusalem on Christmas Day of 1989 and
said before an audience "I am a black South African, and
if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening
in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in
South Africa."
Last month, Desmund Tutu gave a lecture
in Boston, where he affirmed Israel's right to security, but
added "What is not so understandable, not justified, is
what it does to another people to guarantee its existence. I've
been very distressed during my visits to the Holy Land; it reminds
me so much of what happened to us, black people, in South Africa
during the apartheid rule."
Many have long pointed to the tragic
parallels between Israel and Apartheid South Africa where one
people cruelly control the lives and fate of another. In Hebron,
where 600 Uzi-toting Jewish settlers live among 240,000 Palestinians,
85% of the water is diverted to the few Jewish settlers. The
remainder is rationed among Palestinians. The reality is a cruel
contrast between a people with swimming pools amidst green lawns
and a people who must share bathing water.
The shared values of Zionism and Apartheid
spurred the nostalgic reflection in Henry Katzew's book, South
Africa: A Country Without Friends, in which he said: "What
is the difference between the way in which the Jewish people
struggles to remain what it is in the midst of a non-Jewish population,
and the way the Afrikaners try to stay what they are?" (Die
Transvaler, quoted by R. Stevens in Zionism, South Africa and
Apartheid.)
Most people no longer recall that Israel
remained a close ally with South Africa when the world embarked
on a global boycott against it. Few remember that the weapons
used to mow down young boys in Soweto were supplied by the State
of Israel.
And long after the injustice of Apartheid
fell to its knees, Ehud Barak made an offer for a Palestinian
State in the style of apartheid's bantustans. He was widely hailed
as "brave" and his offer as "far reaching."
But to those of us who saw the map or witnessed the reality,
the "97% concession" was clearly apartheid, cleverly
repackaged and renamed. His offer was a patchwork of isolated
islands hemmed on all fronts by Jewish-only settlements and Jewish-only
roads.
Author Breyten Breytenbach was dispatched
in March to the occupied territories as part of a delegation
from the International Parliament of Writers. Upon his return
he wrote:
"I recently visited the occupied
territories for the first time. And yes, I'm afraid they can
reasonably be described as resembling Bantustans, reminiscent
of the ghettoes and controlled camps of misery one knew in South
Africa."
Breytenbach, too, is familiar with apartheid.
He spent seven years in prison under the "Terrorism Act"
in South Africa-the same act under which Mandela was imprisoned.
Yet a brutal Israeli occupation endures
long after apartheid collapsed and it builds tall barriers throughout
the land, long after the world understood the wickedness of the
Berlin Wall.
Israel's ironic denial of Palestine's
right to life (repeated again this month by its ruling party)
spurs the hearts that fought apartheid like few others.
In an open letter to Ariel Sharon Breyten
wrote: "there can be no peace through the annihilation of
the other, just as there is no paradise for the 'martyr' you
have not broken the spirit of the Palestinian people."
Desmund Tutu uttered the questions that
baffle us all. "My heart aches," he said. "Why
are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers
forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective
punishment, the home demolition, 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?"
It makes my heart ache, too. The anger
and helplessness I felt in Jenin and Ramallah subside now to
a constant ache. But I keep looking to the final similarity between
Zionism and Apartheid. The fruition of that accidental prophecy.
The time when the subjugation of my people will end. When the
institution of religious exclusivity will crumble in Palestine
and Israel like apartheid did in South Africa.
Susan J. Abulhawa is a Palestinian living in Pennsylvania. She
is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-profit organization
dedicated to building playgrounds and recreation areas for Palestinian
children living under military occupation. To find out more about
this vital project, visit: http://www.playgroundsforpalestine.org/
Susan can be contacted at: JABROLE@aol.com
This article originally appeared in Dissident
Voice, a semi-regular newsletter dedicated to challenging
the lies of the corporate press and the privileged classes it
serves: dissidentvoice@earthlink.net
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