Palestine 'worse than apartheid': Jewish ANC cabinet minister

Nobel Peace Laureate Jimmy Carter, admittedly not the best leader in this nation's history but arguably it's best ex-president, is one of the world's few statesmen nowadays. He took a lot of flack for his recent book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The politically correct position in this country is that America and Americans must give Israel a blank check at all times. Israel must be treated and defended as though it were the 51st state. Anyone who dares criticize any action Israel takes is accused of wanting (or being accomplices to) Israel's destruction.

Any serious person who looks at the daily life of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will view the system as inhumane. The despair of life there has only made terrorism flourish. You'll note that Palestinian terrorism* against Israeli civilians didn't start in earnest immediately after the Israeli conquest of 1967 but only after decades of despair and hopelessness made Palestinians feel like they had no other option.

(*-Of course, the Palestinians would resort that they are regularly subject to the terror of Israeli air strikes, border closures and other arbitrary measures)

President Carter was attacked because he dared compare the treatment of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories with the racist apartheid system of the white South African government. I commend him for this because he tries to see and treat people on both sides of this divided as human beings with dignity.

But this is unacceptable in the United States. Carter was smeared as a loon, a nut, a terrorist sympathizer and, of course, a Bush hater. Basically, the argument implied that he was not only insulting people's intelligence by equating the Israeli occupation with apartheid, but that no one who fought against apartheid could fail to be offended by Carter's supposedly ludicrous comparison.

So I was interested to read this op-ed column in The Daily Mail and Guardian, a Johannesburg newspaper. The South African minister of intelligence Ronnie Kasrils did not say that what was happening in the occupied territories was tantamount to apartheid. This one-time anti-apartheid activist said that the situation in the territories was "worse than apartheid."

He described in some detail his trip to the territories. His observations make clear that the supposed 'security barrier' is nothing more than a wall designed to facilitate life for the often-fanatical Israeli 'settlers.' Minister Kasrils remarked: Like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank is effectively a hermetically sealed prison. It is shocking to discover that certain roads are barred to Palestinians and reserved for Jewish settlers. I try in vain to recall anything quite as obscene in apartheid South Africa.

If a former anti-apartheid activist makes such a comparison, especially one whose grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania who fled from the Czarist pogroms at the end of the 19th century, maybe he should be taken seriously. If South African blacks can be treated like human beings without them slaughtering their former masters (despite hysterical fears to the contrary), maybe it's time Palestinians are afforded the same fundamental human right.