I was born in Russia and understand how propaganda works. We have seen many ” documents” and ” documentaries” about America. Thanks God we didn’t believe it…Unfortunetely in this country you have open society and there is a way to search and learn about issues from universities, serious researchers and so on, but people prefer to believe to jokers. Of course if you wish to believe propaganda and half truth- you can.
Just wanted to alert you, since i feel you are intelligent to understand. Looks like you formed an opinion and trying to justify it. Once again my recommendation to go to serious sources like Wikipedia at least. Regards.

Anyhow, those of us in America also have learned something about propaganda over the years. One of the categories of propaganda that we have often been subjected to is the idea that Israel is a great democracy, that its government seeks a peaceful resolution to the conflict with its Arab neighbors, and that the occupation of Palestinian land is a necessity forced upon Israel, rather than a chosen situation that it insists on maintaining.

I have also spent a small amount of time in Israel and also in the West Bank and, very briefly, Gaza Strip. I have seen first hand some of the apartheid-like opression imposed by Israel on the Palestinians. I have seen Palestinian ambulances, carrying patients needing medical care, stopped arbitrarily and for long duration by Israeli roadblocks. I have heard Israelis angrily defend the use of torture and declare that all Palestinians deserve to be killed.

I know also that there are numerous Israelis who do not think such things, who honestly desire to live peacefully with Palestinian neighbors. I know that there are Palestinians who are equally filled with hatred towards Jewish Israelis, in addition to the majority who are quite willing to live as neighbors to Israel–but not willing to remain as occupied subjects.

My opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have changed over the years. While writing this post, yes, I was looking for links that could serve as background to my arguments; but I aimed to use sources that were legitimate for what they were supposed to be representing. I don’t expect that any one of them would be read as TRUTH.

As for Wikipedia, here’s their page on “Allegations of Israeli Apartheid“. What I read there looks to be largely in agreement with what I argued in my post. For example, on the question of who and how commonly observers of Israel/Palestine have perceived aspects of apartheid, Wikipedia says:

Commentators who have used the term

* Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, used the analogy on a Christmas visit to Jerusalem, 25th Dec 1989 when he said in a Haaretz article, “I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa.” In 2002, Tutu said that he was “very deeply distressed” by a visit to the Holy Land, adding that “it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa” and that he saw “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about”. Tutu also added that “Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through”, and stated that a letter signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans had drawn an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies.

* Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, Camp David Accords negotiator, and Nobel Peace Prize winner wrote a book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that criticizes Israel’s policies in the Palestinian territories.

* Uri Davis, an Israeli-born academic and Jewish member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, wrote a book Israel: An Apartheid State (1987) that drew parallels between Israel and South Africa.

* John Dugard, a South African professor of international law and an ad hoc Judge on the International Court of Justice, serving as the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories described the situation in the West Bank as “an apartheid regime … worse than the one that existed in South Africa.” Dugard has since become an outspoken critic of the separation barrier and of Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has also commented on the fragmentation of the West Bank into areas “which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa”.

* Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister of South Africa, widely considered the architect of South Africa’s apartheid policies, stated in 1961 that “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state,”

* Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, accused Israel in December 1971 of promulgating a “racist policy of apartheid against Palestinians.

* Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Agency (NSA) advisor to President Carter and currently a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies has said the absense of a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict could lead to de facto apartheid and “two communities living side by side but repressively separated, with one enjoying prosperity and seizing the lands of the other, and the other living in poverty and deprivation.”

Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a Muslim writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School, Ronnie Kasrils, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Arun Ghandhi, Dennis Goldberg, and Breyten Breytenbach. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky headed a list of hundreds of Jewish leaders in South Africa who wrote a June 2001 open letter comparing the occupation of Palestinian lands to Apartheid.

Israelis who have compared the separation plan to apartheid include political scientist Meron Benvenisti, Ami Ayalon, Israeli admiral and former leader of the Israel Security Agency, and journalist Amira Hass. Shulamit Aloni, former education minister and a former leader of Meretz, and Tommy Lapid, leader of the liberal Shinui and former Justice minister, used the term “apartheid” when describing a bill proposed by the government of Ariel Sharon to bar Arabs from buying homes in “Jewish townships” within Israel proper.

Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian proponent of the binational solution has argued that it is in Palestine’s interest to “make this an argument about apartheid”, to the extent of advocating Israeli settlement, “The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state”.

-Norman Finklestein

Send in the Clowns

The Media Lynching of Jimmy Carter