Letters to the Editor
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"~~~~" on how to become an "anti-semite"
Criticizing Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, its apartheid policies or the well-documented and frenzied efforts of the Israel Lobby to get America to fight Israel's wars in the Middle East are sure fire ways to be labeled an "anti-semite" by Israel's apologists.
Well I am honored to be in the company of such "anti-Semites" as Darren Barenboim, Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu who - drawing on his experience with apartheid South Africa - made the following "anti-Semitic" remarks about Israel.
"Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience. "
- Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina (07/02), International Herald Tribune