David Stairs
Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “segregated by race” that entered the general vocabulary during white control of South Africa and Namibia from 1948 to 1994. Its usefulness has expanded in the years since until nowadays it has become a universal term denoting enforced segregation.
As a people who long practiced segregation toward black, indigenous, and minority members of their society, Americans are well aware of the practice and its consequences. Our news media also provides us with numerous examples of such discrimination in other parts of the world: China, Myanmar, Rwanda, etc.
It therefore should come as no surprise to Americans that the Government of Israel stands accused of creating an apartheid state where military violence is regularly leveled at Palestinians inside its borders as well as in the occupied West Bank of illegal Israeli settlements. PBS reports the incredible discrepancy in fatalities resulting from violence since 2014: Israelis = 400 killed; Palestinians = 6,000.
Strange, but plausible in the logic of race violence, Israel had security relations with the white apartheid regime in South Africa, and its agents and Israeli-American camp followers supplied arms and logistics to that regime. What is more surprising perhaps is that the powers that be in Israel did not learn the downside of being a pariah state from the failed South African experiment.
The international boycott movement used against South Africa is partially credited with helping to bring about the end of apartheid in that country, and the elevation of Nelson Mandela as its first black President. The BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement against Israel has suffered a different fate. The Israeli intelligence apparatus has launched not only a full-on public relations campaign against BDS, but has used its influence with American Zionists to convince state legislatures that the movement is tantamount to antisemitic terrorism. The facts are really quite different.
In his exhaustively researched book about American intelligence failures, Spy Fail, James Bamford tells the unsettling story of Israeli influence buying and foreign espionage operations in the United States, Israel’s ally and largest military supplier. In a certain sense, Israel, due to its status as an ally and the large number of Israelis with joint US citizenship, is a greater espionage problem for America than either China or Russia.
According to Bamford, the Israeli nuclear weapons program was jump-started using materials from America. Both plutonium and krytron triggers were exported illegally. Israeli-Americans, like Arnon Milchan, long acted as double agents. Other Jewish Americans, such as Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire hotel magnate and owner of the Las Vegas Venetian Resort, are fervent Zionists who actively fund raise and lobby Congress on Israel’s behalf.
While Americans may be familiar with the Anti Defamation League, and its campaign to hunt down anti-semitism wherever it rears its ugly head, they are probably less familiar with shadowy entities like the IAC (Israeli-American Council) or Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, once expressly founded to lead the attack on the BDS movement and its proponents.
Israeli government officials, like disgraced prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former minister of public safety and current Israeli representative to the U.N. Gilad Erdan, preside over a nation state guilty of crimes against humanity for its vicious military attacks on civilian populations in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as its flaunting of the Geneva Conventions against torture, extra-judicial killing, detention without due process, assassination, illegal seizure of property and numerous other crimes against Palestinians.
The American people have been hoodwinked by a media that soft-peddles Israeli propaganda, and congressional representatives so dependent upon Jewish campaign donations that they rubber-stamp the Zionist attitude that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to terrorism, while American intelligence services ignore illegal Israeli activity in the U.S.
When Nazis first disenfranchised Jews in the 1930s, then liquidated them in the 1940s, the world turned a blind eye until the evidence of Buchenwald and Auschwitz could no longer be ignored. It is a tragic irony that the children of the victims of these crimes, in pursuit of false security, have themselves designed a divided society based upon the same illogical hate of the “other” those German persecutors practiced. Apartheid, like Jim Crow, may pretend to create a society that is “separate but equal,” but we all know the truth about such fantasies, and it is about as nourishing as the sawdust consumed in concentration camps.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
