Apartheid

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most persistent white intentions, i.e. power- and profit-seeking ventures, especially in Africa,
but elsewhere in the non-white world, as well. Whether as a consequence of genocide,
apartheid, or colonialism, the very existence of victimization and victims was, and sometimes
still is, often repressed and ignored. This is an essential part of the global geopolitical
background to which apartheid was reinvented and revived in the modern era, in South Africa
as well as in Israel.
1.3. Death Squads, Torture, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Suicide Attacks,
and ‘Honor’ Killings
Although the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not usually understood as similar to the conflict
between Blacks and Whites in South Africa, the basic patterns are in fact the same, and the superficial
differences between apartheid under white and Israeli Jewish rule are used to veil those patterns.
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against
the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South
African white leadership as ‘hard-line warriors’ rather than racists?
What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at
Sharpeville as an understandable ‘security crackdown’ by the South
African police. And described black children shot by the police as an
act of ‘child sacrifice’ by their parents? What if we had called upon
the ‘terrorist’ ANC leadership to ‘control their own people’. Almost
every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian
war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no
matter how many murders – by either side – and no matter how
bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting
this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites
against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily
supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the
blacks of the shanty towns. But there’s not much difference between
Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there’s not much
difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied
territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime
had death squads, just as Israel has today. 230
The problem of gross human rights violations has long existed in the Occupied
Territories (Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem), mainly due to physical
violence, such as indiscriminate killings, assassinations and torture. Lately, Israeli armed
forces have stepped up their assassination activities, increased the shelling of residential and
other areas, used innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields in attacks on other
Palestinians, and used army snipers to fire into groups of unarmed demonstrators.
Palestinians, on the other hand, have launched suicide bombing and sniping campaigns
against Israeli civilian and military targets since the mid-1990s.
But the problem exists since the very foundation of the modern state of Israel. The
destruction of the village Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, stands out with its brutality. 254
innocent men, women and children were killed and the village was razed to the ground by the
Israeli Irgun unit, headed by a man who would later become prime minister, Menachem
Begin. The village was situated outside the state assigned to the Jews by the United Nations.
But the massacre was also typical for the ruthlessness with which the Zionist project was
planned and carried out. As in South Africa, in several areas, on several occasions, Palestine
was to be emptied of its native population. The Palestinians were to cease to exist, at least as
230 Fisk: When Journalists Refuse to Tell the Truth about Israel: ‘Fear of Being Slandered as “Anti-Semites”
Means We Are Abetting Terrible Deeds in the Middle East’, 2001