Apartheid

258
Israeli military censors, by Israeli soldiers targeting and shooting journalists – especially
journalists of Palestinian ethnicity – and by Israeli and its allied and/or hired US public
relations professionals. 636 However, the qualitative bias of pro-Israeli spin in world media is
remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented, and it amounts to something that is well beyond the
sympathy afforded South African Whites by the world. This is dependent on investment and
effort as well as a deep historical dimension to the ideology, in some respects even deeper
than both the Graeco-Roman one in Egypt and the white one in South Africa.
9.3. The Bible, Hasbara and the Media
For centuries, both Arabs and Jews have developed historical roots in the country now
known as Israel. Both groups have a strong emotional attachment to the country. This has
created two nationalisms, an Arab nationalism, which claims Palestine as its homeland, and a
Jewish nationalism, which through ‘Zionism’ established a homeland in the ‘Holy Land’ and
contributed considerably to the development of the modern state of Israel.
Since Abraham, according to the Bible around 2000 BCE, or since around 1000 BCE
as most scientific scholars believe 637 , Jews had thought of Palestine, and sometimes also its
more than immediate surroundings, as their ‘Promised Land’. Two Old Testament passages
are the main sources of the justification by alleged revelation:
[T]he Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed
have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the
river of Euphrates... (Genesis 15:18)
[T]he Lord spake unto Joshua…the land which I do give…to the
children of Israel…From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto
the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto
the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.
(Book of Joshua 1:1-4)
Due to this very useful and allegedly divine sanction, any means used to appropriate
the land were apparently allowed for the Jews, and for them alone, in order for them to get rid
of the indigenous peoples:
And Joshua said to the children of Israel…the living God is among
you, and…he will without fail drive out from before you the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and
the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites. (Ibid: 3:9-10)
Joshua and his ‘men of valour’ first conquered Jericho, with some supernatural help
(back when Jews were knocking down security fences with the sounds of trumpets), and then
‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old…with the
636 Bathish et al. 2004. Finkelstein, in C. Brown 2006, argues that the shrill accusations of ‘anti-semitism’ against
critics of Israel have increased sharply since the early 1980s, since facts are no longer so easily buried. See also
Chapter II.9.3, below.
637 Whitelam 1996; and, for instance, the egyptologists Rolf Krauss, Edgar Pusch and Old Testament scholars
Bernd Jörg Diebner and Niels Peter Lemche, originally quoted in N.N.: Archaeology: Was Moses Really
Pharaoh? 1997. Palestinians today sometimes refer to themselves as ‘Cana’anites’, underscoring the far from
unrealistic possibility that some may have Palestinian ancestors from before the very first conquest of the land or
the very first case of immigration or colonialization by Jews or by their ancestors (i.e. by some of those people
whose descendants were to become Jews). Whitelam treats ancient Israel as a rather minor part of Palestinian
history, for sound reasons, in my opinion. The entire country, which has been referred to as ‘Palestine’ far longer
than as ‘Israel’, has always been multi-ethnic and there have always been several religions co-existing there. The
PLO continues this legacy with its call for a secular and democratic state. The modern Jewish state, however,
does not. Its closest spiritual precedent is the story of the mayhem of the Book of Joshua. Its closest material
precedent is probably the Crusades, see Chapter I.1.4, above.