Apartheid

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so it was easy for them to swallow the Arab lie that we came to a
foreign country almost like crusaders, conquered it and took it away
from the native population. It seems to the Europeans that we are not
in our own country but in the Belgian Congo. 644
As we have seen throughout this investigation, however, Netanyahu and his fellow
Israeli Jews are in a place and position indeed comparable to the Belgians in Congo, although
even more people were actually killed there. Around ten million Congolese were killed
between 1891 and 1911 alone, mainly as a compounded result of different kinds of aggressive
European presence in the region, namely, as a result of genocide, colonialism, apartheid
(perpetrated by and on behalf of Belgian settlers) and, mainly, as an indirect consequence of
the European racist slave trade and slave industries, which had already ended by then. The
Israeli Jewish situation is a great deal more like the Whites in South Africa, at least until 1994.
But it is not entirely incommensurable with the Belgian Congo. The basic ingredients, except
for the system of slavery, were all there. 645 Jews in Israel today are therefore no better than the
Whites in South Africa, or anywhere else in Africa, except perhaps for some rather localized
atrocities. They are essentially invaders or descendants of recent invaders, who have decided
to base their perceived right to be there on military might. Their justifications – for giving and
allowing Jews more access than indigenous Palestinians to the land and the wealth – by the
alleged word of God, or by ‘history’, are simply not enough from the standpoint of basic
respect for basic human rights, nor at all from existing international law.
After a rocky period of conquests and re-conquests by the different powers of the day,
the last independent Jewish state in antiquity (in which Jews spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew) was
crushed by the Roman Empire, which gave the province the name, Palestina, after the
Philistines, who had lived there for over a thousand years already. ‘Palestine’ is a name that
remained unchallenged, among Jews as well, for nearly two thousand years. The Jews were
scattered across the world after the Roman conquest. During much of the Middle Ages and the
Modern Era, some Jews were to play roles similar to the ones they had played in Egypt, under
Persian as well as under Greek and Graeco-Roman rule. They would often belong to a secondtier
or third-tier ethnic and social class, helping the oppressors police and exploit the
indigenous majority. Individual Jews would also sometimes be on the bottom of the hierarchy,
and sometimes very close to or at the top. Collectively, they were also often made scapegoats
and sometimes massacred for invented reasons, such as the medieval European plague. Most
of the time, they were discriminated against in various ways, especially by European
Christians and Atheists. 646
Until the nineteenth century, many Jews wanted to return to their ‘Promised Land’ for
religious reasons. With the increasing secularization of Europe during the last few centuries,
however, this wish waned. In the 1890s, the Zionists, European Jews with a political program
of ‘re-taking’ and ‘restoring’ Israel and the Hebrew language and culture, burst upon the
scene. No longer was the religious motivation the main motivation.
In western Europe, Jews had often improved their socio-economic and political status,
but in Eastern Europe they repeatedly became an oppressed ethnic minority. Zionists decided
that in order to further improve their social and political status, Jews must establish a national
homeland, in which they would all be united. Like the Germans and Italians had created or
644 Pumpyansky Interview, July 2002. Netanyahu confuses colonialism and genocide with apartheid, a fallacy to
which many of his harshest critics are also prone. Moreover, two-thirds of the group of people which he refers to
by the first person plural are today at home in other countries than Israel and Palestine.
645 Lindqvist 1998 (1992); Reader 1998 (1997): 517ff; Akram: Norman G. Finkelstein: The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2002. See footnote 348 on sex slavery in Israel today. It is
not practiced to the same extent, of course, as African slavery was by the Whites.
646 Shahak: Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994; Fredrickson 2002:
18ff. See also the reviews of Shahak’s book by Hunt, E. H. 1994, Pages 69, 79-80, and Halle 1995.