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corresponding way, as majority positions.
Michael Kleiner of the Herat party, who wants to strip Arabic of its tattered status as
official language in Israel (see Chapter II.8.3), remarked with regard to the Second Intifada,
that ‘for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians’. 717 Surprisingly, or
perhaps not, the most extreme viewpoint to this effect that I have come across in published
form originated with a religious authority: ‘One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish
fingernail’, Rabbi Yaacov Perin declared in 1994 while he was eulogizing the Israeli settler
and mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein. 718 In fact, there are many similar statements made by
Israeli celebrities, also by Israeli heads of state and government, usually made by Jews who
profess to be deeply religious. 719
Yet, the mainstay of their faith, the Jewish Holy Writ, explicitly commands ‘life for
life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ (Exodus: 21.23-24). i.e. proportional retribution. The
potentially pacifist strand of Judaism, the one followed up (to some extent) by the New
Testament, even demands in the Sixth Commandment that: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (ibid: 20.13;
this may of course be interpreted ethnocentrically as ‘Thou shalt not kill Jews’, but that is not
what it says). Both of these mutually contradictory ethical positions are contradicted yet again
by the quotes from contemporary Israelis, such as Rabbi Perin, above, as well by the ancient
authors of the Book of Joshua, and those touting its unambiguously genocidal policy,
including prime minister Sharon (see previous chapter).
From the human rights and cultural diversity perspectives, the latter represent the ugly
aspect of Judaism. But its not so ugly sides should not be forgotten. An ethnicist perspective
on Judaism and Jews is in my opinion a major obstacle to liberation from Israeli apartheid; a
return to the racism of the Nazis and like-minded murderous bigots is undeniably counterproductive
as well as morally corrupt. Judaism is not the same as Zionism. There are many
anti-Zionist Jews, secularists as well as deeply religious people. 720 And there are also many
Zionist non-Jews.
Throughout this context, the ugly sides of Christianity and Islam should not be
forgotten either. In all of the biblical religions, and others, the anti-ethnocentric aspects often
appear to be but a thin veil for something that is at times much more powerful within the
individuals and groups who profess to represent the religions: namely, ethnicist hate. During
the struggle against apartheid, one should therefore never lose sight of the struggle against the
broader enemy of ethnicism. Palestinian liberation fighters should continue to take their cue
from the dominant views within the ANC, during its struggle and since then, on this matter,
although there always seems to be room for improvement, both in apartheid Palestine and in
post-apartheid South Africa.
The important differences between apartheid societies are, as I mentioned in the
introduction, mainly differences of degree. Egypt and Israel share the complication of having
been taken over by (or handed over to) the apartheid minorities from earlier occupiers, the
Persians and British, respectively. The Cape, on the other hand, had belonged to Khoisan
people from time immemorial. The rest of South Africa, however, could be said to have been
717 Fisk October 22, 2002
718 Quoted in James: Israel’s Apartheid Must End, 2000. In February 1994, Goldstein, an Israeli settler, fired
around 100 bullets into a crowd of Palestinian worshippers, killing 29 people inside a religious site at Hebron,
before he was killed himself by Palestinians. In 2002, on the eighth anniversary of the massacre, Jewish rightwingers
pilgrimaged to Goldstein’s grave in the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. Israeli police
cordoned off the gravesite but did nothing to stop the celebrations. See Goldin: Mass Killer Feted by Jewish
Extremists in West Bank, 2002. In comparison, Bartolomeo de Las Casas, an unusual Spaniard at this time, as he
opposed the genocide of Native Americans during the 16 th century, reported that the Spanish settlers on
Hispaniola ‘…made a rule among themselves that for every Christian slain by the Indians, they would slay a
hundred Indians’. Hispaniola, the largest Caribbean island, was soon totally ethnically cleansed of its indigenous
population. See de Las Casas: Hispaniola [excerpts], 2003: 78.
719 Z: Ariel Sharon’s Generation, 2002. See also Chapter II.9.3, above.
720 Weiss: Zionism and Judaism: Let Us Define Our Terms, 2002