{news} Apartheid in the Holy Land

[clifford thornton]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html<http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html>
The Guardian
December 21, 2006

Apartheid in the Holy Land

By Desmond Tutu

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters
were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be
on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless
ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have
continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron
of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel
has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what
it did to another people to guarantee its existence.
I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the
Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to
us black people in South Africa. I have seen the
humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and
roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police
officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a
church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could
hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish
settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for
security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost
their land and homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were
their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was
walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel
Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said:
"Our home was over there. We were driven out of our
home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short.
Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their
humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective
punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history
so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound
and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten
that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

Israel will never get true security and safety through
oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately
be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of
suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young
minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence
of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the
inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with
certainty, will not provide the security and peace
Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous
stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or
-- I hope -- to strive for peace based on justice,
based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories,
and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on
those territories side by side with Israel, both with
secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful
transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must
be possible to do the same everywhere else in the
world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it
can come to the Holy Land?

My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I
am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-
freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression."

But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli
government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to
criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic,
as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even
anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how
did it come about that Israel was collaborating with
the apartheid government on security measures?

People are scared in this country [the US], to say
wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful --
very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this
is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The
apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no
longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet,
Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the
end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who
are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God
gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the
poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of
that, God passes judgment.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of
the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and
say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is
possible. We will do all we can to assist you to
achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you
will be able to live amicably together as sisters and
brothers.
______

Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and
chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation
commission. This address was given at a conference on
Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts,
earlier this month. A longer version appears in the
current edition of Church Times. 








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