In September 2000 the Palestinian leadership abandoned the peace process and launched a terrorist war against Israel. Since then, thousands of Israelis have been killed and injured in more than 20 000 documented attacks. In the first half of March 2002 alone Palestinian terror accounted for more than twice as many civilian deaths as the African National Congress was responsible for in nearly 30 years of ”armed struggle”.
For a small nation, the proportion of casualties is horrific, equivalent to at least 20 September 11s given the relative sizes of the Israeli and American populations.
Despite the fact that the Palestinians (financially and materially supported by, among others, Saudi Arabia and Iran) are clearly the aggressors, the climate of international opinion has been overwhelmingly hostile towards Israel. The catalyst for the latest wave of vilification is a security fence, currently being built roughly along the Israel-West Bank border.
Critics of the barrier can be divided into those who merely dispute its planned route and those who want it to be removed altogether. Many of the latter claim to do so in the name of facilitating the resumption of peace talks, maintaining — bizarrely — that a measure with a proven record of preventing terrorist attacks is a recipe for continuing conflict. In reality, such critics are demonstrating a callous disregard for Jewish life, as well as an inexcusable lack of outrage over the innocent Jewish lives already lost. It seriously calls into question their motivations.
The Palestinians, faced with a shattered economy, mounting anarchy and a growing casualty list of their own, are also victims of the impasse. But in the final analysis they are victims not of Israeli intransigence but of their own benighted actions.
Enmeshed in a cycle of self-destructive hatred, they are perpetrating the kind of atrocities that not only the ANC never contemplated carrying out, but that even the abhorred apartheid regime stopped short of. What, after all, would the death toll be by now had Israel abandoned its policy of restraint and instead used its massive military advantage to target Palestinian civilians as indiscriminately as Palestinians are targeting theirs?
Israel has resorted to the messy and expensive expedient of constructing a security barrier because its neighbours have left it no choice. It is, in many ways, an act of desperation, an abandonment (hopefully temporary) of the long-cherished hope that it will one day be allowed to exist in peace and friendship with the other Middle Eastern nations.
What has complicated matters is the presence of many Jews who have settled beyond the 1967 borders. Since their lives — no less than those on the Israeli side of the Green Line — also need protecting, it has been necessary for the fence to cut into sections of the West Bank at certain points. Israel should (and arguably is) doing all it can to minimise the resultant disruption of Palestinian life in those areas. But the problem could be resolved were Palestinians prepared to tolerate a small Jewish minority in their midst just as Israel encompasses a substantial non-Jewish minority within its own borders.
Attacks on the fence, especially in South Africa, have been replete with palpably inappropriate ”apartheid” imagery. Last week’s Mail & Guardian editorial (”The wall of shame”) likened it to a ”myopic PW Botha-style security response to a political crisis”.
If the barrier was being erected inside Israel proper for the purpose of separating one section of the population from another, the ”apartheid” analogy would possibly be accurate, but this is obviously not the case.
Dozens of countries, among them Kuwait, Lithuania, Namibia, India and yes, even South Africa, have erected fences on their borders. Sometimes for genuine reasons of national security, but usually for such mundane purposes as preventing smuggling or illegal immigration. South Africa has recently reinforced its border fence with Zimbabwe, the primary reason being to keep out cattle that might be carrying foot-and-mouth disease.
As Jerusalem Post columnist Michael Freund asked, ”Why is it okay for South Africa to keep out the cows, but not for Israel to bar entry to suicide attackers?”
Just as the security fence is not an ”apartheid wall”, so Israel is not an ”apartheid state”. Are there any Israeli equivalents to the Group Areas Act, the Land Act, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, pass laws, ”Bantu education” and such constitutional sleights of hand aimed at disenfranchising large sections of the population equivalent to the tricameral Parliament? And notwithstanding frequent ”Bantustan” accusations, is Israel creating ”independent homelands” within its own territory for purposes of denying the putative ”citizens” of such homelands their democratic rights?
If a genuinely focused comparison between modern-day Israel and apartheid South Africa swiftly demonstrates how untrue, unjust and irresponsible the analogies are, why is bogus apartheid terminology being so readily used against Israel? The answer to that is all too obvious. Unable to overthrow Israel militarily, its enemies have resorted to a massive campaign of vilification in every conceivable international forum with the aim of turning the hated ”Zionist entity” into the same kind of pariah that white South Africa was and thereby ensuring its ultimate destruction. It remains to be seen whether they will be allowed to succeed in this evil endeavour.
David Saks is a senior researcher with the South African Jewish Board of Deputies