Ronnie Kasrils (”Israel 2007: worse than apartheid”, May 18) is not wrong in likening his recent visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to ”a surreal trip back into an apartheid state of emergency”. Following nearly seven years of constant conflict, a thoroughly abnormal situation has come into being with regard to the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Two peoples unable and apparently unwilling to find a way to live together nevertheless find themselves locked in a deadly and mutually destructive embrace with the Palestinians, as the weaker party, getting by far the worst of it.
No one can claim that Minister Kasrils’s angry denunciation of the hardships being experienced by the Palestinian population is not heartfelt. As a meaningful contribution to the debate on how this should be addressed, however, it falls woefully short, mainly because it fails to acknowledge that when it comes to conflict resolution, both sides have an obligation to act appropriately.
Support for the Palestinian cause should not take the form of exclusively portraying Palestinians as helpless victims of callous Israeli oppression. Indeed, those who genuinely care about the Palestinians should surely offer constructive criticism wherever necessary. In this regard, both Kasrils and the government he represents have consistently demonstrated a blinkered unwillingness to also hold the Palestinians and their elected representatives accountable for their actions.
One would never guess from Kasrils’s frequent pronouncements on the Middle East conflict that the policies of the ruling Hamas party differ extensively from those of the South African government. South Africa recognises the state of Israel and its right to exist within secure borders, whereas Hamas aims at its complete elimination and replacement with a single Palestinian state. South Africa believes in pursuing the goal of a viable Palestinian state, coexisting side by side with Israel through a negotiated process, while Hamas is committed to methods of indiscriminate violence.
The actions of Hamas have made nonsense of claims that the root cause of the conflict is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in mid-2005, it provided the Palestinians with an ideal opportunity to reciprocate by halting violence and reopening a process of constructive engagement with its neighbour. Instead, Hamas was elected to office and a barrage of rockets from the newly vacated territory rained down on Israeli population centres.
Neither Kasrils nor any other government representative has spoken out against Hamas, instead providing ritual denunciations solely of Israel. In doing so, they have regularly equated its policies to those of apartheid South Africa.
Fashionable as such comparisons are, they are highly misleading and cynically unfair. Israel faces the kind of threats to the lives of its citizens that simply did not exist under apartheid. One only has to note how only a few dozen whites at most lost their lives in the liberation movements’ 30-year-long ”armed struggle” whereas in less than seven years since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, nearly 1 500 Israelis — the majority of them civilians — have died.
Israel, as must readily be conceded even by its supporters, has been far from blameless in bringing about the current impasse. Its programme of settling large parts of the West Bank has resulted in untold complications, making the achievement of a viable Palestinian state extremely difficult. Difficult is not the same as impossible, however. With mutual trust and good will, peaceful coexistence between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples is still achievable.
South Africa is certainly able to play a meaningful part in bringing this about, but to do so, it will have to be considerably more even-handed than it has been up until now.
David Saks is associate director, SA Jewish Board of Deputies