A SINGLE STATE SOLUTION
Do I Divest? By Desmond Tutu
October 16, 2002
The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure - in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.
Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies' stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. Students played an especially important role by compelling universities to change their portfolios. Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.
Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than forty campuses in the U.S. are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.
These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience.
To criticize the occupation is not to overlook Israel's unique strengths, just as protesting the Vietnam War did not imply ignoring the distinct freedoms and humanitarian accomplishments of the United States. In a region where repressive governments and unjust policies are the norm, Israel is certainly more democratic than its neighbours. This does not make dismantling the settlements any less a priority. Divestment from apartheid South Africa was certainly no less justified because there was repression elsewhere on the African continent. Aggression is no more palatable in the hands of a democratic power. Territorial ambition is equally illegal whether it occurs in slow motion, as with the Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, or in blitzkrieg fashion, as with the Iraqi tanks in Kuwait.
The United States has a distinct responsibility to intervene in atrocities committed by its client states, and since Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. arms and foreign aid, an end to the occupation should be a top concern.
Almost instinctively, the Jewish people have always been on the side of the voiceless. In their history, there is painful memory of massive roundups, house demolitions and collective punishment. In their scripture, there is acute empathy for the disfranchised. The occupation represents a dangerous and selective amnesia of the persecution from which these traditions were born.
Not everyone has forgotten, including some within the military. The growing Israeli refusenik movement evokes the small anti-conscription drive that helped turn the tide in apartheid South Africa. Several hundred decorated Israeli officers have refused to perform military service in the Occupied Territories. Those not already in prison have taken their message on the road to U.S. synagogues and campuses, rightly arguing that Israel needs security but that it will never have it as an occupying power.
More than thirty-five new settlements have been constructed in the past year. Each one is a step away from the safety deserved by the Israelis, and two steps away from the justice owed to the Palestinians.
If apartheid ended, so can this occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1984 for his work against apartheid. This piece was
written in collaboration with Ian Urbina of the Middle East
Research and Information Project in Washington D.C.
NEW YORK - The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is
protesting the appearances by Archbishop Desmond Tutu on
U.S. college campuses, in view of Tutu´s statements
comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and complaining about what
he called "Jewish arrogance."
Tutu spoke this week at Yeshiva University´s Cardozo Law School in New York City, and is scheduled to speak soon at the University of Pennsylvania,
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said "in view of Archbishop Tutu´s long record of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel remarks, it is appalling that Yeshiva University´s Cardozo Law School invited him as a speaker, and we urge other universities to refrain from inviting him."
lsrael is Like Hitler
The Israeli daily Ha´aretz (April 29, 2002), reporting Tutu´s remarks at a conference in Boston, quoted him as saying:
* "Israel is like Hitler and apartheid" "I´ve been 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... "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? ... 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."
* "The Jewish lobby is very powerful": "People are scared in this country [the U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful--very powerful."
"Critics of Israel are being smeared": "You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.] and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if Palestinians were not Semitic."
"Jewish Arrogance" Tutu accused Jews of exhibiting "an arrogance--the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support,"(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, Nov. 29, 1984)
"Jewish Monopoly of the Holocaust Tutu complained about the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust." (Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1985)
"Forgive the Nazis" During his 1989 visit to Israel, Tutu "urged Israelis to forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust" (Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 1989), a statement which the Simon Wiesenthal Center called "a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere." During the visit, Tutu remarked "If I´m accused of being antisemitic, tough luck," and in response to questions about his anti- Jewish bias, Tutu replied, "My dentist´s name is Dr. Cohen." (Simon Wiesenthal Center´s Response magazine, January 1990)
"Zionism Is Racism" Tutu has claimed that Zionism has "very many parallels with racism." (American Jewish Year Book 1988, p.50)
"Jews Thought They Had a Monopoly on God" Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that "the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings." In the same speech, he compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa. (Hartford Courant, Oct. 29, 1984)
"Palestine, Not Israel": In conversations during the 1980s with the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, Tutu "refused to call Israel by its name, he kept referring to it as Palestine." (Simon Wiesenthal Center´s Response magazine, January 1990)
Source: United Jerusalem