'Apartheid' Claims are Anti-Semitic
As a South African who grew up in the apartheid era, and who signed up as a youth delegate for the anti-apartheid Progressive Party while a student, I find the present politically-correct campaign to condemn Israel as an apartheid state particularly obnoxious, not to say ridiculous.
The issue has been highlighted by the resignation of Oxford University Labour Club co-chairman Alex Chalmers, in the wake of the club's vote to endorse this week's global Israeli Apartheid Week seeking to bolster the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against all things Israeli. Chalmers has cited strongly anti-Semitic tendencies among members including support for Hamas (the terrorist group controlling the Palestinian enclave of Gaza).
You would think that Oxford students would strive to allow free debate and fair consideration of both sides, seeing as they are perceived as the intellectual elite. But the Bible reminds us that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge..." (Prov 1:7), not man's academic pursuits.
What About the Wall?
True, a security wall has been built in Israel, to keep potential suicide bombers from launching their murderous raids from the disputed territories. Even outspoken Palestinian Christy Anastas says this was necessary "because it has stopped my people from blowing themselves up".1 And it has worked!
But this can hardly be compared with the separate development policy of Afrikaner-led South Africa, which restricted black citizens to certain areas and denied them political and other rights, including access to 'whites-only' jobs. The minority Arab citizens in Israel have the same rights as their fellow Jewish citizens, which was never the case for blacks in my country between 1948 and the early 1990s.
In Israel, Arabs are even represented in the Knesset (Parliament) and I have personally met a Muslim Arab Israeli diplomat. In South Africa, blacks had no vote, their pay was much lower than that of white people doing the same job, and access to education was limited. How can an apartheid state have Jews and Arabs working together in government and side by side in hospitals?
Who's Practising Apartheid?
There are 1.6 million Arabs living in Israel – that's 20% of the population. And yet PA leader Mahmoud Abbas will not allow any Jews to live in his proposed state of 'Palestine'. So who's practising apartheid? Worse still, the new Hamas textbooks in Gaza teach that "all of Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan belongs to us – to us Muslims."2 So, no room for Jews anywhere in the region then!
The deeper one becomes embroiled in this debate, which is fuelled by gross ignorance, prejudice and skewed intelligence and which ultimately drives towards the de-legitimisation of Israel, the stronger the stench of anti-Semitism becomes.
What an irony, too, that the present South African government chooses to condemn Israel as an apartheid state, when it was the Jewish community among the ruling white population who were at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement there.
Robert Hardman, in a major Daily Mail article on the Oxford debacle,3 points out that "Israel is one of the only places in the Middle East where these oh-so-righteous custodians of the moral high ground could live without discrimination or worse..."
Both Robert and Charles (that's me) rest their case.
References
1 Bethlehem Native Christy Anastas Voices Strong Support for Israel's Security Barrier. The Algemeiner, 4 May 2014.
2 Peace in Jerusalem by Charles Gardner, available from olivepresspublisher.com – also a source for other material used in this article
3 Hardman, R, Anti-Semitism and Oxford's Left wing hate mob: University's Labour club chair quits, saying the Left has a 'problem with Jews.' Is it so surprising when Jeremy Corbyn backs terrorists who bomb Israel? The Daily Mail, 20 February 2016.
