Israel and apartheid: a correct association

TO THE EDITOR:

The March 19 guest column rejected any association between Israel and apartheid on the grounds that there are Palestinians who occupy parliamentary and judicial positions and that Israel’s declaration of independence “affirms equality” (as did America’s in 1776).

Such information, however, does naught to disqualify claims of an Israeli apartheid.

Nelson Mandela, for example, was a practicing lawyer and member of the Transvaal Law Society. Mandela’s godfather, Chief Jongintaba, was a regent who oversaw tribal lands and represented his people.

Apartheid allowed for self-administration, but what it did not bestow upon nonwhites is the same thing that Israel refuses to grant Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: self-determination.

Just as apartheid relegated nonwhites to Bantustans and zones of inhabitance, so too has Israel confined many Palestinians to Gaza, and an increasingly smaller West Bank.

And just as whites would claim the lands of nonwhites, so too have Israeli settlers expelled Palestinians from their land for many decades.

Similarities can even be drawn between the flags of apartheid South Africa and modern Israel.

South Africa’s former flag bore at its center the flags of: Great Britain, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

All of the flags were symbols of whiteness and white dominance. No reference was given to the African populace, just as Israel’s flag provides no recognition of Muslim Arabs who formed a majority of the population in the region for many centuries prior.

Perhaps the ultimate reason, however, that Israel’s policies can be related to apartheid is that fact that Nelson Mandela himself has made such an association in the past.

The man who fought against apartheid for much of the 20th century also considered Yasser Arafat’s death “a great blow to all those who are fighting against oppression.”

Roderick Flannery ’14
Geography