Trump’s Plan for Palestine Looks a Lot Like Apartheid
- Trump’s Plan for Palestine Looks a Lot Like Apartheid
by ALON LIEL, https://foreignpolicy.com/
Israel has long resisted the South Africa analogy, but the U.S. government’s support for annexation is making it a reality.
–
In the heyday of South Africa’s apartheid regime, the country’s white minority government planned to create 10 so-called homelands—also known as Bantustans—where black South Africans could live far away from the cities it hoped to keep white. It was the culmination of what the regime called “separate development”—an effort to deflect attention from racial oppression by claiming black people had been granted independence in their own states and weren’t second-class citizens in South Africa.
–
The apartheid government ultimately created only four ostensibly independent Bantustans (Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei, and Transkei) and six supposedly self-governing territories. Foreign governments for the most part dismissed the puppet states for what they were; South Africa was the only country in the world to officially recognize the Bantustans, and the major decisions regarding their affairs were made exclusively in Pretoria.
–
I have devoted decades of my life to Israel’s foreign service, including serving as a South Africa desk officer in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the apartheid era and as the Israeli ambassador to South Africa from 1992 to 1994, during the country’s transition to democracy.
–
During these years, I learned, to my dismay, that no country in the world (with the exception of South Africa) contributed more to the economy of the Bantustans than Israel. Israelis built factories, neighborhoods, a hospital, and even a soccer stadium and an alligator farm in these South African puppet states. Israel went so far as to allow one of them, Bophuthatswana, to maintain a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, and its leader, Lucas Mangope—shunned by the entire world for advancing and legitimizing apartheid by cooperating with the South African regime—was a frequent guest in Israel.
–
As the entire world boycotted the Bantustan sham, Israel—motivated by the desire for security cooperation and an export market for its arms industry—mobilized to support the apartheid regime. Israel’s security cooperation with South Africa began in 1974 and ended only with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994.
–
read more.
9 … I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a [a]synagogue of Satan.