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Join on Telegram Rabat – Two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa have come clean with details on the Israeli apartheid policies enforced in occupied Palestine.
Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, two former Israeli ambassadors, co-authored and published an article in GroundUp, a South African newspaper. In the article, the two authors discussed their experiences and explored the history of how Israel turned to South Africa for inspiration on state-sanctioned segregation.
The two ambassadors’ line of work helped them understand “the reality of apartheid and the horrors it inflicted,” as well as “the reality at home,” they said.
“For over half a century, Israel has ruled over the occupied Palestinian territories with a two-tiered legal system, in which, within the same tract of land in the West Bank, Israeli settlers live under Israeli civil law while Palestinians live under military law,” the two ambassadors explained. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank sustains a system of “inherent inequality,” they argued.
Throughout the article, the two former Israeli ambassadors do not mince their words, calling the Israeli settlements “illegal” and highlighting the “expropriation and takeover of massive amounts of Palestinian land.”
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Referencing Israel’s former Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon’s trip to South Africa in the early 1980s, the two authors drew parallels between the situation in the West Bank and the South African Apartheid regime. “Even a cursory look at the map of the West Bank leaves little doubt regarding where Sharon received his inspiration,” they wrote.
As tensions recently flared up between Israel and Hamas, many government officials, public figures, and media organizations across the world appeared to be split on whether the ongoing Israeli occupation can be considered on equal footing as South African apartheid.
While organizations such as Human Rights Watch have been clear in their message that occupied Palestine is in fact undergoing persecution under Israeli apartheid, the US, Israel’s most steadfast partner, has categorically rejected such “accusations.”
As the world at large continues the “debate,” significant criticism from within the Israeli state apparatus remains limited. In this context, Baruch’s and Liel’s statements hold significant value for the discourse on the Palestinian experience.
Israel’s defenders often fall back on describing any criticism of Israeli discriminatory policies as an act of antisemitism. In other instances, anti-Zionist criticism coming from Europe often gets rebuked with opportune reminders of the tragic Jewish persecution under the Holocaust.
According to Baruch and Liel, however, some of these debates mask the cruel reality of the Palestinian tragedy while downplaying the apartheid-like and racialist undertones of Israel’s presence on Palestinian lands. “It is clearer than ever that the occupation is not temporary, and there is not the political will in the Israeli government to bring about its end,” they said.
