[News] Twilight Zone / 'Worse than apartheid'

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Twilight Zone / 'Worse than apartheid'

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1000976.html

July 15, 2008 By Gideon Levy
Source: <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1000976.html>Haaretz


I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata 
refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said 
there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is 
worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human 
rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were 
members of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress; at least one 
of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. 
There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy 
minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. 
Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict 
with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. 
Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.

For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel -- without 
Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the 
Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice 
Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, 
where hardly any official guests go -- places that are also shunned 
by most Israelis.

On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West 
Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from 
Joseph's Tomb to the monastery of Jacob's Well. They traveled from 
Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages 
that have no access to the main road, and seeing the "roads for the 
natives," which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. 
There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the 
Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.

Jody Kollapen, who was head of Lawyers for Human Rights in the 
apartheid regime, watches silently. He sees the "carousel" into which 
masses of people are jammed on their way to work, visit family or go 
to the hospital. Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, who lived for 
several years in the besieged city, explains that only 1 percent of 
the inhabitants are allowed to leave the city by car, and they are 
suspected of being collaborators with Israel. Nozizwe 
Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy minister of defense and of health 
and a current member of Parliament, a revered figure in her country, 
notices a sick person being taken through on a stretcher and is 
shocked. "To deprive people of humane medical care? You know, people 
die because of that," she says in a muted voice.

The tour guides -- Palestinian activists -- explain that Nablus is 
closed off by six checkpoints. Until 2005, one of them was open. "The 
checkpoints are supposedly for security purposes, but anyone who 
wants to perpetrate an attack can pay NIS 10 for a taxi and travel by 
bypass roads, or walk through the hills.

The real purpose is to make life hard for the inhabitants. The 
civilian population suffers," says Said Abu Hijla, a lecturer at 
Al-Najah University in the city.

In the bus I get acquainted with my two neighbors: Andrew Feinstein, 
a son of Holocaust survivors who is married to a Muslim woman from 
Bangladesh and served six years as an MP for the ANC; and Nathan 
Gefen, who has a male Muslim partner and was a member of the 
right-wing Betar movement in his youth. Gefen is active on the 
Committee against AIDS in his AIDS-ravaged country.

"Look left and right," the guide says through a loudspeaker, "on the 
top of every hill, on Gerizim and Ebal, is an Israeli army outpost 
that is watching us." Here are bullet holes in the wall of a school, 
there is Joseph's Tomb, guarded by a group of armed Palestinian 
policemen. Here there was a checkpoint, and this is where a woman 
passerby was shot to death two years ago. The government building 
that used to be here was bombed and destroyed by F-16 warplanes. A 
thousand residents of Nablus were killed in the second intifada, 90 
of them in Operation Defensive Shield -- more than in Jenin. Two 
weeks ago, on the day the Gaza Strip truce came into effect, Israel 
carried out its last two assassinations here for the time being. Last 
night the soldiers entered again and arrested people.

It has been a long time since tourists visited here. There is 
something new: the numberless memorial posters that were pasted to 
the walls to commemorate the fallen have been replaced by marble 
monuments and metal plaques in every corner of the Casbah.

"Don't throw paper into the toilet bowl, because we have a water 
shortage," the guests are told in the offices of the Casbah Popular 
Committee, located high in a spectacular old stone building. The 
former deputy minister takes a seat at the head of the table. Behind 
her are portraits of Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad and Marwan Barghouti -- 
the jailed Tanzim leader. Representatives of the Casbah residents 
describe the ordeals they face. Ninety percent of the children in the 
ancient neighborhood suffer from anemia and malnutrition, the 
economic situation is dire, the nightly incursions are continuing, 
and some of the inhabitants are not allowed to leave the city at all. 
We go out for a tour on the trail of devastation wrought by the IDF 
over the years.

Edwin Cameron, a judge on the Supreme Court of Appeal, tells his 
hosts: "We came here lacking in knowledge and are thirsty to know. We 
are shocked by what we have seen until now. It is very clear to us 
that the situation here is intolerable." A poster pasted on an 
outside wall has a photograph of a man who spent 34 years in an 
Israeli prison. Mandela was incarcerated seven years less than that. 
One of the Jewish members of the delegation is prepared to say, 
though not for attribution, that the comparison with apartheid is 
very relevant and that the Israelis are even more efficient in 
implementing the separation-of-races regime than the South Africans 
were. If he were to say this publicly, he would be attacked by the 
members of the Jewish community, he says.

Under a fig tree in the center of the Casbah one of the Palestinian 
activists explains: "The Israeli soldiers are cowards. That is why 
they created routes of movement with bulldozers. In doing so they 
killed three generations of one family, the Shubi family, with the 
bulldozers." Here is the stone monument to the family -- grandfather, 
two aunts, mother and two children. The words "We will never forget, 
we will never forgive" are engraved on the stone.

No less beautiful than the famed Paris cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, the 
central cemetery of Nablus rests in the shadow of a large grove of 
pine trees. Among the hundreds of headstones, those of the intifada 
victims stand out. Here is the fresh grave of a boy who was killed a 
few weeks ago at the Hawara checkpoint. The South Africans walk 
quietly between the graves, pausing at the grave of the mother of our 
guide, Abu Hijla. She was shot 15 times. "We promise you we will not 
surrender," her children wrote on the headstone of the woman who was 
known as "mother of the poor."

Lunch is in a hotel in the city, and Madlala-Routledge speaks. "It is 
hard for me to describe what I am feeling. What I see here is worse 
than what we experienced. But I am encouraged to find that there are 
courageous people here. We want to support you in your struggle, by 
every possible means. There are quite a few Jews in our delegation, 
and we are very proud that they are the ones who brought us here. 
They are demonstrating their commitment to support you. In our 
country we were able to unite all the forces behind one struggle, and 
there were courageous whites, including Jews, who joined the 
struggle. I hope we will see more Israeli Jews joining your struggle."

She was deputy defense minister from 1999 to 2004; in 1987 she served 
time in prison. Later, I asked her in what ways the situation here is 
worse than apartheid. "The absolute control of people's lives, the 
lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total 
separation and the extensive destruction we saw."

Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation is 
not succeeding here because of U.S. support for Israel -- not the 
case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy. 
Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was 
not the case in South Africa. "Talk about the 'promised land' and the 
'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have."

Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday 
Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. "When you observe from 
afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. 
Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain 
sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The 
level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than 
the worst period of apartheid.

"The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think 
the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a 
human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the 
checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible -- 
and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also 
knew that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The 
end of the tunnel is blacker than black.

"Under apartheid, whites and blacks met in certain places. The 
Israelis and the Palestinians do not meet any longer at all. The 
separation is total. It seems to me that the Israelis would like the 
Palestinians to disappear. There was never anything like that in our 
case. The whites did not want the blacks to disappear. I saw the 
settlers in Silwan [in East Jerusalem] -- people who want to expel 
other people from their place."

Afterward we walk silently through the alleys of Balata, the largest 
refugee camp in the West Bank, a place that was designated 60 years 
ago to be a temporary haven for 5,000 refugees and is now inhabited 
by 26,000. In the dark alleys, which are about the width of a thin 
person, an oppressive silence prevailed. Everyone was immersed in his 
thoughts, and only the voice of the muezzin broke the stillness.




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