Hossam el-Hamalawy's Library tagged apartheid →  View Popular

Koos Bezuidenhout, chief executive of the workers' interest group the United Association of SA, warned that "dissatisfaction with poor service delivery or the complete lack thereof at municipal level is now spreading like a veld fire through South Africa".

Fifteen years after the ANC won its first election, more than 1 million South Africans still live in shacks, many without access to electricity or running water. The gap between rich and poor is also growing. Nearly 3m houses have been built, but the allocation has been prone to nepotism and corruption.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel's case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines - even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinian in 1948 - the year his apartheid party similarly came to power - of the unfolding destruction of their villages, the premeditated massacres and the systematic ethnic cleansing.

Within a few short years of coming to power in 1948 South Africa's apartheid regime was ruthlessly cleansing cities and towns of so-called “black spots” - where the “non-whites” lived, socialised, studied and traded - bulldozing homes, loading families onto military trucks, and forcibly relocating them to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” - soon to be reconstituted as Bantustans – these were not too far away from industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of cheap black labour.

What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key amongst them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel, and seek to emulate in the southern African region, was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighbourhood.

The early Dutch pioneers, the Afrikaners, had used Bible and gun as colonisers elsewhere, to carve out their exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland. Like the biblical Israelites they claimed to be “God’s chosen people” with a mission to tame and civilise the wilderness; disregarding the productivity and industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and traded for centuries - claiming it was only they who would make the land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a covenant with God to deliver their enemies into their hands and to bless their deeds. Until the advent of South Africa’s democracy, the racial history books generally taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or less as the so-called “Bantu tribes” from the north were wandering across the Limpopo River - and that they the were pioneer settlers in a land devoid of people.

It is by no means difficult to recognise from afar, as Verwoerd had been able to do, that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and later in a peace agreement the Sinai from Israel. After that Israel and South Africa were virtually twinned as military allies for Pretoria helped supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of its 1973 setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa at the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology - from naval ships and the conversion of supersonic fighter planes to assistance in building six nuclear bombs and the creation of a thriving arms industry.

But such a fate must not be allowed to happen. Dare we believe that an America led by Barak Obama will make a difference? Some raise the hope that after 15 years the stalled Road Map might spring back to life and with it the chimera of a Two-State solution. One notes that President Obama only calls for a freeze in settlement construction – and precious little else. Can 12% or a few percent more in horse- trading provide for a viable Palestinian state? One doubts it. We await with interest the results of this conference's deliberations. May I remind you of Lewis Carroll's “Alice in Wonderland”, where a lost Alice asks a caterpillar seated on a toadstool the way. He asks her where does she want to go but the bewildered Alice does not know. “Well”, answers the caterpillar, “”If you do not know where you are going any road will do.”