Rice compares Israeli occupation to infamous US segregation

By Lenni Brenner
—Guest Columnist— | Last updated: Jan 13, 2008 - 12:49:00 PM

Can anyone be more defensive of Zionism’s reputation than Israel’s Prime Minister? Therefore many people wondered why Ehud Olmert suddenly announced after Annapolis that “if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” (news.bbc.co.uk - 11/29/07)

[I]f a Jewish state is legitimate in principle, how and why did the only democracy in the Middle East as Israel proclaims itself, end up looking like apartheid South Africa and the segregated American south, even in the eyes of its own PM?

Apparently he was reacting to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s blunt statements to him. Haaretz, Israel’s most prestigious newspaper, tells us that:

“In private conversations—and as she said in Annapolis—Rice tends to compare the Israeli occupation in the territories to the racial segregation that used to be the norm in the American South. The Israel Defense Forces checkpoints, where Palestinians are detained, remind her of the buses she rode as a child in Alabama, which had separate seats for Blacks and Whites. This is an uncomfortable comparison, of course, for the Israelis, who view it as ‘over-identification’ on her part with Palestinian suffering.” (Aluf Benn, “What’s the hurry?” www.haaretz.com - 12/27/07)

Abe Foxman of America’s Anti-Defamation League and other apologists for Israel scream at ex-President Jimmy Carter for attacking West Bank Israeli apartheid. And Haaretz says that American Zionist ultras are dumping on Rice for using the s-word, which, if it sticks to Israel, will ultimately be fatal for Zionism in the U.S. Now these fanatics are ranting at Olmert for his statement. But he is smarter than them. When Carter and Rice say what they say, Israel must make a deal with the Palestine Authority and the Arab states backing it, or face growing opposition within American imperialism from those more concerned about Arab oil than Zionist campaign contributions. Mr. Olmert knows that growing divisions between Israel and its patron will inevitably inspire many Palestinians to continue to fight Zionism until it is defeated like the apartheid regime that even he says it resembles.

Of course Mr. Olmert isn’t abandoning Israel’s “right” to exist as a Jewish state within borders recognized by the Authority and the Arab world. Ditto Mr. Carter and Secy. Rice. But if a Jewish state is legitimate in principle, how and why did “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel proclaims itself, end up looking like apartheid South Africa and the segregated American south, even in the eyes of its own PM and Bush’s international motor-mouth? Be sure that we will never get honest answers to that query from Mr. Olmert, much less from Rice, who shows zero signs of in-depth knowledge of Zionist history. But there is indeed an intelligent explanation, and we can find it in “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” written in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of the “Zionist-Revisionist” movement which Olmert grew up in.

Although he was born in what is now Ukraine, Mr. Jabotinsky was Russian-speaking and a gifted writer in that language and many others. Indeed his talents were so extraordinary that he soon became a leading international Zionist figure and was instrumental in getting London to establish a “Jewish Legion” in 1917 to help Britain take Palestine from the Ottoman Empire.

Zionism, like any ideology, has writers who don’t do and doers who don’t write. But fighting in the imperial army made Mr. Jabotinsky the writer into a realistic doer. Read him on “colonization,” his ‘c-word’. You will understand exactly why Israel, regardless of all the monkey-chatter about it being “the only democracy in the Middle East,” inexorably came to be the discriminatory regime summed up so well by Secy. Rice’s “segregation” and Mr. Olmert’s “apartheid.”

They each, in different voices, call for a “2-state solution.” But Olmert wants as big a Zionist state as he can keep with minimal Israeli casualties, with the Palestinians confined in a Bantustan no bigger than a broom-closet. Secy. Rice is prepared to be a tad more generous. But segregation or apartheid, religious or ethnic, has no right to exist on even one inch of our planet. After decades of struggle, American legal segregation and South African apartheid are dead and gone and we all say good riddance to them. In time, when progressive Palestinians and Israelis get their act together and set up their equivalent of the American civil rights movement and the African National Congress, Zionism will join segregation and apartheid in the cemetery reserved for discredited and defeated colonial regimes.

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Lenni Brenner is a writer who worked with Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), the legendary “Black Power” leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Committee against Zionism and Racism, from 1985 until Ture’s death in 1998.He is the author of 4 books, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil, a study of the Democratic Party.

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