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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html
Apartheid
in the Holy Land
Desmond Tutu
Monday April
29, 2002
The Guardian
In our struggle
against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They
almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised,
of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil.
I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of
a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right
to secure borders.
What is not
so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people
to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in
my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened
to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation
of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like
us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
On one of
my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican
bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed
to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for
security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land
and homes?
I have experienced
Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by
Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head
of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and
said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home;
it is now occupied by Israeli Jews." My heart aches. I say why
are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers
forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective
punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?
Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious
traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the
downtrodden?
Israel will
never get true security and safety through oppressing another
people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice.
We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the
corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the
violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the
inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.
The military
action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide
the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the
hatred. Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated
situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive
for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied
territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state
on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure
borders.
We in South
Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could
end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else
in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can
come to the Holy Land? My brother Naim Ateek has said what we
used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice,
pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
But you know
as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed
on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately
dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic.
I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And
how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid
government on security measures?
People are
scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because
the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For
goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe.
The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer
exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi
Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust. Injustice
and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have
to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what
is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And
on the basis of that, God passes judgment. We should put out a
clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the
Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on
justice is possible.
We will do
all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is
God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as
sisters and brothers. Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of
Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation
commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the
Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month.
A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.
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