The other night in Brooklyn, in a speech condemning apartheid in the West Bank, the head of the South African Council of Churches, Rev. Eddie Makue, said that things look very grim right now for Palestinians, but that "we could not comprehend during the height of the conflict in South Africa in the '80s that suddenly on the second of February 1990 we would have one of the apartheid rulers, F.W. De Klerk, unban the political organization [the African National Congress]… call for the unbanishment of the political leaders… We never thought we would live to see the day when a great leader and father to our nation, Nelson Mandela, would walk the street of Soweto, not to mention the streets of South Africa…"
Makue said De Klerk's reversal came about because of international pressure on South Africa, isolating it; and the parallel I am putting forward here is that Washington is Pretoria with respect to apartheid in the West Bank. Jerusalem has no foreign policy, just a reliance on the U.S.; and the U.S. has been inflexible on Palestinian freedom. The strongest supporters of the injustice in Palestine are not even Israelis but Americans, the Congress, the media, the thinktanks, the president. And history is piling up against this policy. The bell has tolled, from Jimmy Carter to Ehud Olmert to Avraham Burg.
F.W. De Klerk was a great man. He was born to a political family, he served the National Party all his life. Then in a stroke he began to demolish apartheid. He saw the writing on the wall, and won the Nobel Prize.
I was walking in the woods today, thinking about Rahm Emanuel, and the fact that his father was in a terrorist organization but he has made halfway-aware statements himself re Israel/Palestine. I wonder whether he does not understand this historic opportunity, and if Obama doesn't understand this to be his great challenge re the Middle East. Not to push things on his own, but to find the F.W. De Klerk for Israel: an American Jew who will signal the great change, as De Klerk did. Just a thought.
