I wrote this for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Review in 1990. I thought of it when I read Yoel Marcus in Haaretz that if there had been 5 million Afrikaners in the US, there would still be apartheid in South Africa.
If South Africa had a lobby as powerful as the Israeli lobby…
* Nelson Mandela would not be free.
* There would be no sanctions against South Africa.
* South Africa would be the largest recipient of US aid.
* The African National Congress would still be outlawed.
* Congress would have endorsed the idea that apartheid is not racism.
* Pro-apartheid forces cloaked as peace-makers would try to control the anti-apartheid movement.
* Public television would require "balanced" reporting to counteranti-apartheid programs.
* Journalists. academics and others who criticized apartheid would be targets of character assasinations.
* The struggle of the Boers against the British for control of South Africa would be considered a "national liberation struggle."
* South Africa would ultimately be defended as the only "democracy" in Africa.
5 million well connected south africaners.. one could say it would be hard to be as well connected as the jewish are to the political and business and banking structure in the usa… i know… this means i am anti- semite for saying such an outlandish thing, but the facts speak for themselves… jewish folks are way more connected then usual to politics, business and media then i think is generally the case with the rest of the minority groups in the usa, or canada where i live…
The importance of a US lobby in pushing our foreign policy can be seen very clearly in how we reacted to the civil war that broke out when Yugoslavia collapsed. Basically, there was a large Croation expatriot community in the US (these were made up of the Croatian Utashi that collaborated with the Germans during WWII, the US welcomed them because they could be used in the anticommunism crusade following that war). These communities became relatively prosperous in the US and Canada over the nest 40 years. Once Yugoslavia broke up, these former Croatian fascists lobbied the US to support the Croatian forces, then is an alliance with the Moslems of Bosnia, to oppose the Serbs. There were no large Serbian communities in the US to counter this lobby. This led directly to the US supporting the Moslem and Croatian forces that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian population in the province of Krajina and the Nato war against the Serbs in Kosovo.
This was one time where I had to admire Israeli foreign policy. They refused to demonize the Serbs for the simple reason that during WWII the Serbs supported an underground railroad for Eastern European Jews escaping to Israel. Not just that but the Croatian Ustashe manned the concentration camps that sent many Jews and many more Serbs to their deaths. It is sickening to see that US foreign policy is still backing these fascist Balkan parties in Kosovo and Bosnia. That is the power of ethnic lobbies.
Of course you could add more points, but you did a great job Jeffrey:
* Afrikaners made the area rich and successful, and no black has the same good treatment or life they get in South Africa;
* Afrikaners were destined to this area, chosen by god, to their predestined success like the Reformed Church says (“they shall have dominion”).
etc.
Good observation v. The white SA hasbarah had a lot in common with the Zionist variety. I guess the defences for colonial dispossession are rather limited. Here are a couple more Afrikaner favourites:
* Black Africans already have c. 50 states (all corrupt and totalitarian)
* SA was empty before the Dutch settlers came. The blacks migrated there later, in order to take advantage of the opportunities created by the Europeans.
RE: South Africa
Al Jazeera English – Focus – “South Africa’s legal war over Gaza”, By Imran Garda, 11/01/09
(excerpt)…We’ve identified about 75 South Africans who we believe served in the IDF at one point or the other,” Boda says. We believe that there is prima facae evidence against all of them. “We have informants from South African police stations, whose identity we are currently protecting for their safety, who have pinpointed which of their fellow South African police force reservists went to Gaza to fight in the war. We have pictorial evidence as well.”
The lawyers say some of their evidence can be found on public profiles on social networking sites like Facebook. Al Jazeera logged on to Facebook and quickly found photographs of South Africans proudly showing off their stints fighting for the Israeli army. One 23-year-old man from Johannesburg had posted photographs that made it clear he had fought in the Gaza war. And he is not alone. There is a dizzying array of similar photographs on the website, featuring smiling young men striking gladiatorial poses with weapons that, according to Goldstone, belonged to an army committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Beneath the pictures are captions such as: “These are the presents we sent the Gaza residents daily.”…
…Even if war crimes and crimes against humanity cannot be proven, there is another more obvious charge for South Africans who fought for Israel. A South African law, the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act, bars any citizen from fighting for a foreign force without express government permission…
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to english.aljazeera.net
RELATED VIDEO (3:43) – link to youtube.com
After watching a recent Noam Chomsky speech where Chomsky cites every half-baked cockamamie excuse as to why the US supports Israel, but fails to mention or even hint at the power of the Zionist Lobby and Zionist-leaning media elites I agree wholeheartedly with the points above.
You can criticize Chomsky for a big blind spot if you wish, but implying that he is pro-Israel apartheid is dumb.
We’d probably have a SA Witty telling us how he wants a reformed racist, White South Africa. But of course, still White and racist.
Richard Van Der Witty!
In the United States, there IS a Jewish peace movement, with some very significant number signing on.
It would be the equivalent of 20% of the Afrikaner movement saying, “we renounce expansion, occupation”.
What percentage of US Congress was at the J Street convention? What percentage of the knesset even?
Spreading ignorance and vitriol is not the same as enlightenment. I guess there is some truth in Blankfort’s comments, somewhere.
Better that he only presented information, rather than his spirituality in the midst of his religious trappings.
You’re not part of the Jewish peace movement and anyways this ‘Jewish’ peace movement is more selfish, criminal sense of entitlement, and self-loving bullshit.
Peace is peace. There is no such thing as JEWISH peace.
They are Americans. Unless you’re saying they are Jews before they are Americans. Then you have to define for us, what exactly does their JEWISHNESS have to do w/ their interest in peace for cause A, B, or C.
No, sorry. There is no JEWISH peace movement. There are Jews who want peace. But even that is superficial.
I’m sure most people want peace. You have to compliment people who have a plan for it, who care for it, are fair about it, etc. Not simply superficial people who talk talk talk about it all the time and do jack shit.
The Jewish Establishment wants to keep as much land as possible. It does not want peace. And because Jewish identity is a social taboo guarded by Leftists and the Fascist right (like you Witty) – it’s very difficult for ordinary people to look at this conflict w/ clear vision.
Jewish identity – or a favorable construct of it – is constantly being internalized in non-Jews, via film and through our intellectual class. We are at the same time, destroying the symbol of Arab identity and Islamic identity. Look at our history and our movies. Look at how often ethnocentric Jews and Zionist employ tactics of emotional blackmail?
This is where Kevin MacDonald is completely right. Zionist Jews are carrying out group warfare. They frame all of this through their identity. This is IDENTITY politics.
And the more powerful the image, the harder it is to disassemble. Israel is able to be criticized when it reveals it’s UGLINESS for the world to see. And in that opening, people begin to criticize it. This is not ‘Jewishness’ in any absolute sense. But people make the knee-jerk connection between the ‘Jewish State’ and ‘Jewishness’. Many Jews in the mainstream Western intelligentsia are Zionist, so the PATHETIC tactics of Zionists to gain peoples sympathy and guilt trip them, while butchering Palestinians and stealing their land, is quite effective.
This is the dual identity of Zionism: bombard non-Jews w/ positive imagery of Jewishness (victimhood, ie. lots of holocaust movies, then simply business as usual positive portrayals of people who may be jewish) and play the victim (just think back to the juxtaposition of an Israeli from S’Dereot hugging a policeman in grief after a DUD ROCKET was in the street, versus a Palestinian mother who lost her 2 children) – MEANWHILE in reality, Israel is a regional superpower. Diplomatic immunity. Killing and stealing. Not just every now and then, when it goes on a massacre.
But every other fucking day. You read it all the time in the NGO papers. Some Palestinian was driving too fast, so he got shot in the face. Some kid wandered into a street, so he got shot in the forehead.
These people are fucking Nazis. And the sick part is that they work so goddamn hard to make everyone think their angels.
This is ten times worse than SA. White identity is MEANINGLESS. It does not function in the same way.
Jewish identity is both victim and avenger and is Establishment. I mean its perfect, the ‘white minority’.
” Zionist Jews are carrying out group warfare. They frame all of this through their identity. This is IDENTITY politics.”
So the Jewish peace movement is equivalent to Afrikaners saying they only want white-rule in half the country? Or that they only want apartheid in parts of South Africa? Gee, how enlightened!
Pro-apartheid forces cloaked as peace-makers would try to control the anti-apartheid movement.
Richard, this is you exactly. If you support Palestinian rights, why don’t you get behind actual Palestinian-led efforts to secure those basic rights? I’m talking about the Palestinian call for BDS. Palestinians certainly do not call for the coddling of Zionism as Jewish-rule ideology, let alone the colonization and segregation of the West Bank.
And we’d constantly be reminded it was the Brits who invented concentration camps. Talk about Perfidious Albion.
I forgot how Pavlovian the “South African” invocation can be.
Well you couldn’t give two shits about Palestinians, I suppose it isn’t a far cry for you to dismiss Africans as well.
I certainly care about the Palestinians, which is why in public I describe Palestinians’ needs and legal rights as important, for compassion, for the greater good, for the prospect of good relations with Israel’s neighbors, for the confirmation of the rule of law.
I also care about Israelis, which is why in this public, I describe Israeli’s needs and legal rights as imporant, for compassion, for the greater good, for the prospect of good relations between neighbors.
That I regard shelling of civilians as an act of war, is somehow condemned. That I question Norman Finkelstein or other politically correct interpretations of events in the region, is somehow condemned.
Phil used to question. He used to see, and then continue to question.
He used to be committed to peace.
During Vietnam for example, I don’t remember him dropping out, determining to permanently create a counter-culture. He went to Harvard.
Actually, Witty, what we’re condemning is that you regard the shelling of civilains by Hamas an act of war but you exonerate Israel for all of its crimes that take place before the shelling. What we’re condemning is your hypocrisy and apologism for attacks on civilians when they originate from Israelis.
I’ll post it again because it’s the most incisive dismissal of your B.S., Witty — It is ISRAELI actions — official military actions, in particular — that destroy the peace process. Unless you acknowledge and confront that, you will continue to spell yourself out as a racist hypocrite.
Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?
And like I said, you’re tripping over yourself to trivialize the suffering of black South Africans in your zeal to attack anyone in the anti-occupation movement. It’s disgusting.
The conflicts are quite different. The beliefs and goals of both sides just don’t match up. In particular, the South African blacks were by and large integrationist, while the bulk of the Arab Palestinian leadership is supremacist and expulsionary.
While the South African whites varied their point of view over time, they were basically racist in their outlook. The Israelis overwhelmingly don’t see race, or superiority, as an issue.
The white South Africans had reason to believe that if they turned over the state to the blacks, they’d be alright. The Israelis have no such belief, nor any reason for any such belief.
People love these sorts of analogies but they are all eventually misleading.
On the comparison of the Lobby, the facts go the other way. The civil rights struggle then going on in the US was likewise analogized at the time to the situation in South Africa. This meant the civil rights struggle acted as a proxy lobby for the blacks in South Africa. If there were no civil rights issue in the US, would the US pressure have forced the changes on South Africa the same way? Were the US performances of Miriam Makeba just a coincidence? The two movements supported each other; the black movement in the US functioned as an “ANC Lobby” in the US.
So how come black South African leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu support the Palestinians and characterize what they are going through as very much like their own suffering under apartheid, but worse?
Are they wrong? Are you going to tell us that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu don’t know what they are talking about? Really?
20-20 hindsight, AM. The fears of white SA were quite similar to the ones you ascribe to Israelis.
Don’t you mean the Israeli Leadership when you say “supremacist” and “expulsionary”? Mr. “Lieberman knows how to speak Arabic” Avigdor ring a bell? Mr. “In our Judea and Samaria, somehow, out of nowhere, a bunch of Arabs kinda popped out” Prime Minsiter makes you recall a few things at all?
Look at the basic facts on the ground – Palestinian homes are being squashed, and Palestinians are evicted from their homes the past 50 years and given directly to Jews, and you have the audacity to claim that the Palestnian Leadership is expulsionary? I have no love for Arafat or Abbas, but you are using the exact words to describe the Palestinian Leadership that should be applied to the current Israeli Leadership. Of course, the shittier Palestinian politics get, the more I’m sure the Israeli Government cheers for joy.
As for the rest of your comments – the situations aren’t exactly the same, and I see no one claiming that the two are the same. But the oppression and exploitation of a native population IS the same. There are many differences – but there are many similarities…
I mean to say, “exactly the same”. But I want to emphasize that point being they are not exactly the same, they are eerily similar. Too bad they aren’t similar enough to the point that supporting Palestinians isn’t seen as fighting apartheid in the mainstream.