Apartheid in the Holy Land
guardian.co.uk
"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. |
