[antiwar-van] important artical

[givara gaza]

The Analogy to Apartheid

Ian Urbina
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer223/223_urbina.html

(Ian Urbina is associate editor at the Middle East
Research and Information Project. His writing has
appeared in the Nation, the International Herald
Tribune and elsewhere.)


Students for Justice in Palestine protest with mouths
taped shut after UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl
briefly banned the group in April 2002. (Rob
Katzer/The Daily Californian) 


It was not a novel comparison, but it caused quite a
stir. In June 2001, Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky,
two Jewish heroes of South Africa's struggle for
liberation from state-driven racism, published a
letter in the Pretoria newspaper comparing Israel's
occupation of Palestinian lands to South African
apartheid. The letter, signed by several hundred other
prominent Jewish leaders and titled "Not in My Name,"
called for an immediate end to the occupation and
sparked a frenzy in the South African press in the
months that followed. Most recently, Nobel laureate
Bishop Desmond Tutu drew the apartheid parallels in
his editorial calling for Israel's full withdrawal.[1]
The Kasrils-Ozinsky petition continues to inspire both
support and opposition in South Africa.

The Israeli left has been discussing this comparison
since at least the late 1980s, when Israeli
anthropologist Uri Davis published his famous work,
Israel: An Apartheid State. At the September 2001 UN
conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, calls to
compare occupation with apartheid were drowned out by
the more incendiary claim that "Zionism is racism,"
and therefore received little substantive or
even-handed coverage in the press. But suddenly, the
analogy is getting wider circulation, as efforts to
persuade universities and other institutions to divest
from Israel gather steam internationally and in the
US.

Emerging Apartheid

Apartheid South Africa was based on an "us here, them
there" formula of territorial segregation in which the
white-ruled areas consisted of 87 percent of the
country, including the big cities and most of the
arable land. Nominally independent bantustans, forming
a horseshoe-shaped archipelago along the nation's
outskirts, made up the remaining 13 percent of the
land. There is striking similarity to
Israel-Palestine, where the state of Israel covers 78
percent of the original British mandate territory,
while Palestine, a nation-in-waiting, makes up the
remaining 22 percent. In early September 2000, Israeli
activists organized a conference in Neve Shalom to
announce a Campaign Against an Emerging Apartheid,
which some on the radical left feel is an apt
description of Israel's "matrix of control" --
composed of settlements, bypass roads, security zones
and checkpoints -- in Palestine.

Especially after Operation Defensive Shield, when
Palestinians are required to get permits from the
Israelis to travel from one tank-encircled West Bank
enclave to another, life for an average citizen in the
Occupied Territories resembles that of the
apartheid-era townships in more ways than one. Most
notably, after 1967 Palestinian workers became as
dependent on work inside Israel as township residents
were on jobs in the white-dominated cities and equally
vulnerable -- through closures and internal sieges --
to collective punishment. Meanwhile, the growing
Israeli refusenik movement evokes the small
anti-conscription drive that took shape in South
Africa in the late 1980s. Decorated officers refusing
to perform military service in the Occupied
Territories are a political embarrassment to the
Israel Defense Forces. Those not in prison have taken
their message on the road, arguing at US synagogues
and campuses that the occupation is both wrong and a
formula for perpetual insecurity. Just as in
contemporary Israel, mandatory military service in
apartheid South Africa was integral to the national
fabric, and a refusal to serve was rare and highly
stigmatized. The government attempted to coopt the
young officers by offering alternative forms of
service, but failed. The actions helped convince
Pretoria that its apartheid policies were simply
untenable.

The South African analogy also conjures up the
international activist movement which emerged in the
late 1970s and 1980s to dismantle apartheid. This
grassroots effort consisted of university and
government divestment efforts, consumer boycotts, arms
embargoes and eventual economic sanctions of the
apartheid regime. Students confronted their university
administrators, union members pressured their
stockholders, faith-based groups informed their
parishioners and ultimately a populist force
culminated in radical change. 

Princeton University’s investments in companies that
have significant operations in Israel.

- Name of Company Amount of Princeton's Investment
Company's Relationship with Israel 
American International Group $6.9 million
Joint venture with Aurec to form insurance company in
Israel 
Boston Scientific $6 million
Purchased 25% of Medinol 
Dow Chemical $3 million
Invested $750,000 in Asheklon Technological
Industries, a technology incubator 
General Electric $8.5 million
Joint venture to provide electronic trade services
with an investment of $2.5 million 
Hewlett Packard $9.5 million
Owns Computation & Measurement, Ltd., a $19 million
Israeli company 
IBM $8.5 million
Owns Ubique, Softel, and IBM Israel, Ltd. 
Intel $9 million
$1.6 billion facility in Kiryat Gat 
International Paper Inc. $2.5 million
Owns 11% of Scitex, Ltd. 
Johnson & Johnson $9.8 million
Took over Biosense for $400 million 
Lehmann Brothers $6 million
Owns 4% of Bank Leumi, 8% of Nice Systems, 4.5% of
Leader Investments 
Lucent Technologies $5.5 million
Purchased Lannet for $117 million 
MacDermid, Inc. $2.3 million
Owns 100% of MacDermid Israel, Ltd. 
McDonalds Corp. $5.4 million
McDonalds Israel 
Merck $8.4 million
Opened subsidiary in Israel 6/97 
Motorola $5 million
Owns Motorola Israel, Ltd., Motorola-Tadiran Cellular 
Texas Instruments $8 million
Owns $50 million Butterfly and $260 million Libit 
TOTAL $104.3 million



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