Anti-Apartheid Poet, Activist, Breyten Breytenbach warns against comparing Israel, Apartheid

[HamdenRice]

<I realize this is a bit out of date and therefore not fully within the ordinary rules, but because I was arguing for the comparison in the past, I thought out of fairness, it was important to bring this to the forum's attention. Breytenbach, an Afrikaner, is considered the country's greatest poet of Afrikaans, and was imprisoned in the 1970s under charges of treason for attempting to assist the armed struggle, an experience he wrote about in his famous book, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.>

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/26/an_hour_with_the_renowned_south

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking on a day when there are funerals for two Palestinian teenagers; where Gaza is under siege; where the head of the UN General Assembly, the Nicaraguan Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, has called for sanctions against Israel for the siege of Gaza, and where he compared South Africa, apartheid South Africa— ... —and what it’s doing in the Occupied Territories. You’ve warned against, at least in the past, that kind of comparison. Why?

...

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH: For the simple reason that I think that we owe it to ourselves to see things as they are. If we’re going to be effective in our means of opposing injustice—and what is happening in the Occupied Territories is a massive injustice—I think this is probably, I would imagine, probably the most important, although it’s not the largest, maybe not the most consequential one in terms of loss of human life, and maybe not even in terms of the danger of regional conflagration, but this is the essential problem that the world has to face, the Palestinian-Israeli problem, the one of the Occupied Territories, the one of state terrorism, you know, the one of the extinction of the Palestinian people, because this is where it’s heading. This is literally a disappearance of a people. And I do think that this is the core issue that informs nearly everything else that happens in the Middle East.

I think if you can find some kind of solution there, if you can find a way out there, if you had the moral imagination—and, by the way, I would plead for a one-state solution and not for a two-state solution. I do think that we’ve seen the means, the moral means of the parties concerned, as has happened elsewhere in the world, as has happened in South Africa, to be able to live together, even if it’s a very complicated thing and even if you’re going to have to gerrymander all kinds of structures to be able to do so, federal, whatever the case may be. But you have to do that. You cannot have this attrition going on. You cannot have this ongoing warfare with its strain of racism and cruelty and indifference and alienation, etc., including the alienation brought about to the young Israeli people who are involved in that.

I was there. I happened to go there. I was lucky to spend a few days there. And people asked me the question, “Does this remind you of apartheid?” And, of course, it is. The premises are very much the same. You have essentially economic exploitation. Now, this is about stealing. This is about stealing land. This is about stealing means. This is about exploiting people. That’s the backdrop to it. And then racism. These are the two essential ingredients that we had in South Africa, as well. And then, to think that you can solve it by segregation and by having, you know, second-class citizens—in other words, some people have less rights than the other people have—these are the ingredients of what apartheid was. So, in that sense, yes, it is.

But I would not—you know, I think it’s a shortcut that blunts our potential instruments at understanding the specificity of what’s happening, just to call it apartheid, in the same way as I always objected to people saying apartheid was a form of Nazism. Of course, it is in many ways, but, you know, it is trying to piggyback on an easy concept instead of doing the hard work of trying to dig into it and understand and make it clear what are the historical origins of this and in which way is it like that system that you compare it to and in which way is it different from it.

I found that what I saw in the Occupied Territories, in some ways, worse than apartheid. There was an intimacy to the cruelty. There was a proximity, maybe because the territory is so much smaller. There was a kind of a wantonness in the destruction, you know? I saw the Sakakini Cultural Center, for instance, in Ramallah after it had been sacked by Israeli occupation forces, something which I don’t think we saw quite in the same way in South Africa.

[Larkspur]

1. A better comparison would be to what the US Government in the 19th century did to

the Indigenous people of America -- slaughter many and stuff the remainder into reservations. Reservations were the forerunner of ghettos. The US Government also tried to purge the remaining Indigenous people of their language and culture. It was apartheid plus extermination policies combined.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

4. That's an apt comparison.

As is our depictions of it up until recently in the media. Think of your classic westerns with attacks from the "indians" on settler outposts. More or less, we've been getting the "Little House on the Prairie" version of the story and not the Native American side of it for many, many years.

[leveymg]

2. Very misleading title. Should be, "Breytenbach: Occupied Territories Worse than Apartheid"

:eyes:

[HamdenRice]

3. I think he's making a point about conceptual clarity, which is fair enough

but you are correct, he does conclude that conditions for Palestinians is worse than apartheid -- an assessment I agree with.