Instead of shouting "apartheid": go learn what segregation looked like in South Africa (Maariv, 2019)

Submitted by Robert (United States), Nov 14, 2022 at 19:47

Nadav Haetzni, 'Instead of shouting "apartheid": go learn what segregation looked like in South Africa,' Maariv, 04/10/2019

[https://www.maariv.co.il/amp/journalists/Article-722356]

After a century of attempts it can be declared that the democratic system is not built to deal with murderous regimes. Take with you Trevor Noah's book that describes the reality in which he grew up.

Not everything is black: So what does Israeli apartheid look like, the one that good souls accuse us of? Take Trevor Noah's new book "Outside the Law - Childhood in South Africa", which describes the apartheid in which he grew up, and you will learn.

I have always chuckled every time I entered Jerusalem restaurants and saw our local version of apartheid. How Jewish-Israeli waiters serve Muslim-Arab couples and families, who feel at home. Just for comparison, Trevor Noah's father, a white Swiss, received a special license to operate a restaurant for whites and blacks together to serve foreign nationals - a restaurant that was prohibited under apartheid laws. But the license was revoked when the place became too successful. Blacks were not allowed to go near white restaurants.

From many self-inflicted and external accusations and beatings, from Meir Golan to Roger Waters, maybe someone got confused and began to believe the slanders against us. That's also why it's fascinating to take the book with you, because on the other hand it reflects us. Noah, the son of a black woman and a white man, was indeed 6 years old when apartheid was abolished, but his experiences before and after, as well as the family stories, will provide you with a standard for comparison. He himself was clearly illegal, a villager of interracial relationships. So much so that he could not live with his father, and certainly not call him "father" in public.

Noah is a witty South African comedian, presenter and producer, so his book is fascinating, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. But the reality of blacks in the era of racial segregation was certainly not entertaining. The codex of segregation laws built a sophisticated architecture of social conditioning, one that imposed limitations on the learning and education of blacks from childhood so that they could not even dream of a horizon beyond menial manual labor in the service of whites. Not to mention the physical racial segregation, and of course - the cruelty, exploitation and oppression.

Go with the book and look for something in it that reminds you of the Israeli reality. You will find that every nook and cranny of our being means something different. Despite the hostility and murderousness of the Palestinian society towards us, we do not have a natural policy of discrimination. There is no legislation and not even such a social construction. It is not only voting rights and personal equality before the law, also the social spirit that determines - in law, academia, the press and cinema - illustrates how much the Israeli Arab is not discriminated against or excluded. Even the chaos and violence in Arab society in Israel is indirectly a product of fear of discrimination. The Israeli government is afraid to impose strict and mandatory enforcement on the Arab settlements, so that they do not accuse it of apartheid.

This insight is also true in Yosh, despite the hostile entity we have established there and despite the systematic attempts to eliminate us. It is true that the Jewish settlements are surrounded by fences and well guarded, it is true that there are barriers, but absolutely not because of racial segregation. Simply to protect ourselves from the national murder of our neighbors, the one that hurt us in the first place Zionism to this day.

Precisely in these circumstances, the accusation of apartheid, not to mention racism, is particularly vicious. In South Africa, a system was developed that was designed to exploit the blacks and leave them inferior and limited, even though they did not threaten white-Afrikaner nationalism. And with us, almost no one dreams of introducing the solution that was introduced all over the globe when one ethnic group tried to violently eliminate another ethnic group or people. The weak side always paid the full price - expelled or annihilated.

Even though Arab nationalism has set its flag on eliminating us, we beat ourselves up for the most natural feelings of reluctance from those who seek our souls. And whoever does not develop negative feelings towards a society that encourages the murderers of Jewish girls, one that pays honorariums to throat slitters of Jews, is mentally unhealthy. The same goes for those who call our reality apartheid, racism, and certainly those who find in us alarming signs of acceptance of the processes that took place in Nazi Germany.

Western pretensions have collapsed

More than two weeks have passed since Iran set fire to Saudi Arabia's oil wells, and to this day the outspoken American president has not dared to explicitly accuse Tehran of being responsible for the attack. Because direct accusations have binding conclusions that he does not intend to carry out.

Not to mention the other heads of the international community, especially the Alliance of the Righteous of Europe, which continues to flatter the murderous entity with every breath, even though it has crossed the most dramatic red lines in international relations.

At the same time, the ruler of North Korea - the man and the bomb - is still alive and well, free to agitate his people and terrorize his neighbors as in the old days. Now he already knows that even the impulsive American president does not really endanger him.

And how is the chief cook Bashar al-Assad? Well thank you. He stopped to look every five minutes at his palace escape briefcase, which he had kept close to his chest for years. Despite the mass atrocities, no one in the West dares to express even a vague criticism towards him.

At the same time, somewhere in Afghanistan, the elders of the Taliban are counting the minutes. Those who at the time were deported to the ravines of the mountains under the pretense of liberating the Afghan people from the Islamist madness and liberating the West from the nest of global terror that grew among them - they also understand that the West blinks first, and soon they return to their favorite hobbies of stoning and murder without interruption.

Thus, nothing remains of the pretensions of the United States and the West to rule moral norms and democracy in the wild regions of the earth. Even the thought that the spread of particularly aggressive regimes, such as Iran's, can be curbed, runs into the inherent weakness of democratic regimes.

The honest and innocent pretense of George Bush Jr. to overthrow the unjust regime of Saddam Hussein was replaced by the distorted and double standards of Barack Obama and the gang of hypocrites of Western Europe, who led the Middle East to a bloodbath and waves of refugees. These were replaced by the aggression of Donald Trump's tweets, which initially marked a refreshing change in the rules of the game, but recently turned out to be a toothless tiger, except for economic sanctions.

Beyond the traditional European morals of laziness, the understanding is particularly sharpened to the extent that the democratic system is not built to deal with murderous and unrestrained societies and regimes. Trump has elections and critical lawmakers, Boris Johnson has Brexit, each of their peers has economic interests and voters who don't like sending soldiers to die for noble causes.

And that's why unbridled regimes that oppress their citizens to the ground, that whistle for their well-being and the good life, will always win over the West. will always achieve their goals in the long run.

After more than a century of attempts to build international mechanisms that would tame the savages, it can be declared that everything has failed. The international conventions and the organization of the League of Nations of 1918 became a farce under the boots of Hitler and Mussolini, and the organizations established after 1945, the United Nations, UNESCO and the like became a stage and a voice amplifier for the darkest dictators.

Paradoxical as it may sound, the democratic world is unable to deal with real threats to world peace, except in cases of extreme catastrophe such as the eve of World War II. As citizens of the world the conclusion is depressing. But the citizens of the State of Israel have only one lesson: never to trust any external factor, and always maintain as much independent power as possible. All so that no Ayatollah dares to bomb our gas fields, and if he dares - he will kidnap back, so that he learns to distance himself from us.

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