“Israel and the United States have been built on the subjugation of other people.”

We understand three things as we watch and try to understand this insanity: one, Israel is and always has been an apartheid nation, complete with highways that only Israeli Jews can drive on, and Bantustans where the Palestinians are increasingly herded while the Israeli government steals more and more of their land and water, and cuts the people off from their farms, jobs, businesses and schools. Gaza and the West Bank are, for Palestinians, like Mississippi and the worst parts of the South were for oppressed African Americans for most of this country’s history. Two, Israel’s closest partner – the United States – has also been built on the subjugation of other people, especially people of color, and the two nations therefore share a common racial view of history and a common goal of maintaining the race-based power structures they have built. And three, both nations are determined to rule the oil-rich Middle East, no matter how many innocents they have to kill in order to achieve their goal.

In following their destructive and anti-democratic agenda, their words and deeds about their deepest beliefs and the nature of the nations they are, will almost always be in conflict, as in Lebanon, where Israel killed children and other innocents, but called their victims “terrorists.”

The United States tried for decades to maintain the fiction that freedom and slavery could co-exist, and the hypocrisy almost tore this nation apart. The Missouri Compromise, which was passed in 1820, agreed that Missouri could be admitted as a slave state but that slavery would be prohibited in any future states carved out of the huge Louisiana Purchase. Thomas Jefferson knew the compromise couldn’t last, saying that it was “like a fire bell in the night,” warning of the possible future destruction of the nation over the conflict between slavery and freedom.

Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence, with its fine words about all men being created equal, while an enslaved young Black man fanned him in the hot room. When Jefferson died, the first thing his executor listed in the newspaper in the estate of the ex-president and writer of the Declaration of Independence, was “about 70 likely and valuable negroes,” along with stocks, crops, etc. Two weeks later the executor auctioned off another “130 valuable negroes” owned by Jefferson, along with other valuables such as stock, crops, household and kitchen furniture, etc.

“To this day the U.S. still clings desperately to race-based inequality.”

The slave-owning Jefferson obviously didn’t believe his own words about equality, but he knew the compromise between slavery and freedom could never last and it didn’t. The Missouri Compromise ended in 1854, when pro-slavery forces repealed it in an attempt to expand slavery. The forces of slavery, like the forces of darkness everywhere, are insatiable and are never content unless they’re spreading their darkness (the word “Europe” comes from a Semitic word that means “darkness”). The Civil War followed within a few years of the end of the Missouri Compromise, almost bringing about the destruction of the nation. But to this day the country still clings desperately to race-based inequality.

Thus Israel and the United States are natural allies. Both have supported terrorism when it suited them, and labeled others “terrorists” when it suited them. The U.S. has stood by in silent (and sometimes not-so-silent) approval, while Israel has obliterated entire Palestinian villages, brutalized the population, engaged in collective punishment, murdered with impunity, built an Apartheid Wall on land mostly stolen from the Palestinians, and engaged in widespread murder and torture.

The former prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, has been complicit in many war crimes. In October, 1953, he led Israeli Army Unit 101 in a murderous attack on the Palestinian village of Kibya, killing civilians and destroying their homes

Sharon’s actions against innocent civilians were so outrageous that the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharrett, said he told a cabinet meeting that he “condemned the Kibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres regardless it seems, of whether their actions may lead to war.”

Sharon provided searchlights so his Lebanese Christian allies could kill hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in 1982, was involved in running guns and drugs in Central America in the 1980's, and targeted the officials and buildings of the Palestinian Authority as a way of destroying the Palestinian peoples’ ability and will to ever have a government of their own.

“Israel helped white-ruled South Africa evade United Nation sanctions and fight Black liberation movements on its borders.”

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, whose Stern Gang participated in the massacre of 250 civilians in the village of Deir Yassin in 1948, had once attempted to strike a deal with Hitler’s Nazi party. Under terms of the proposed deal, a Jewish state would have been established in Palestine on a “totalitarian” basis and be bound by treaty with Nazi Germany.

Israel, which is routinely praised by the U.S. media, helped white-ruled South Africa evade United Nation sanctions and fight Black liberation movements on its borders. When the South Africans attacked Mozambigue’s capital, Maputo, in 1983 (hitting a child-care center and several houses), they modeled their attack on the Israeli attack on Beirut the previous summer. Israel also aided the force that was formed by the CIA to fight Black liberation in Angola, shipping arms to them through Zaire, which was ruled by the brutal, U.S.-backed terrorist dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.

The Israelis also helped train South African forces in the most effective ways to subjugate Black South Africans, just as Israel had learned how to subjugate the Palestinians. Israel and the United States supplied arms and ammunition to South Africa, and Israel joined with South Africa in developing atomic weapons.

As a white South African Broadcasting Corporation editorial put it: Israel and South Africa were “the only two Western nations to have established themselves in a predominantly nonwhite part of the world.” And what that meant to the whites who set up their nations on land that was historically the homeland of other people, was the subjugation of Black people in South Africa and Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

As the Jewish philosopher and cultural Zionist, Martin Buber, wrote to Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1949: “We will have to face the reality that Israel is neither innocent, nor redemptive. And that in its creation and expansion, we as Jews have caused what we historically have suffered: a refugee population in Diaspora.”

David Ben Gurion acknowledged that what Martin Buber said was true, and wrote back to him: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel....we have taken their country....There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept us?”

Former South African President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Israel was like apartheid South Africa. That kind of truth-telling was bitterly resented by the powers-that-be in the United States, who were just as committed to continued White domination in Israel and Africa, as they were committed to maintaining the racial status quo in the United States.

It is eye-opening to realize that the forces in the Unites States that have spoken out the strongest in defense of Israel and white-ruled South Africa, are the same forces that have fought against racial equality in this country.

This can be seen most clearly in two cases: the police spying on the NAACP, the African National Congress, and other progressive organizations that was paid for by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, and the smearing of African Americans who fought to end apartheid and to support Black African liberation movements.

“Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Israel was like apartheid South Africa.”

Jonas Savimbi, the Black leader of UNITA (the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola), was a pawn of efforts by White South Africa, Israel and conservatives in the Unites States. His fight against Black liberation, often alongside South African soldiers and Israeli advisers, cost the lives of an estimated 600,000 Angola men, women and children. The hundreds of thousands of land mines his forces planted are still maiming and killing people, four years after Savimbi’s death in an ambush. His acts of terror were legendary, yet the United States whole-heartedly supported this terrorist. When Savimbi visited the United States in 1989, this murderer and torturer of Black people in support of White interests, was enthusiastically welcomed by U.S. officials, members of such rightwing organizations as the Heritage Foundation, and leaders of major Jewish organizations.

The Heritage Foundation’s foreign policy analyst and other conservatives had regularly visited Savimbi in his clandestine camps in Angola, and provided him with political and military advice. One of the conservatives who met with him at his camp in Jamba was Jack Abramoff, a young American Republican who is currently under indictment and whose knowledge of the wheelings and dealings of the Bush Administration could conceivably bring down that administration if he revealed all he knew.

Also present at the meeting with Savimbi in Jamba that night, according to South African newspaper reports, were Nicaraguan contras, members of the leaders of the Afghan mujahedin (this group could have contained an operative from Osama bin Ladin, though it is not known whether or not it did), Laotian guerillas, and people close to Oliver North. All of these groups had close ties to the CIA, and were committed to advancing U.S. foreign policy no matter how harsh a price the Angolans or anyone else had to pay.

The Ronald Reagan Administration’s ambassador to the UN, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, described Savimbi as “one of the authentic heroes of our time,” and Reagan himself incredibly and with total disregard for the hundreds of thousands of Black victims killed by Savimbi and his forces, likened Savimbi to Abraham Lincoln. These rightwing Americans were the same ones who called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and labeled the African National Congress a “terrorist” organization.

Randall Robinson, the director of TransAfrica, had led the successful1986 campaign for sanctions against apartheid South Africa. When Robinson came out in opposition to U.S. aid to Savimbi and called for U.S. recognition of the democratically-elected government of Angola, Sen. Orrin Hatch urged the attorney general of the U.S. to investigate Robinson and charge him with interfering with U.S. foreign policy. The attorney general refused.

But perhaps nothing better illustrated the common racial interests of U.S. conservatives, White South Africa and Israeli policies, than the Anti-Defamation League’s spy scandal of 1993. An employee of the ADL was found to have files on over 10,000 individuals and 600 organizations. The organizations ranged from the Arab American Antidiscrimination Committee and the ACLU to the NAACP and the African National Congress, labor unions and Central American solidarity organizations. The ADL had obtained the files by paying policemen in this country to spy on the groups and report back to the ADL. The files on anti-apartheid activists were shared with South African intelligence agents, and may have led to the death of Chris Hani in South Africa. Not long after his file was given to the South African agents, Hani (one of the most popular figures in the ANC), was shot to death outside his home in a mostly-White suburb of Johannesburg that he was trying to integrate.

“Nothing better illustrated the common racial interests of U.S. conservatives, White South Africa and Israeli policies, than the Anti-Defamation League’s spy scandal of 1993.”

The so-called “mainstream” media in the U.S. gave very little coverage to the ADL spy scandal, and the San Francisco district attorney eventually let the organization off with a fine. It would have been too “expensive and time-consuming” to the ADL and the San Francisco district attorney’s office to prosecute them, the district attorney announced with a straight face.

It is also interesting to note that many of the people who are the strongest supporters of Israel, and were supporters of Israel’s ties to apartheid South Africa, are also the strongest opponents of affirmative action for African Americans. The idea of “quotas” is something they say they find abhorrent, but they have had no trouble supporting two nations built on racial and religious quotas: apartheid South Africa in the past and Israel in the present.

In 2001 Nelson Mandela wrote a letter to New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, in response to Friedman’s attacks on Mandela.

“Apartheid is a crime against humanity,” Mandela wrote. “Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.....It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.”

“I’m not going to indulge you, the way your supporters do,” Mandela told Friedman. “If you want formal apartheid, we will not support you. If you want to support racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing, we will oppose you. When you figure out what you’re about, give me a call.”

It is very strange to some of us that Israel waited until Lebanon finally had a fledgling democracy and until foreign troops had been withdrawn from its soil – two things the Israelis had long claimed as goals – to attack and try to destroy the country. But the people who run Israel know, as the people who run the United States have always known, that apartheid and democracy cannot co-exist, even if they’re in different countries. Either democracy will spread to both, or apartheid and destruction will spread to both. And neither Israel nor the United States, in spite of what they say, want democracy to spread to the oil-rich Middle East (anymore than they wanted it to spread to oil-rich and diamond-rich Angola), or to their own countries.

“Neither Israel nor the United States, in spite of what they say, want democracy to spread to the oil-rich Middle East.”

And so we have the ultimately strange spectacle of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, House Negro Extraordinaire, traipsing around the world justifying the slaughter of innocents in the name of freedom, and defending terrorists who drop bombs on children.

“It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them...

The words above were written by Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony in 1637. Bradford was justifying the Pilgrims’ action in burning alive hundreds of Pequot men, women and children. Native Americans had helped the Pilgrims survive their first hard winters in the so-called New World, but now the Pilgrims wanted their land.

Condoleezza Rice has learned nothing from history. Or perhaps she has learned everything. Namely, that when innocent people get in the way of your greed, simply label them as terrorists or as something else that says they are not as fully human as you and yours. Then, like Governor Bradford, the German killers of the Herero people, Jonas Savimbi, the Europeans who raped and stole and murdered their way through Africa, the kidnappers and enslavers of Africans, those who killed Native Americans and stole their land, and people everywhere who put into practice the belief that might makes right, you can then strut across the world stage spouting words about freedom and democracy, while in your Heart of Darkness you urge those who share your lust for power to “Exterminate All the Brutes!”

Clinton L. Cox is a veteran journalist living in upstate New York. He can be reached at clintie@earthlink.net

RELATED ARTICLES BY THE Black Agenda Report Team Israeli Apartheid by Bruce Dixon
Israel's Terror by Margaret Kimberley

Other resources on Israel and Palestine include
Haaretz, the daily Israeli newspaper of record, which often tells truths about occupation, torture and the daily functioning of Israeli apartheid that US media don't, and
Electronic Intifada an extensive and highly recommended wite for ongoing news about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle against occupation. page