About that word apartheid; a parallel time line


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About That Word Apartheid
by: Mahoney, John; Adas, Jane; Norberg, Robert
April - May 2007
The Link - Volume 40, Issue 2


June 1917: London. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, future first president of
Israel, and Gen. Jan Christian Smuts, future prime minister of South
Africa, meet to exploit British imperial interests for their own
purposes. Weizmann argues that a Palestine opened for Jewish
settlement will help England safeguard its Middle East interests.
Smuts sees the wisdom of supporting the Zionist enterprise, as Jews in
South Africa, by the end of World War I, constitute per capita the
wealthiest Jewish community in the world. Later, he will tell the
Anglo American Committee of Inquiry that he was "one of those who in
1917 took an active part in the planning of the Balfour Declaration."
Two years following his death in 1950, Israel will dedicate the Smuts
Forest in the Judean Hills, overlooking the Weizmann Forest.

May 1948: Prime Minister Jan Smuts extends de facto recognition to the
newly established state of Israel. Days later, Smuts's party loses to
the apartheid Nationalist party, many of whose members had backed
Adolph Hitler.

1949: Daniel F. Malan, the new South African prime minister, who in
1938 had led the opposition to Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany to
South Africa, extends de jure recognition to the Jewish state.

July 5, 1950: West Jerusalem. Israel enacts the Law of Return by which
Jews anywhere in the world, that is, by virtue of being born of a
Jewish mother or being a convert, have a "right" to immigrate to
Israel on the grounds that they are returning to their own state, even
if they have never been there before.

1951: Pretoria. Prime Minister Daniel Malan introduces the Bantu
Authorities Act, which sets aside 13% of South Africa's poorest land
to establish "homelands" for the different black ethnic groups. The
remaining 87% is reserved for the white population. The idea is to co-
opt local black tribal leaders to run the Bantustans, thereby creating
a ruling black elite with personal and financial interests in
maintaining the separateness.

July 14, 1952: By putting into effect the Citizenship/Jewish
Nationality Law, Israel becomes the only state in the world to grant a
particular national-religious group-the Jews-the right to settle in it
and gain automatic citizenship.

1953: West Jerusalem. South Africa's Prime Minister Daniel Malan
becomes the first foreign head of government to visit Israel. He
returns home with the message that Israel can be a source of
inspiration for white South Africans.

1955: Military cooperation begins with Israel's delivery of Uzi
submachine guns to South Africa. By 1971, South Africa will be
manufacturing the Uzi under a license arranged with Israel through
Belgium.

1958: South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of the virulent anti-
Semitic newspaper Die Transvaler, becomes prime minister. During his
tenure, Nelson Mandela is tried for treason, the African National
Congress banned, the Sharpeville massacre perpetrated, and the "grand
apartheid" plan introduced.

1959: Pretoria. The Self-Government Act is passed granting the
homelands self-governing, quasi-independent status. Ten "homelands"
will eventually be created, each comprising broken tracts of eroded
land incapable of supporting their large designated populations. Only
two will be totally coterminous, the others will be scattered blocks,
some widely dispersed.

November 6, 1962: New York. When Israel supports a U.N. General
Assembly resolution condemning South Africa's policy of apartheid,
South African prime minister Verwoerd declares that Jews "took Israel
from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years.
In that I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid
state." Despite its U.N. vote, Israel remains one of South Africa's
chief trading partners. Reflecting on this contradiction, the former
Israeli ambassador to Pretoria Alon Liel will later acknowledge, "At
the U.N. we kept saying we are against apartheid ... but our security
establishment kept cooperating."

1963: Israel sells Centurion tanks to South Africa, while South
Africa, which has the fourth largest uranium reserves in the world,
ships ten tons of the material to Israel for use in its Dimona nuclear
reactor. On August 7, the U.N. Security Council imposes its first arms
embargo on South Africa and calls on all states to comply. Later,
Israel provides South Africa with technological training, anti-tank
rounds, and natural uranium rods. . In August, the U.N. Security
Council imposes its first embargo on arms to South Africa and calls on
all states to comply. Later, Israel will provide South Africa with
technological training, anti-tank rounds, and natural uranium rods.

September 1966: Cape Town. Following Prime Minister Verwoerd's
assassination, the Senior Rabbi of the Progressive Jewish
Congregation, Rabbi Arthur Super, eulogizes him as a man who, like
Moses of old, led his people to the Promised Land after 60 years of
wandering. Chief Rabbi Professor Abrahams calls Verwoerd "the first
man to give apartheid a moral ground."

June 1967: Pretoria. When Israel launches the Six Day War, the South
African government releases over $28 million to Israel from Zionist
groups and permits South African volunteers to work and fight in
Israel. Israel occupies the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, and the Sinai Peninsula. The first Jewish
settlements begin.

August 1, 1967: Israel enacts the Agricultural Settlement Law, which
bans Israeli citizens of non-Jewish nationality, e.g., Palestinian
Arabs, from working on Jewish National Fund lands, i.e., on well over
80% of the land in Israel. Knesset member Uri Avnery states: "This law
is going to expel Arab cultivators from the land that was formerly
theirs and was handed over to the Jews."

1968: Israel and South Africa refuse to sign the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and bar inspection of their nuclear plants by
the International Atomic Energy Commission. In June, Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir rejects U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers'
Peace Plan that would require Israel to withdraw from the occupied
territories, and calls upon Jews everywhere to denounce it.

April 4, 1969: Haifa. Reflecting on Israel's 20th anniversary, General
Moshe Dayan is quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz telling
students at Israel's Technion Institute that "Jewish villages were
built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of
these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography
books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab
villages are not there either... There is not one single place built in
this country that did not have a former Arab population."

March 26, 1970: Pretoria. South Africa passes the Homelands
Citizenship Act that defines blacks living throughout South Africa as
legal citizens of the homelands, even if they have never stepped foot
in their "homeland," thereby stripping them of their South African
citizenship and whatever civil and political rights they had.

April 28, 1971: C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times,
quotes South African Prime Minister John Vorster as saying that Israel
is faced with an apartheid problem, namely how to handle its Arab
inhabitants. Sulzberger writes: "Both South Africa and Israel are in a
sense intruder states. They were built by pioneers originating abroad
and settling in partially inhabited areas... For diplomatic reasons,
neither overstresses their bond in public."

April 1976: Prime Minister Vorster, who had been interned during World
War II for being a Nazi sympathizer and commander of the fascist
Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler, visits Israel and concludes a
comprehensive bilateral agreement whereby the two nations pledge
themselves to each other's survival and freedom from foreign
interference. Within the space of a year, South Africa will become
Israel's single largest customer for weaponry.

October 26, 1976: South Africa. Transkei becomes the first of the
"homelands" to be granted "independence." Its assembly controls many
internal matters, such as law enforcement, health and education, but
all of its decisions are subject to the control of the South African
government. Bophuthatswana will be granted "independence" the
following year, then Venda in 1975, and Ciskei in 1981. Not one of the
"states" will be recognized by any foreign government.

November 1977: The U. N. Security Council imposes a Mandatory Arms
Embargo on South Africa. Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan says
Israel will simply ignore the resolution. South Africa trades 50
metric tons of yellowcake uranium for 30 grams of Israeli tritium, a
radioactive isotope used as a component in triggering thermonuclear
reactions. Three major Israeli electronics companies, Tadiran, Elbit,
and Israeli Aircraft Industries, help South Africa design and build
its own electronics manufacturing capability, and sell it a variety of
electronic and infra-red equipment for sealing its borders to prevent
passage in and out of insurgents.

February 7, 1978: Pretoria. South Africa Minister of Plural Relations
and Development Connie Mulder tells the House Assembly: "If our policy
is taken to its logical conclusion as far as the black people are
concerned, there will be not one black man with South African
citizenship." By the early 1980s, some 3.5 million blacks (or 55% of
the total black population) will be expelled from their homes and
resettled in the bantustans.

September 13, 1978: Washington, D.C. The Camp David Accords are signed
by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The Accords reaffirm
U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which prohibit acquisition of land by
force, call for Israel's withdrawal of military and civilian forces
from the West Bank and Gaza, and prescribe "full autonomy" for the
inhabitants of the territories. Begin orally promises Carter to freeze
all settlement activity during the subsequent peace talks. Once back
in Israel, however, the Israeli prime minister continues to
confiscate, settle, and fortify the occupied territories.

May 14, 1979: Tel Aviv Radio announces that South Africa has become
the first government to establish a tourist office in Israel. El Al
and South African Airways, the two national airways, already have
signed reciprocal agreements. By the end of 1981 the Israeli press
will report a rise of 50 percent in Israeli tourism to the apartheid
state.

September 14, 1979: Johannesburg. The Financial Mail, in an article
entitled "Policies of Apartheid of the Government of South Africa,"
reports that when arms and diamonds are taken into account, "Israel is
already one of South Africa's biggest trading partners." Israel
supplies South Africa with the Jericho missile, capable of carrying a
nuclear warhead, and a joint naval project is developed for nuclear
submarines, to be built in South Africa with assistance from Israeli
engineers and designers. Israel also provides South Africa with Dabur
patrol boats, Reshef missile boats, Gabriel ship-to-ship missiles,
state-of-the-art night vision helicopter equipment, and training in
Israel for South African navy personnel. Israeli professor Benjamin
Beit-Hallachmi will later conclude that for decades Israel played a
"crucial role in the survival of the apartheid regime, breaking the
international arms boycott to become South Africa's main foreign arms
supplier."

September 22, 1979: Aboard a ship in the South Atlantic. Israel and
South Africa test a nuclear device. Details of the test and the
nuclear cooperation between the two countries are closely guarded
secrets.

March 20, 1980: The Los Angeles Times, citing an Israeli state radio
announcement, reports that Israeli defense minister Ezer Weizman has
gone on a "routine secret mission" to South Africa to discuss joint
production of the Lavi aircraft. .

1980: South Africa achieves nuclear status with the firing of a weapon
from the 155mm howitzer that Israel helps South Africa obtain from the
U.S.

February 10, 1981: Israel. The newspaper Ha'aretz reports that Israeli
defense minister Ariel Sharon has just spent ten days with South
African troops along the Angolan border in Namibia. Uri Dan, a close
associate of Sharon, who accompanies him on the trip, quotes a senior
South African officer, who tells him: "Don't underestimate the
influence the example of the Israeli army as a fighting army has on
us." Four hundred U.S-made 113AI armed personnel carriers and U.S.-
made 106mm recoilless rifles are sent to South Africa via Israel.

March 4, 1983: Israeli radio reports that "close ties will be
established between Israel and Ciskei, one of the puppet states set up
in South Africa for the blacks." The radio also quotes South African
reports that Israel will supply weapons to Ciskei.

October, 1984: The Israeli West Bank settlement of Ariel is twinned
with Ciskei's "capital" Bisho. Ciskei's Israeli representative Yosef
Schneider observes: "It is symbolic that no country in the world
(except South Africa) recognizes Ciskei, just as there is no country
in the world that recognizes the Jewish settlements in Judea and
Samaria."

December 13, 1984: New York. The U.N. General Assembly passes
resolution 39/72C, entitled "Relations between Israel and South
Africa," which declares: "... that the increasing collaboration by
Israel with the racist regime of South Africa, especially in the
military and nuclear fields, in defiance of resolutions of the General
Assembly and the Security Council, is a serious hindrance to
international action for the eradication of apartheid ... and
constitutes a threat to international peace and security."

February 23, 1985: Israeli journalist Yossi Melman reports in Jane's
Defense Weekly that a South African delegation has concluded a visit
to Israel by secretly signing contracts with Tel Aviv worth $5-million
for cooperation in joint ventures in high science technology. The
agreement is negotiated by the Israeli ministries of finance and trade
and industry and approved by the Israeli cabinet.

March 1985: Denis Goldberg, a Jewish South African sentenced in 1964
to life in prison for "conspiring to overthrow the apartheid regime,"
is released through the intercession of his daughter, an Israeli, and
top Israeli officials, including Israel's president. Arriving in
Israel, Goldberg says that he sees "many similarities in the
oppression of blacks in South Africa and of Palestinians," and he
calls for a total economic boycott of South Africa, singling out
Israel as a major ally of the apartheid regime. Pledging never to stay
in a country that is a major supporter of apartheid, Goldberg moves to
London.

September 1985: New York. Israel's foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir
announces his country will not institute sanctions against South
Africa, and will retain "normal" relations with Pretoria. Two years
later, as prime minister, he will say: "We have no reason to highlight
our relations with South Africa, but we have no wish to join sanctions
either, the like of which have often been employed against Israel."

September 13, 1985: Rep. George Crockett (D-MI), after visiting the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, compares the living conditions there with
those of South African blacks and concludes that the West Bank is an
instance of apartheid that no one in the U.S. is talking about.

November 5, 1985: Israel. A South African purchasing mission visits
Israel to procure a "sophisticated Israeli-made electronic border
fence." According to Knesset member Mattiyahu Peled, Israeli Defense
Forces soldiers show the delegation how the electronic fence works in
the Jordan Valley.

December 13, 1985: The Committee for International Trade Union Rights
announces that 12 major U.S. corporations have joined a boycott of
South African goods: Safeway Stores, Mervyn's, Montgomery Ward, F.W.
Woolworth, Carter Hawley Hale, Thrifty Drug, Nordstrom, Sprouse Reitz,
Macy's California, Sears Roebuck, J.C. Penney and K Mart.

1986: South Africa unveils its jet fighter, the Cheetah, which is
virtually identical to the Israeli Kfir-TC2 jet. The following year
the Jerusalem Post reports that South Africa was recruiting Israeli
engineers who worked on the Lavi aircraft. The United States voices
concern because it has heavily subsidized the Lavi project and worries
that the technology is being transferred to South Africa.

September 1987: Washington D.C. The Rev. Allan Boesak, president of
the World Alliance of Churches and a leader of the struggle in South
Africa, tells a Palestinian human rights group: "What is it that makes
Israel take into its bosom a government that in spirit, philosophy,
and actions reminds us more of Hitler than any other government today?
There is something wrong here... We must remember because, you see, your
struggle and our struggle is not only against apartheid either here or
there. It is not only against injustice, exploitation; it is not only
against the dehumanization of our peoples; it is also a struggle
against forgetfulness... We must remember that this land, yours and
ours, belongs to all of us and not simply to a small elitist clique
who now has claimed the land simply because they have more guns, more
deadly weapons, and more friends in high places."

March 16, 1988: Washington, D.C. The Congressional Black Caucus raises
the Lavi issue with Israel's Prime Minister Shamir, calling it an
"unconscionable" use of U.S. aid. Rep. George Crockett also questions
the prime minister on "his government's brutal response to the
Palestinian uprising," and asks when "the curfews, the closed military
zones, the beatings, the house raids, the gunshots, the rubber
bullets, the tear-gassing and mass deportations would end." The Black
Caucus then tells Shamir: "Recalling the inhumanities of slavery in
this country, having suffered the indignities of racial
discrimination, Black Americans recognize and identify with those who
are oppressed throughout the world. We, thus, feel a growing kinship
with the Palestinians." The Caucus also complains that all of the
federal programs geared toward helping low-income Americans received
only $491 per capita for fiscal year 1987, while aid to Israel in 1987
was $686 per capita.

September 13, 1993: Washington, D.C. Following secret negotiations in
Oslo, Norway, Israel and the P.L.O. sign the "Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self Government" (DOP). It will be followed by
the 1995 Oslo II Agreement which will divide the Palestinian
territories, excluding East Jerusalem, into three zones: Area A,
comprising disconnected districts, will include 17.2% of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip and will be under the security and civil control of the
Palestinian Authority (PA); Area B, 23.8%, will be under Israeli
security control, with the PA responsible for some social and civil
services; Area C, approximately 59%, will remain under full Israeli
occupation. In time, Area C, on the West Bank, will be subdivided into
smaller population reserves by a Jewish-only road bypass system and
four major Jewish-only settlement blocs. Oslo will also
institutionalize a permit and closure system whereby Palestinians will
face conditions similar to those faced by blacks under the pass laws.

May 10, 1994: South Africa. Watching Nelson Mandela take the oath of
office as president of the new, desegregated South Africa, F. W. de
Klerk, the out-going president of the apartheid regime, reflects on
his Afrikaner ancestors: "The dream they had dreamt of being free and
separate people, with their own right to national self-determination
in their own national state in southern Africa was the ideal to which
I myself had clung until I finally concluded, after a long process of
deep introspection, that, if pursued, it would bring disaster to all
the peoples of our country, including my own."

July 2000: Maryland. President Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David II
Peace Summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian
Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Clinton-not Barak-offers Arafat the
withdrawal of some 40,000 Jewish settlers, leaving more than 180,000
in 209 settlements, all of which are interconnected by roads that
cover approximately 10% of the occupied land. Effectively, this
divides the West Bank into at least two non-contiguous areas and
multiple fragments. Palestinians would have no control over the
borders around them, the air space above them, or the water reserves
under them. Barak calls it a generous offer. Arafat refuses to sign.

August 31, 2001: Durban, South Africa. Up to 50,000 South Africans
march in support of the Palestinian people. In their "Declaration by
South Africans on Apartheid and the Struggle for Palestine" they
proclaim: "We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with
a colonial mentality, see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of
colonialism in the 21st century. Only in Israel do we hear of
'settlements' and 'settlers.' Only in Israel do soldiers and armed
civilian groups take over hilltops, demolish homes, uproot trees and
destroy crops, shell schools, churches and mosques, plunder water
reserves, and block access to an indigenous population's freedom of
movement and right to earn a living. These human rights violations
were unacceptable in apartheid South Africa and are an affront to us
in apartheid Israel. "

October 23, 2001: Ronnie Kasrils, a Jew and a minister in the South
African government, co-authors a petition "Not in My Name," signed by
some 200 members of South Africa's Jewish community, reads: "It
becomes difficult, from a South African perspective, not to draw
parallels with the oppression expressed by Palestinians under the hand
of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under
apartheid rule." Three years later, Kasrils will go to the Occupied
Territories and conclude: "This is much worse than apartheid. Israeli
measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never
had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted
month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had
armored vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not
on this scale."

February 2002: An out-of-court settlement is reached with the Anti-
Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, which is accused of spying on
U.S. citizens in order to neutralize critics of Israel's military and
economic ties to South Africa at the height of its apartheid. For the
plaintiffs, former U.S. Rep. Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey declares: "With
this settlement, it can be confirmed that the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith sold and gave its illegally collected information ...
to foreign intelligence services-the Israeli Mossad, and the South
African intelligence services, during the period of the apartheid
government."

April 29, 2002: Boston, MA. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says
he is "very deeply distressed" by what he observed in his recent visit
to the Holy Land, adding, "It reminded me so much of what happened in
South Africa." The Nobel peace laureate said he saw "the humiliation
of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us
when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
Referring to Americans, he adds, "People are scared in this country to
say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful-very powerful.
Well, so what? The apartheid government was very powerful, but today
it no longer exists."

May 2002: Israel. A major study of Israeli settlement practices by the
Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem concludes: "Israel has
created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on
discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area
and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime
is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of
distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in
South Africa."

May 16, 2003: Former prime minister F. W. deKlerk says that the U.S.-
sponsored Roadmap, which is supposed to lead to a Palestinian state,
looks exactly like South Africa's "grand apartheid" that prime
minister Hendrik Verwoerd set in motion in the mid-1950s.

June 16, 2003: Washington, D.C. At a forum co-sponsored by the
Foundation for Middle East Peace and Americans for Peace Now, Akiva
Eldar, senior political correspondent for Israel's leading daily
Ha'aretz, warns that Ariel Sharon's model for a Palestinian state is
not that of a nation-state, but rather the South African bantustan
model of apartheid. He quotes Sharon as telling the former prime
minister of Italy Massimo D'Alema that "the best solution for the
Palestinian problem is bantustans."

July 3, 2003: Writing in American Prospect, Israeli researcher Gershom
Gorenberg concludes that it is no accident that Ariel Sharon's plan
for the West Bank "bears a striking resemblance to the 'grand
apartheid' promoted by the old South African regime," and he also
quotes Sharon as saying "the bantustan model was the most appropriate
solution to the conflict."

July 29, 2003: Prime Minister Sharon rejects President Bush's appeal
to halt construction of a separation barrier that Israel is building
on occupied Palestinian land. When completed, the barrier will form a
complex system of electronic fences and concrete walls, up to 24-feet
high in population areas, and ultimately stretching for 420 miles.
Hundreds of acres of West Bank land will be confiscated for the
barrier's construction, and the route will incorporate into Israel all
of East Jerusalem and major Jewish settlement blocks on the West Bank.
A year later, the World Court will advise that the barrier is illegal
and must be dismantled.

April 26, 2004: Former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti
writes in The Guardian: "The bantustan model for Gaza ... is a model
that Sharon plans to copy on the West Bank. His announcement that he
will not start to disengage before construction of the fence is
completed along a route that will include all settlement blocs (in
keeping with Binyamin Netanyahu's demand), underscores the continuity
of the bantustan concept. The fence creates three bantustans on the
West Bank-Jenin-Nablus, Bethlehem-Hebron, and Ramallah."

August, 2004: A report by the Israeli human rights organization
B'Tselem concludes that the for-Jews-only road system Israel has
established in the West Bank "bears striking similarities to the
racist Apartheid regime," and "entails a greater degree of
arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South
Africa."

September 11, 2006: Israel. The editorial board of Israel's leading
newspaper, Ha'aretz, observes that "the apartheid regime in the
territories remains intact; millions of Palestinians are living
without rights, freedom of movement or a livelihood, under the yoke of
ongoing Israeli occupation."

October 27, 2006: Tel Aviv. Spiritual leaders from America's historic
African-American churches arrive in Israel to see the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict through the lens of their faith and their experience
of the civil rights movement in the United States. On their return,
Dr. Belletech Deressa of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
observes: "This crisis is different to me than any other one. I always
thought that yes, there is a difference between the Palestinians and
the Jews; yes, there is animosity. But now I realize that it is worse
than racism and worse than apartheid. I don't really have a word for
it."

November 2006: Former president Jimmy Carter brings out his book
"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" In it the Nobel Peace Prize laureate
calls the Israeli policy in the West Bank "a system of apartheid, with
two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each
other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by
depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights."

Israel's defenders react: Michael Kinsley, in a Washington Post
article "It's Not Apartheid," calls Carter's book "foolish and
unfair;" Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation
League, declares that Carter "is engaging in anti-Semitism;" Harvard
Law professor Alan Dershowitz calls the apartheid analogy "outrageous"
and judges the book is "shallow and superficial;" and David Harris,
executive director of the American Jewish Committee, calls the analogy
"inflammatory" and the book "a crude polemic that compromises any
pretense to objectivity and fairness."

Supporters of Carter's contentions respond as well: In The Nation,
Henry Siegman, former national director of the American Jewish
Congress, observes that even more extreme criticisms of Israel's
policies are found regularly in the Israeli media, and Yossi Beilin, a
Knesset member and leader of the Israeli team in the Oslo
negotiations, agrees, noting, "There is nothing in the criticism that
Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves."
Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Dugard, considered
the father of human rights in South Africa and Special U.N. Rapporteur
on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories,
accepts the apartheid analogy, saying, "Many aspects of Israel's
occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale
destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands,
military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far
exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa."

The president's book quickly makes the best-seller list.

December 4, 2006: Former national security advisor to President
Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writes in the Financial Times: "President
Carter, in my judgment, is correct in fearing that the absence of a
fair and mutually acceptable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is likely to produce a situation which de facto will resemble
apartheid, i.e., two communities living side by side but repressively
separated, with one enjoying prosperity and seizing the lands of the
other, and the other living in poverty and desperation."

December 11, 2006: Israel. Speaking on Israel Radio, President Carter
comments: "When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West
Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a
road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in
many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse
instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South
Africa."

December 26, 2006: In violation of the terms of the American-backed
"Road Map" to peace, Israel's Defense Ministry and settler groups
announce plans for the construction of a new Jewish settlement in the
occupied West Bank, the first in ten years. Not counting the 190,000-
plus settlers in East Jerusalem, over 260,000 Jewish settlers now live
in the West Bank among 2.5 million Palestinians. These indigenous
Palestinians, according to the Israeli human rights organization
B'Tselem, are confronted with: 54 permanent military checkpoints; 29
"Green Line" checkpoints; 38 locked gates in the separation barrier
for Palestinians, with keys kept by the Israel Defense Forces; 160
flying checkpoints per week; 12 internal checkpoints in Hebron; plus
various permanent physical obstructions, such as concrete blocks, 219
dirt piles, 20 miles of trenches, and 69 locked gates at entrances to
villages with keys held by the IDF; and 445 miles of forbidden roads.

January 19, 2007: A new military order goes into effect that, with a
few exceptions, forbids Israelis or foreigners from transporting
Palestinians in the West Bank. Israelis have yellow license plates and
can travel on Jewish-only bypass roads in the West Bank. Violators are
subject to five years in prison.

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