Israel and apartheid

Comparisons of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians are increasingly compared to South African apartheid, but this is an unfair comparison on at least two grounds:

1. The South African apartheid government envisioned independence for the African population of the country. True, they proposed independence for 80% of the population on 13% of the land, with none whatsoever for Asians or Coloured South Africans, and they did insist on dividing the Africans ethnically in a way that they didn't divide the whites, but they did acknowledge that Africans were peoples and entitled to self determination, even if that determination was decided for them by others. Netanyahu has finally admitted that he never had any intention of allowing a Palestinian State to exist. This has been obvious for a long time, and may well ultimately spell the doom of the Israeli state, since neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are going anywhere. If they won't sit down together and decide how to divide up the land and live in peace with each other they will be increasingly caught up in a vicious cycle of mutual violence. Sure, Hamas is as much to blame as Netanyahu, but that doesn't make the inevitable destruction any less tragic. Israelis used to say that they couldn't negotiate because there was no Palestinian Mandela, but Mandela wasn't Mandela before F.W. de Klerk decided he needed someone he could negotiate with. Mandela was arrested for blowing things up, trying to lead a violent revolution to take power the way his role model, Fidel Castro, had. Netanyahu could have been de Klerk if he'd had enough brains, or patriotism, but he was to smugly self centered and sure he was smarter than anyone else. Of course there was no Palestinian ANC either, no one on the Palestinian side who wanted a secular multiethnic country. There were Arab nationalists and Islamic nationalists, just as Israelis were Jewish nationalists, secular and religious, so the land would have to be divided somehow. The closest thing to a legal solution is still the UN partition plan, but neither side really wants that. And I digress. Israel is not apartheid, it is worse, and more obstinate. When the apartheid government and the Afrikaners running it realized they faced an internal threat, not an external one, they got rid of their nuclear weapons and negotiated. Israel faces an internal threat, but thanks to Netanyahu it keeps its useless nukes and refuses to negotiate. It's sad to watch a country commit suicide like that.

2. The apartheid government in South Africa was not trying to kill off the black population. They tried to control them, especially their access to cities, but they really didn't want to eliminate them as such. They just wanted to exploit their labor, without which the high standard of living of the whites was impossible. Now, just as the Holocaust showed that even Germans were as capable of genocide as the Turks had been against the Armenians, Gaza is proving that Jews are as capable of genocide as the Germans were. Everyone is capable of that kind of behavior. Darfur proved that Arabs are as capable of it as Germans or Jews, and Rwanda proved that Africans are as capable of genocide as Arabs or Turks. Does Netanyahu think that he can really order his military to go into Gaza and kill people until they all just disappear? If so he is as delusional as Hitler, who thought Karl May's fiction set in the American west was real. Hitler thought he could just march his armies east and start shooting people and the natives would just disappear. In fact the decimation of the Native American peoples was part of same Columbian exchange that turned Russian thistle into tumbleweed, an icon of the American western landscape. The native peoples lacked disease immunities and peaceful contact could be, and often was, more dangerous to them than hostilities, since it spread diseases even faster than conflict could. Netanyahu is delusionsal if he thinks Palestinians are going to just fade away into the sunset, or even be absorbed by other Arab countries. They are not Egyptian or Lebanese, much less Yemeni, Moroccan, Sudanese, Kuwaiti or anything other than Palestinians. "Arab Unity" is one of those gag oxymora, like "military intelligence" or "business ethics". They cannot all become one people any more than the English speaking peoples can, or the Roman speaking peoples of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania. Morocco has spent decades trying to conquer the Sahrawi people of the Sahara. They both speak Arabic dialects, but they are not the same people and haven't been for centuries. Palestinians are not going anywhere. Neither are Israelis. They need to sit down and bargain in good faith to live together, or they will continue dying together.