Jerusalem Watchman

Jimmy Carter’s book slandering Israel continues to feed the hatred towards the Jewish state felt by many people who still regard the peacenik former president as a credible authority.

So I thought I should confront this lie once again.

I am a white South African who became a journalist mostly because I wanted to report and expose the evils of apartheid in the Eastern Cape of my country.

A political reporter for the Daily Dispatch in the dying years of that institutionalized racist system, all I read, talked and wrote about in those days had to do with the origins and establishment of apartheid, its manifestations (which I was also daily witness to) the forces opposing it and the need to bring it down. I supported the African National Congress (ANC), as did my brother, a skilled fellow journalist who was sought by the dreaded security police, had to flee, and became a refugee under the UNHCR. I also took a public, if belated stand against continuing to serve in the South African Defense Forces, because I grew to understand that they were used more to enforce apartheid and keep it alive than to defend the country.

For the past 20 years, since the collapse of “the system,” I have lived in Israel as a reporter and writer. When I left South Africa, a friend and fellow anti-apartheid activist assumed I was moving take up the pen for the “poor Palestinians.” He was unable to accept what I told him: that in the Middle East it was Israel, and not the “Palestinians,” that was the persecuted and hated nation; that the Jews were the victims of the worst and longest-standing form of prejudice known to – and almost universally practiced by – man.

I know about apartheid. Before I became a man I had lived in all South Africa’s major centers and many of its little towns, even a village or two. I lived among whites and I lived among blacks. My father – a doctor, sometimes a mission doctor – had practices in white areas and in black townships. He cared for more black than white patients in all his years of service.

I saw apartheid; was intimately acquainted with its despicable nature and expression. As a reporter it was in my face as I covered life in the townships and squatter camps, the mass evictions and family breakups of people made “illegal aliens” in the country of their birth. I witnessed – often – the vicious treatment by policemen and soldiers of black men, women and children, often beaten up in broad daylight before the eyes of uncaring or approving whites.

My brother exposed and helped send to prison one of the biggest mass-murderers of all time – a white security guard who used black children for target practice and was repeatedly exonerated by the white court system. (See Borderline: Murder, corruption and intrigue on the Eastern Frontier by Patrick Goodenough, available at http://www.amazon.com/Borderline-corruption-intrigue-Eastern-Frontier/dp/1430315911/ref=sr_1_1/103-0836479-2732648?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183365360&sr=1-1) I knew I as a white lived in luxury and could earn a decent salary because they as blacks were forced to live in squalor and were paid slave wages.

I covered coup after coup as the illegitimate puppet Bantustan “governments” exploited their people and were overthrown only to be replaced by more corrupt and brutal leaders. As the edifice crumbled under massive pressure from the international community I marched through the streets of East London, King Williams Town, Johannesburg and Cape Town with the hundreds of thousands of South Africans who suddenly smelled freedom in the air.

I know about apartheid.

During my 20 years in Israel I have seen NOTHING that in any way compares to that system - whether on the books (in the government, judiciary and security services) or on the streets - among the Israelis I have come to know so well.

Mandela imprisoned (who, since his release, has embraced Israel’s enemies, become an enemy of the Jews, and lost my support and respect) was no Arafat. The ANC was no PLO. White South Africans are no Jews. Black South Africans are no “Palestinians.” The “occupied territories” are no Bantustans. The IDF and Israeli police forces are no SADF and SAP. South Africa is not Israel. Zionism is not apartheid.

One other interesting observation: South Africa’s blacks had very real and deep grievances, plenty of cause to abhor and want to kill us whites. But the vast, vast majority never allowed such sentiments into their hearts.

I remember, late one night, hearing from a group of men who in the morning would face dogs, teargas, beatings, separation from their families and deportation to “their” Bantustans:

“We do not hate you,” they told me, as we huddled together in their makeshift shelter in the large Crossroads camp near Cape Town, winter rain driving down on us. “We do not want to hurt you or throw you out. We do not want to take what you have. All we want is to live among you, and have you live among us; together; as equals. We have much to give and receive from one another. South Africa has much to give us all. Why can’t we share this land?”

The (for most whites unexpectedly) peaceful transition to a one-man-one-vote democracy, and the bright promise with which South Africa entered its new existence as “The Rainbow Nation,” bore testimony to how widely-shared was the good will held by these men. Tragically, the dream is dying. But today’s out-of-control violence and massive AIDS epidemic etc are first and foremost the decayed fruit of the dead apartheid era – the detritous left by the decades of discrimination. They have nothing to do with blacks hating whites.

How different from the reality in the Middle East. In all the years I have lived in Israel I have yet to hear, or even read about, a single Muslim, much less one group of “Palestinians,” expressing anything remotely resembling the sentiments of my black countrymen.

There are a number of reasons for this contrast. One has to do with tolerance and respect:

While there were small groups – like the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (with their “One settler, one bullet” slogan) and the South African Communist Party – the great mass of popular support was with the African National Congress, which finally was voted in to lead the country, and whose Freedom Charter begins with the words: “We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…”

Compare that with the realities in the Arab world, where ethnic cleansing is the order of the day: The Jews had to get completely out of the Gaza Strip and are expected to get completely out of Samaria and Judea. Without exception, all the “Palestinian” “liberation” movements (the terrorist organizations) share a common goal of expunging the Jewish people from every scrap of land in Eretz Yisrael. The PLO Charter begins: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”

Blacks share South Africa with whites, even though they (blacks) have an older claim to and history in the land. For the “Palestinians,” however, there is no room for the Jews - who have a much older claim to and history in this land. For a Palestinian Arab to sell his house to a Jew, the punishment is death.

Another reason has to do with religion:

In the late 1980s, many millions of Black South Africans were practicing Protestant Christians. Islam had virtually no foothold in my homeland, its adherents restricted to specific communities in particular parts of the country, the cry of jihad never heard. (This is changing radically now.)

The Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, are almost all Muslim. ’Jihad!’, and ‘Itbach al-Yahud!‘ (Kill the Jews) are their battle cries. Their religion, its sacred writings and its teachings, engenders deep hatred for Israel’s Jews.

But to wrap it up for now: Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, clearly either knows very little about apartheid, or he knows very little about Israel. I would guess that as an American southerner he probably knows something about white-on-black racism.

Which leads me to conclude that his knowledge about Israel is limited to what he has imbibed from his good friends the “Palestinians.”

They – as I have observed after nearly two decades of closely watching and listening to them – have perfected the art of turning myths into facts and truth into lies, winning the world to their side by the simple dint of being shameless liars and inveterate propagandists.