A second fantasy is that Israel is an apartheid state and that peace would be at hand if only Israel ended its apartheid ways. This fantasy is exemplified by the just released scurrilous tract Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter.
Now, basic to apartheid, the legal regime in South Africa until 1994, was the denationalization of blacks because they were black and forced removal to state-created homelands. Israel has not taken away the citizenship of even one Israeli citizen on the basis that the citizen is ethnic Palestinian, then forcibly removed that person to a territory designated for ethnic Palestinians.
I saw this in a Globe & Mail editorial. It of course did little to influence the Jew-haters, if the comments attached to that online article are any indication. None-the-less it did give me a whole new perspective on what apartheid means. I was especially interested in the comment:
Palestinians are forbidden to drive on Jewish roads and blocked from travel to their farmland or family by military checkpoints and barriers
Next time I stand on the main road through Benyamin, Highway 60, on my way to Jerusalem, and wait for over an hour as an endless stream of Arab cars with Palestinian Authority plates drive by, I'll have to remember that they are forbidden to drive there. Or perhaps the next time there is some intelligence of a suicide bomber and together with hundreds of other cars we sit sweltering in the heat till we can pass the Hizma entrance to Jerusalem, I'll remember that it isn't supposed to be that way, only Palestinian Arabs suffer, not Jewish settlers.
Seed Newsvine