Martin Behr’s complaint that innocent Israelis are the victims of Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza raises the reality that it is actually the Israelis who are the perpetrators instead of the victims of the century-long Palestinian tragedy (“The Right To Resist Vs The Right To Exist”, May 18).
Months before their unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in May 1948, Israelis, colluding with the British, methodically destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns and dispossessed their inhabitants of the land. By the time Arab armies intervened — only after that UDI and again colluding with the British-led Jordanian army, which annexed the West Bank —it was already too late.
Jewish resistance against the Nazis in Warsaw is universally applauded. It is past time SA’s Jewish community acknowledged the parallels between Nazi atrocities in Europe during the 1940s and the Nakba in 1947/1948 and current Israeli government’s atrocities against Palestinians. On the apartheid wall at the Bethlehem checkpoint (where I worked for three months as a peace monitor in 2010), graffiti artists have inscribed: “Teargas now — resist before gas chambers later.”
That Israel is an apartheid state was formally established by the 2018 Nation State law. In turn, apartheid is designated under international law as a crime against humanity. Why the crime of silence from Behr and others?
Passage of the Nation State law not only confirmed Israel as an apartheid state, it also exposed the canard that Israel is the “only democratic state in the Middle East”. Israel never was and never can be a democratic state. If it were, most of its Palestinian citizens would never have been systematically and deliberately expelled by David Ben-Gurion when Palestinians constituted 70% of the population, and the name of the land would still be Palestine, instead of Israel.
Why should Palestinians accept Israel’s right to exist any more than South Africans refused to accept apartheid?
Terry Crawford-Browne
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
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